제사공장 여공들의 표상

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the life of female workers in silk mills of the 1920s by categorizing them as married women, women who missed their optimum years for marriage, and children workers, through Daiko Hirabayashi’s work Niguruma. Married female workers had difficulty conceiving children due to the inflow of cold air into the workplace, and even if they had been able to conceive and bear children, it would have been difficult to raise them because they were given only 20 minute lunch breaks to eat and also breastfeed their babies. And unmarried female workers were given meager wages with which they had to take care of their families as family hands, and for this reason they have missed their prime years for marriage. Children workers were dying unnoticed in construction sites where the factory owners had, against labor laws, hidden them away from the eyes of inspection teams. Accidents were common in working quarters where they worked, including incidents where female workers had their hair caught by and sucked in the machine to weave threads. Their dormitories had dirty blankets, putrid odors, and bugs that bit those sleeping there which made it nearly impossible to sleep there. Hirabayashi’s work also depicts how even the inspectors who were sent to stop such abuses by factory owners normally overlooked them and remained silent.