[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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