67 activity is also greatly influenced by the social position and occupation of one’s husband. In this sense, the interpretation that in the years following the famines North Korean women’s economic power was vitalized due to their market activities and that, within the family, their ‘right to speak out’ was strengthened and their roles and status improved is an aspect that needs to be re-examined in various ways. Although there are cases in which women have to some extent acquired economic power through their market activities, this, however, does not directly translate into an improvement of role and status. It must rather be seen as an extremely limited phenomenon arising in the low and middle classes who struggle, day by day, to secure their livelihoods, and it is difficult to generalize this interrelation and render it a common phenomenon. Hence, the economic crisis can be said to have loosened up the rigid gender division of labour of the past only to a degree that does not amount to a collapse of the patriarchal order.32 Furthermore, it can be argued that the public-private divide between men’s and women’s spheres and spaces has in fact been consolidated. Because the marketplace, the market, and spaces related to market activities have been not public but private and dishonourable spaces, the assertion that women took the lead in market-related activities does not mean that the market sphere is now accepted as a public space. Instead, it is rendered the private sphere of women even more forcefully than in the past. For example, the authorities exert pressure on women who trade on the general market by demanding that they ‘must wear skirts’; this shows that social prejudice which clearly identifies the space called market as a female sphere is effectively at work here. Therefore, neither women’s market activities nor their livelihood activities have been able to significantly reverse the patriarchal family order. Furthermore, market activities are currently not granted the same social guarantees that are generally afforded to public occupations, and thus attain a character of 32 Lee Mikyeong, 2006. A View on the Change of North Korean Women’s Status Following the Economic Crisis Construed through In-Depth Interviews with North Korean Women. Family and Culture, Vol. 18, No. 1, Korean Family Studies Association, p. 45.