The Positive Effect of Women’s Education on Fertility in Low-Fertility China

European Journal of Population - Despite pervasive evidence of more educated women having lower fertility, it remains unclear whether education reduces women’s fertility. This study presents...     

Is This a Man’s World? Woman in the Farm Family of Thessaly,Greece from the 1950s Onwards

This study, drawing data from 891 women’s autobiographical memories, investigates the changes of woman’s position within the farm family in Thessaly (Greece), during a period of deep sociopolitical and agrarian transformations in the country (1950–2013). The results indicate that at one end of the spectrum woman’s status within the family significantly improved over the period under consideration, while, at the other end, full gender equality remains questionable. Although pervasive patriarchal values of farm family delayed the evolution of her familial position, woman gained a better status after 1980, a progress that, according to analysis, could be viewed as a corollary of both agricultural modernization and the influx of new members and new ideas in the Thessalian rural society. The findings confirm that the improvement of women farmers’ status within family—and society—is a lengthy and difficult process which is hampered by the commitment of farming communities to traditional male-privileged morals and ethics.     

“알맞게 낳아서 훌륭하게 기르자!” (Let’s Have the Proper Number of Children and Raise Them Well!): Family Planning and Nation-Building in South Korea, 1961–1968

This paper looks at the formation of a South Korean national health network by focusing on the introduction of an ambitious National Family Planning (FP) Program under President Park Chung Hee (1961–1968). The program, influenced in part by the model of its neighbor, Taiwan (Taichung), saw two pilot studies carried out in Koyang (rural, beginning in 1963) and Sundong-gu (Seoul metropolitan area, 1964–1966), before being carried to rural areas nationwide. If the program began with numerous echoes of Japanese colonial practice, it was mobilized specifically in terms of the emerging “modern” South Korean story and the state’s relationship to the welfare of the individual family unit. Using a range of Korean and English-language sources, the paper illustrates how the FP effort took: (1) the Koyang study of the effects of mass communication in rural areas as a tentative blueprint for expanding its national agenda; (2) subsequently enlisted mobile transportation (1966) to expand the scope of its reach; and finally, mobilized “Mothers’ Clubs” (1968) to penetrate the very fabric of rural society, making women both the target as well as the primary means of distribution. Ultimately, this strategy of enlisting the active participation of South Korean women on behalf of the program asked rural women in particular to submit their bodies to the state’s scrutiny, even as they formed the core of the distribution network. In this respect, FP anticipated the mass mobilization of rural South Korea in the New Village movement of the 1970s and leaves behind an ambiguous legacy of state control that is only just beginning to be re-examined.