On Their Own Terms: Ordinary Women and Family Planning in Postcolonial Korea

• In Event: 50655 - Asian and Asian American Women

Abstract

This paper examines why ordinary women in South Korea, an agrarian society with strong pronatalist norms, embraced a small family ideal following the implementation of nationwide family planning initiatives in 1962. Existing scholarship on family planning programs in the Global South often frames women's reproductive decisions within a binary of resistance or victimhood, treating agency as synonymous with opposition to state control. However, in Korea—where family planning efforts relied primarily on propaganda rather than punitive enforcement—many women voluntarily reduced their number of children despite minimal changes in their material conditions. Do they represent submissive subalterns, or does their agency manifest in ways that elude the dominant frameworks of resistance and compliance? To address this question, this study draws on archival data from ethnographic research and researchers' field notes (1950s–2000s) alongside popular magazines (1960s–1970s) to analyze how ordinary women interpreted and negotiated family planning discourse. This paper argues that, despite the constraints of economic hardship and patriarchal structures, Korean women actively engaged with state narratives on family planning to expand their agency, secure future stability, and align themselves with emerging ideals of modernity and civilized social norms. By tracing how women interpreted and acted upon these narratives, this paper moves beyond framework that reduce subaltern women's reproductive decisions to either resistance or victimhood. Instead, it highlights the complex ways in which individual agency reshaped Korea's social and demographic landscape.

Author

• Yeon-Hwa Lee, SUNY-Binghamton