Reforming Domestic Servitude into Contractual Work: Transnational Networks and Gendered Modernity in Postwar South Korea (1953–1979)

Abstract: This article situates the household as a site of transnational encounters between the state, international organizations, housewives, and domestic workers, where the colonial drive to legitimize its civilizational rule by transforming servitude into contractual work found continuity in the postcolonial period under the leadership of elite Korean women. The YWCA’s campaign planning documents, member surveys, program reports, elite members’ essays, workers’ memoirs, and training curriculum illustrate how the mindset and daily relationships between housewives and domestic workers were contested ground for modernization. Shaped by national postcolonial history and transnational networks, the YWCA’s elite members established the terms of becoming modern. Scholarship on industrial modernization in Korea rarely examines the household, prioritizing instead the role of the developmental state and factories. However, contradictions in the YWCA’s archives illuminate how elite women used the rhetoric of inclusion and progress to manage working-class women’s labor, which workers contested in creative ways.