Singmo Sallim and Rethinking Kinship in Twentieth-Century Korea

This essay foregrounds the narratives on singmo sallim (household management through domestic servitude) and how they offer an alternative understanding of kinship in twentieth-century Korea. To examine three life histories mediated across different formats, I attend to the role of relationship-building and historicization as a dialogic process that shapes what kind of stories can be told. During two distinct periods of industrialization under the Japanese Occupation (1910–1945) and post-Korean War (1950–1953) Korea, the number of young girls finding employment in households increased exponentially. Extending scholarship on domestic servitude and kinship, this essay demonstrates how poor women exposed the role of kinship in obfuscating social stratification in the domestic sphere by mobilizing young girls’ devalued labor. However, poor women also used kinship rhetoric to ensure survival.