This book examines the lives of young women factory workers in the Masan Free Export Zone (MAFEZ) in South Korea, and endeavors to provide an understanding of the ways in which these women both accommodate and resist the dominating forces of global capitalism and South Korean versions of patriarchy. My ethnography looks at the conflicts and ambivalence of these young women as they participate in the workforce of industrial factories and simultaneously grapple with defining their roles with respect to marriage and motherhood within conventional family structures. It explores their individual and collective struggles to improve their position and examines their links with other political forces within the labor movement. I analyze how women workers envision their place in society, how they cope with economic and social marginalization in their daily lives, and how they develop and actualize strategies for a better future. In exploring these questions, I consider the heterogeneity of women workers and the complexities of their experiences as women and as workers.

My research covers a defining moment in South Korean labor history. In December 1986, when I arrived in Masan to begin my fieldwork, workers appeared politically quiescent, but in the ensuing months, as the country worked through a political crisis, workers in Masan became part of a nationwide labor uprising that challenged the legitimacy of the government. Not only did I witness and participate in the widespread demonstrations for democracy and workers' rights, I developed a firsthand appreciation of the lives of factory workers by taking a job in a MAFEZ electronics factory.