earticle

영어

No individual life is free from social and historical change. War is one of the strongest factors which occur changes in society in a great scale. The effects of war on individual lives seem to be various according to such conditions as gender, age, socio-economic backgrounds and so forth. This paper examines the effects of Korean war on women's lives based on oral histories of seven women who experienced the Korean War as unmarried and nineteen to twenty-five year old girls. Especially, this study focuses on the ways in which the Korean War affected experiences of economic activity of these unmarried women. The oral history interviews conducted on these seven women show the ways in which women experience works, and also the process and characteristics that they selected jobs and continued or discontinued their work career by the war in terms of motives and kinds of jobs and occupations. Besides, this study looks into the ways in which their family and parents consider their daughter's work as a family strategy in the social dislocation of wartime. Moreover, it examines how these women remembers their work experiences in relation to war and give meanings to their economic activities. Exploring these matters through women's oral history, this paper attempts to explore the characteristics of labor participation and work patterns during the Korean war and the effects of the war made to unmarried women who experienced the war in their early twenties compared to other generations of women.