‘Let's Turn the Grass Into Meat’: Animal Husbandry as Women's Work in Cold War North Korea

In postcolonial North Korea, the future of the nation was said to be a function of the feedlot. Unobtainable on the battlefields of the recently ended Korean War, liberation and unification of the peninsula became a question of competitive developmentalism. In this context, planners and pundits in the North turned to the female farmhands of the agrarian sector to coordinate the scientific and motherly care of the nation's flocks. As demonstrated in this article, a particular intersection of postwar demographics, scientific mobilisation and patriarchal thought led to the establishment of animal husbandry in North Korea as women's work.