Women’s subordination in Confucian culture: Shifting breadwinner practices

Abstract

By tracing everyday breadwinner practices from the early industrial period to the democratic period (largely between 1960s and 2000s) in Korea, this study aims to illustrate the changes in dynamics relating to women’s subordination. I conducted 64 interviews with women and men of two generations. These revealed that the Confucian hierarchy of male supremacy continued into the early industrial period, despite the significant contributions of women to earning a living for their families. In the democratization generation, which grew up during the period of rapid economic growth and democracy, male respondents internalized the breadwinner role and saw this as partial justification for their dominance. This implies that rationalizations for gender relationships change over time, for example, from viewing male supremacy as “natural law” to considering it as a result of women’s economic inferiority. This also suggests reconsideration of the link between masculinity and the breadwinner role.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.