2011 Volume 30 Pages 167-178
In this article I focus on the South Korean national family planning project in the 1960s and 1970s and the role of the Mothers’ Association for Family Planning, which played an active role in promoting the project. By investigating the operation of the family planning project and changes in women’s attitudes towards reproduction, I show how these decades became the key period in creating the image of the modern family in South Korea.
The structure of this article is as follows. In the first sections I explain the purpose of my research together with its background in the context of the social situation in South Korea during the 1960s and 1970s. In the second and third sections I review literature related to this research and examine the operation of the family planning project and the activities of the Mothers’ Association for Family Planning. In the fourth section I analyze some articles on family planning in the women’s educational magazine Family Friend with a view to examining how women’s activities and their political intentions were interlinked.
In conclusion, Korean society in the 1960s and 1970s operated on the basis of a totalitarian national policy aimed at economic development and national prosperity. Hence, images of the family and women’s life planning suited to this policy were strongly promoted. In particular, the family planning project was driven mainly by nationalistic propaganda, but as a consequence it led to the formation of the modern family in South Korea.
