An increasing number of South Korean women are choosing not to marry, not to have children, and not even to have relationships with men. With the lowest fertility rate in the world, the country’s population will start shrinking unless something changes.
“I have no plans to have children, ever,” says 24-year-old Jang Yun-hwa, as we chat in a hipsterish cafe in the middle of Seoul.
“I don’t want the physical pain of childbirth. And it would be detrimental to my career.”
Like many young adults in South Korea’s hyper-competitive job market, Yun-hwa, a web comic artist, has worked hard to get where she is and isn’t ready to let all that hard graft go to waste.
“Rather than be part of a family, I’d like to be independent and live alone and achieve my dreams,” she says.
…
When I put it to her that if she and her contemporaries don’t have children her country’s culture will die, she tells me that it’s time for the male-dominated culture to go.
“Must die,” she says, breaking into English. “Must die!”
Laura Knight - Motley, Preparing for Her Entrance [1937] by Gandalf Via Flickr: This work was painted in Knight’s studio which she transformed into a dressing room for the circus-stars who had finished their season at Olympia in Kensington but stayed in London to pose for the picture. An Irishwoman called Nan Kearns, who was posing as the dresser and would later become a film actress, fed everyone with food from the Cookery School on the Finchley Road. The studio was crowded and alive with chatter as Knight worked, Whimsical Walker regaling everyone with his tales of stage life. Knight described this time; “I tried to dissociate myself from the gaiety, but it was overwhelming. The young people were having the time of their lives, and Nan in her Irish way drove her load of fun over us all like a car or Juggernaut.”
John Singer Sargent, Miss Beatrice Townsend, 1882.
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In response to the closures of both the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum due to the partial government shutdown, I will be posting highlights from both collections indefinitely until these museums are reopened.
![Laura Knight - Motley, Preparing for Her Entrance [1937]](https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4824/45998835014_aa1118735d_b.jpg)
