Andrei Lankov on Ajumma Power

Picking up the theme of North Korea’s indefatigable ajummas, Andrei Lankov writes in the Wall Street Journal:

A joke making the rounds in Pyongyang goes: “What do a husband and a pet dog have in common?” Answer: “Neither works nor earns money, but both are cute, stay at home and can scare away burglars.”

I’ve often thought that one of the most destructive consequences of socialism is the destruction it wreaks on families. That is especially so in Korean society, where the family unit retains such strength and importance. But in North Korea, women who had been herded into the factories and communes, and who had no intention of being “empowered” — to use a P.C. term — found themselves driven into founding a new merchant class out of necessity. I surmise that this was mainly a result of the system’s failure to fully employ their husbands, on one hand, combined with its refusal to let them abandon their assigned work units, on the other. As Andrei notes, women were “liberated” from the jobs that couldn’t pay them because the regime deemed their labor to be relatively expendable, and perhaps also out of local officials’ recognition that a family has to get by somehow.