[KS] Maid servants in early modern Korea

Eugene Y. Park epa at sas.upenn.edu
Fri Jul 25 02:41:04 EDT 2014


Dear all,

I'm forwarding a research inquiry (below my message) from a colleague, 
Amy Stanley, who is a Japan historian at Northwestern U. I told her that:

     -more mainstream South Korean scholars tend to be skeptical toward 
the notion that anyone anywhere in the early modern era worked for 
"wage" in the purest sense of the word and all its connotations (e.g. 
free labor, room for wage negotiation, contractual relationship between 
the employer and the employee).
     -it was easier for runaway slaves, male and female, than commoners 
to work for pay, as commoners (most of whom were farmers) were more 
bound to where they lived--with the watchful state making sure through 
household registration system that they paid their taxes as well as 
performing corvee and military duties (actually most commoners had to 
pay the military tax rather than performing military duties)
     -the slaves who ran away, as well as desperate commoners who did 
the same, found jobs for pay, in an increasingly liberalized, 
commercialized economy, in which slave owners preferred to hire someone 
rather than spending resources on tracking down their runaway slaves.
     -contrary to the popular image of runaways living in isolated areas 
or mountains as some sort of brigands, towns and private mines were much 
more sensible destinations, if not joining traveling merchants, as they 
could "hide" there more easily and find work.
     -for runaway female slaves, they found work in the kind of areas 
that we can easily guess (i.e. domestic servants, prostitutes, 
entertainers).
     -a demand for paid workers was limited in late Choson Korea, which 
was much less commercialized and urbanized that Qing China or Edo Japan 
(Korea's largest city, Seoul, had population no more than 
250,000)--though the demand certainly increased.

Please reply directly to her by email (a-stanley at northwestern.edu). I 
paraphrase her inquiry (see below).

Thanks in advance,
Gene
---

I'm working on an article about migrant maidservants in the early modern 
world. One of my working ideas is that the demand for women to work in 
domestic labor increased in cities across the Eurasian continent, 
drawing women from rural hinterlands into burgeoning urban centers. New 
opportunities in urban labor markets provided some women (though not 
nearly all) the opportunity to defy their parents, husbands, etc., 
enabling them to exert agency in ways that looked surprisingly similar 
across linguistic and cultural boundaries. It seems clear that the 
demand for female domestic labor did rise in Choso(n Korea, as it did 
elsewhere, that such laborers were more and more valuable, and that some 
purchased women began to work on fixed contracts rather than in 
hereditary slavery. But I have two basic questions that I can't figure 
out: (1) Were there any maidservants working for wages in Korean cities 
and towns? (2) When female slaves ran away, did they look for work in 
urban marketplaces? Or did they generally run off to rural areas and try 
to get by as peasants?


Eugene Y. Park
Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History
Director, James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies
University of Pennsylvania
http://www.history.upenn.edu/faculty/park.shtml


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