Sewing Sisters

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, many young women flocked from the countryside to Seoul seeking work in the burgeoning garment industry and at the sewing factories of Pyeonghwa Market. They worked and lived in squalor and were brutally exploited; many suffered from starvation and were unable to access education. They became politicised and started to organise, struggling for the improvement of their lives by forming women's networks of solidarity, setting up activist labour clubs, as well as literacy and learning classes. This was met with opposition by the industry and the governme...