Contemporary Era
In contemporary North Korea, women are important for three reasons:
- increasing production of material goods and services
- reproduction in order to increase the population
- ensuring that there is a long-serving and largely celibate army
To fulfill these expectations, women are expected to fully participate in the labor force outside the home. Apart from its ideological commitment to the equality of the sexes, the government views women's employment as essential because of the country's labor shortage. No able-bodied person is spared from the struggle to increase production and compete with the more populous southern half of the peninsula. According to one South Korean source, women in North Korea are supposed to devote eight hours a day to work, eight hours to study, and eight hours to rest and sleep. Women who have three or more children are permitted to work only six hours a day and still receive a full, eight-hour-a-day salary.
Read more about this topic: Women In North Korea
Famous quotes containing the words contemporary and/or era:
“The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“... most Southerners of my parents’ era were raised to feel that it wasn’t respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn’t elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 1 (1962)