Ruth Barraclough

Tales of Seduction: Factory Girls in Korean Proletarian Literature

In the 1920s, when authors of proletarian literature were becoming some of Korea’s leading literary avant-gardes, people working in factories, ports, and mines were mounting campaigns to alleviate some of the worst abuses of colonial industrialization. Women, as well as men, formed unions, called strikes, and wrote in to newspapers and magazines to draw public attention to conditions in the new industries. Two of the most prominent strike demands by blue-collar women in the 1920s and early 1930s were for higher wages and an end to sexual violence in the factories.1 Women workers on occasion downed tools in an attempt to halt sexual violence in factories, such as the 140 workers at the Chikp’o Linen Factory in Mokp’o who in 1926 stopped work to make a single demand: that assault by factory foremen should cease.2 Newspaper reporters also warned women of the dealers in “human traffic” who masqueraded as factory recruiters. According to

Red Love in Korea: Rethinking Communism, Feminism, Sexuality

In the 1920s and 1930s, some of Korea’s most famous Communists were young women. Glamorous and notorious, they frequented the social pages as well as arrest notices of the daily newspapers in Seoul. These women grew up and came of age when Korea was a colony of Japan (1910–1945). They were remarkable feminists who went to prison for the right to strike, for national independence, and for better working conditions for proletarian women with whom they sought common cause. Within their own leftist organizations and intimate affiliations they pursued a new sexual autonomy, or Red Love (Pulkŭn Yŏnae), that merged political activism with female sexual sovereignty. Determined to live political and sexual liberation as mutually as possible, they created tension not only within colonial capitalism but also against patriarchal Communist structures of resistance. This chapter examines the lives of four of these early Communists—Hŏ Jŏng-suk (1902–1991), Vera Khan (1899–1953), Kang Kyŏng-ae (1906–1944), and Chŏng Ch’il-sŏng (1897–1958)—to demonstrate the variety and complexity of what Red Love meant and continues to mean in modern Korean history.1