DIVORCE IN SOUTH KOREA: DOING GENDER AND THE DYNAMICS OF RELATIONSHIP BREAKDOWN
Yean-Ju Lee
Series: Hawai‘i Studies on Korea
Hardback: $80.00
ISBN-13: 9780824882556
Published: April 2020ADD TO CART
Paperback: $30.00
ISBN-13: 9780824889708
Published: January 2021ADD TO CART
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
University of Hawaii Press
192 pages | 1 b&w illustration
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It may sound logical that individualistic attitudes boost divorce. This book argues otherwise. Conservative norms of specialized gender roles serve as the root cause of marital dissolution. Those expectations that prescribe what men should do and what women should do help break down marital relationships. Data from South Korea suggest that lingering norms of gendered roles can threaten married persons’ self-identity and hence their marriages during the period of rapid structural changes.
The existing literature predicting divorce does not conceptually distinguish between the process of relationship breakdown and the act of ending a marriage, implicitly but heavily focusing on the latter while obscuring the former. In contemporary societies, however, the social and economic cost of divorce is sufficiently low—that is, stigma against divorce is minimal and economic survival after divorce is a nonissue—and leaving a marriage is no longer dictated by one’s being liberal or conservative or any particular characteristics. Thus, the right question to ask is not who leaves a marriage but why a marriage goes sour to begin with.
In Korea, a majority of divorces occur through mutual consent of the two spouses without any court procedure, but when one spouse files for divorce, the fault-based divorce litigation rules require the court to lay out the entire chronicle of relevant events occurring up to the legal action, often with the help of court investigators. As such, court rulings provide glimpses into the entire marital dynamics, including verbatim exchanges between the spouses. Lee argues that the typical process of relationship breakdown is related to married persons’ daily practices of verifying their gendered role identity.
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VOLUME 94 – NO. 3
DIVORCE IN SOUTH KOREA: Doing Gender and the Dynamics of Relationship Breakdown | By Yean-Ju Lee
Hawai‘i Studies on Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020. 185 pp. (Tables, figures) US$62.00, cloth. ISBN 9780824882556.
Over the past few decades, there have been substantial changes in Korean families, including rising divorce rates. However, despite a growing body of literature, a comprehensive understanding of why people divorce remains insufficient. Existing survey data sets are limited in that detailed circumstantial information about what an individual’s marital life entails and how marital conflicts occur is simply not available. Additionally, qualitative studies based on in-depth interviews often face challenges of data quality, as the information collected through interviews is retrospective, relying on participants’ recollections. By using a mixed methods approach, Divorce in South Korea: Doing Gender and the Dynamics of Relationship Breakdown (hereafter Divorce in South Korea) offers answers for the processes through which some marriages in Korea end in divorce and provides important implications going forward.
The main contributions of the book are three-fold. First, as a well-established family demographer who has keen insights into families in Korea, Yean-Ju Lee nicely encompasses a wide range of literature on marriage, divorce, gender, and family relations to illuminate the process of divorce in Korea. In particular, Lee adds relationship dynamics—an important dimension in marriage to account for the pathways to divorce—to this book in the context of South Korea, which makes divorces in South Korea such a unique case for extending existing literature and advances our understanding about why people divorce.
Second, the multifaceted aspects of marriage and family life in South Korea are well captured, allowing us to understand how some marriages end in divorce. For example, Divorce in South Korea covers divorced couples from various angles by paying attention to the perspectives of husbands and wives (chapters 3 and 4), relationship conflicts with the extended family, including the parents-in-law as well as the son-in-law (chapter 5), and common types of culpability in the marital relationship dynamics (chapter 6) in the Korean context. In particular, given that marriage in Korea is viewed as a family formation between two families (that of the groom and that of bride), rather than between two individuals, the theoretical approach that situates divorce in larger circumstances involving the in-law families and their relationships is noteworthy.
Third, Lee successfully elucidates why people divorce by utilizing multiple sources of data, including surveys, in-depth interviews, and court rulings on divorce cases. The diverse data sources are tremendously helpful to better understand the process whereby marriages end in divorce. Either through surveys or in-depth interviews, collecting rich information about the process of marital disruption is challenging. Surveys often lack information about the underlying reasons for marital conflict, and in-depth interviews are more susceptible to participant’s reporting biases, whether intentional or not. Detailed accounts of marital conflicts from court rulings are excellent resources to complement available information from the other data sources, and this book successfully incorporates all the accessible information into this work on divorce in South Korea.
Using these data sources, the author purposely focuses on the sample of divorces that occurred from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s among those who were in the childbearing and childrearing stages of the family life cycle and in their first marriages. This is an attempt to look into divorce among younger birth cohorts whose educational attainments are higher and who have different gendered perceptions of the roles of husbands and wives compared to older birth cohorts. The strategy of excluding divorces among older adults and remarried couples from the analytic sample of the project allows Lee to shed light on accounts of how the majority of the divorces in South Korea proceeded.
I would also like to mention that I find Appendix A very informative, where amendments to the family law over the past half-century in South Korea are well-summarized. It is a great bonus, allowing us to place divorce in South Korea in its social/cultural/historical contexts, and making the book more accessible to a general audience who might not be very familiar with how family law in South Korea has evolved in recent years.
As evidenced by the term “Sampo Generation,” commonly heard in South Korean media, which refers to the pessimistic young generation that has given up on three important transitions to adulthood (i.e., dating, marriage, and starting a family), establishing a family among many young adults is often considered a “luxury” in South Korea. With marriage and fertility rates declining, it is plausible that divorce rates will not increase in the future, at least to the degree they have in the past. However, it is important to note that marriages in South Korea may become more vulnerable. In South Korea, levels of educational attainment among both men and women are the highest among developed countries, and yet, the precarious labor market, less family-supportive overall work environment, and gender hierarchical expectations of family roles persist.
Therefore, one of the most impending questions to ask about marriage and divorce is which aspects of marriage and marital lives become vulnerable in the gendered Korean society. Divorce in South Korea addresses this question by providing thought-provoking insights into gender dynamics within married couples and their extended families in South Korea, and how these lead some couples to decide to take their lives in different directions. While effectively refuting the notion that divorce in South Korea is a result of the lowered social and economic costs associated with it, the author instead argues that persisting norms of gendered expectations and role performances are to blame for putting marriages at risk. For many of us eager to understand the increase in divorce rates in a highly advanced and yet gender inegalitarian society, Divorce in South Korea is a most welcome addition to the literature of marriage and family as well as to studies on contemporary South Korea.
Hyeyoung Woo
Portland State University, Portland
Last Revised: November 30, 2021
Pacific Affairs
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