December 9, 2021 – Before she fled south six years ago, Kim Eun Kyoung spent her days in one of North Korea’s many informal markets. She sold household goods and illicit South Korean tv dramas. In the evening, she did the housework and looked after her daughter. She says her husband worked just a few hours a day at his state-mandated factory job and spent the rest of his time gambling and drinking. They hardly ever saw each other. “I would have liked it if he’d helped with the housework, but we lived totally separate lives,” says Ms Kim (not her real name). “The only thing we ever discussed honestly was our economic situation.”

Ms Kim’s story is increasingly common among North Korean women, judging from surveys of those who have fled to the South over the past two decades. After the collapse of the North’s planned economy and public-distribution system in the 1990s, the state grew more relaxed about enforcing labour requirements for women. The regime continues to compel most men to work for the state, but pays most of them very little or nothing altogether. Women, who are both freer than men to spend time working in the markets and compelled to do so in order to feed their families, have therefore acquired some economic power.

In many North Korean families, women now appear to be the main breadwinners. In 2020 the Database Centre for North Korean Human Rights (nkdb), an ngo in Seoul, the South’s capital, asked 60 refugees from Hyesan, a city on North Korea’s border with China, about their married lives back home. Fully 47% said the wife brought home the kimchi, 37% said it was the husband and 17% said both contributed equally. Hyesan, an unusually open border town, may not be representative, cautions Hanna Song of nkdb. But testimonies of refugees from other parts of the country suggest similar trends.

Women’s extra earnings have yet to change expectations about what they do at home, however. Traditional views of family life remain common, notes Ms Song. Among those surveyed by nkdb, both men and women considered child care and housework to be women’s work. “Of course women should look after children, they’re much better at it,” says Jeong Jin, a 30-something woman from Hyesan who came to Seoul in 2015. “My husband always looked really unnatural holding our baby.” She acknowledges that many women complain about the double burden, but says the fault lies with the system that forces the men to work without much pay.

Even when people blame the state, the gap between expectations and reality has begun to cause conflict. Some overburdened wives demand help with chores or a say in family decisions. Many husbands insist on being respected and obeyed, regardless of how much they contribute. Common insults for useless husbands include haebaragi (“sunflowers” who sit pretty waiting for their wives to come home), natjeondeung (“day lamps”, as useful as a lamp turned on in the sunshine) or bul pyeon (“inconvenience”, a play on nam pyeon, the Korean word for husband).

The most successful marriages appear to be those that combine a woman’s economic activities with a man’s political influence. Ms Jeong says her marriage to a high-ranking police officer was a happy one even though they lived mostly off what she and her mother earned as smugglers. “My husband had little money, but a lot of power,” she explains. Men suffer through years of badly paid army or police jobs to rise through the ranks, at which point they can bring both higher salaries and opportunities to top them up by extracting bribes from smugglers or by earning bonuses by catching them—as well as the ability to protect their wives’ grey-market activities.

The state is unlikely to offer women more rights or men better jobs. After a brief period of championing female fighter pilots and engineers, Kim Jong Un, the North’s dictator, has recently reverted to promoting a traditional approach to family life, urging women to look pretty for their husbands and to care for their children. For North Korea’s harried married women, Mr Kim is about as useful as a natjeondeung.

WUNRN

The Economist/Asia