Abstract

This thesis aims to consider the Confucian discourse on women’s labor through the Confucian scriptures and Confucian Women’s Classics(女性敎訓書) and to reveal the way of reproduction of women’s labor. The Confucian scriptures and the Confucian Women’s Classics regard women’s labor as yeo-gong(女功), one of virtue. Because it was necessary to emphasize women’s labor for maintaining the domestic economy, Confucian patriarchism needed to control women’s space and time, and to regulate women’s body. To reveal the Confucian thought on women’s labor, first, I examine the thought on the concept of labor briefly, second, I analyse how the Four Books for Women(女四書), one of the representative of the Confucian Women’s Classic’s, understand and explain women’s labor. Through this analysis, I attempt to reveal that the Confucian scriptures and the Confucian Women’s Classics produce the knowledge about women and work as the apparatus to reproduce the women’s labor. And then, among haeng-jang(行狀), the records of a deceased person's life of Chosun Dynasty, I select records of Shin Daewoo(申大羽, 1735～1809) and his wife written by their son, Shin Jak(申綽, 1760～1828), and compare the perspective of narration. In the record of Shin Daewoo, Shin Jak mainly narrated the scholarship and the career, and did not write his mother’s labor. On the other hand, in his mother’s record, Shin Jak emphasized her labor and management of their property and tried to make his daughters in law and other women in his family remember in order to reproduce the women’s labor.