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Vietnam's Women in
Transition

Edited by

Kathleen Barry
Professor, Department of Human Development and Family Studies
The Pennsylvania State University
 First published in Great Britain 1996 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-333-64669-4 ISBN 978-1-349-24611-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24611-3

First published in the United States of America 1996 by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-12830-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vietnam's women in transition / edited by Kathleen Barry.
p. cm. -(International political economy series)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-12830-2 (cloth)
1. Women-Vietnam-Social conditions. I. Barry, Kathleen.
II. Series.
HQ1750.5.V56 1996
305.4'09597-dc20 95-34286
CIP
Editorial matter, selection, Introduction and Chapter 9 © Kathleen Barry 1996
Individual chapters (in order) © Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini;
Mary Ann Tétreault; Le Thi; Thai Thi Ngoc Du; Nguyen Thanh Tam; Le Thi Nham
Tuyet, Annika Johannson and Nguyan The Lap; Linda J. Yarr; David Shapiro; Bui
Thi Kim Quy; Nguyan Thi Hoa; Le Thi Quy; Hoang Thi Khanh; Hoang Thi Lich;
Ha Thi Phuong Tien; Nguyen Quang Vinh; Tran Thi Van Anh; Nguyen Thi Khoa;
Le Thi Chieu Nghi; Carolyn Sachs; Le Thi Quy; Lynne Goodstein; Michael P.
Johnson; Cynthia Enloe 1996
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying
issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court
Road, London W1P 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96
To the women of Vietnam
Contents
List of Tables and Figures X

List of Abbreviations XI
Acknowledgements xu
Notes on the Contributors xiii
Map of Vietnam xviii

Introduction 1
Kathleen Barry

Part I Status of Women: In History and Revolution

1 Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting: The Causes of
the Initial Decline in the Status of East Asian Women 21
Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini
2 Women and Revolution in Vietnam 38
Mary Ann Tetreault

Part II Family and Modernization

3 Women, Marriage, Family, and Gender Equality 61
Le Thi
4 Divorce and its Impact on Women and Families in
Ho Chi Minh City 74
Thai Thi Ngoc Du
5 Remarks on Women Who Live Without Husbands 87
Nguyen Thanh Tam
6 Abortion in Two Rural Communes in Thai Binh
Province, Vietnam 93
Le Thi Nham Tuyet, Annika Johansson,
Nguyen The Lap
7 Gender and the Allocation of Time: Impact on the
Household Economy 110
Linda J. Yarr

vii
viii Contents
8 Women's Employment, Education, Fertility, and Family
Planning in Vietnam: An Economic Perspective 123
David Shapiro
9 Industrialization and Economic Development: The Costs to
Women 144
Kathleen Barry

Part III Urbanization and Women's Work

10 The Vietnamese Woman in Vietnam's Process of
Change 159
Bui Thi Kim Quy
11 Female Workers at Thanh Cong Textile Company in the
Renovation Process 167
Nguyen Thi Hoa
12 Homeless and Street-Women in Poverty in the Informal
Economic Sector in Hanoi 179
Le Thi Quy
13 Female Labour and Objectives of the Economic Development
in Ho Chi Minh City 185
Hoang Thi Khanh
14 The Vietnamese Woman in Scientific Creation and
Technological Transference 191
Hoang Thi Lich
15 On the Problem of Health Protection for Female
Labourers 199
Ha Thi Phuong Tien

Part IV Rural Women and Agricultural Development

16 Women and Institutional Changes in a Developing Rural
Area 207
Nguyen Quang Vinh
17 The Direct Loan of Capital from the Bank to Develop
Production and Gender Equality 214
Tran Thi Van Anh
 Contents ix
18 The Real State of Forestry Workers' and Peasants'
Families in the Area of Paper-Making in North Vietnam 226
Nguyen Thi Khoa
19 Women Engaged in Household Economy: The Programme of
Poverty Alleviation in Areas Outside Ho Chi Minh City 236
Le Thi Chieu Nghi
20 Rural Women: Agriculture and the Environment in
Vietnam 246
Carolyn Sachs

Part V Violence Against Women

21 Domestic Violence in Vietnam and Efforts to Curb It 263
Le Thi Quy
22 Sexual Assault in the United States and Vietnam:
Some Thoughts and Questions 275
Lynne Goodstein
23 Violence Against Women in the Family: The United States
and Vietnam 287
Michael P. Johnson

Part VI Beyond War

24 Women After Wars: Puzzles and Warnings 299
Cynthia Enloe

Appendix: Documents on State Policies with Regard to Women 311

Index 321
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
3.1 Proportion of number of households according to the
number of persons in households in 1979 and 1989 64
3.2 Population over 15 years old classified by gender and
marital situation in 1989 66
3.3 Proportion of unmarried women with children 69
4.1 Population shift: Ho Chih Minh City Census- April1, 1989 75
4.2 The divorce situation 77
4.3 Annual divorces granted by age group 78
6.1 Population, density, birth rate and growth rate in%,
Thai Binh and whole country 94
6.2 Use of modern contraceptives among women of reproductive
age in Thai Binh 95
6.3 Abortion in 1991: ratio of abortions per I 000 live births 95
6.4 Gestational age at the time of abortion 96
14.1 Women scientists and technicians as a ratio 192
14.2 Levels of education in 1989 193
14.3 Female enrolment in universities 193
14.4 Women in higher education 194
15.1 Disease among female labourers, by age group 202
15.2 The ratio of female labourers suffering labour accidents
in the agricultural co-operatives (Nam Ninh district) 204
18.1 Generations in the family 227

Figures
8.1 Multiple effects of individual education 125
8.2 Total fertility rates, 1969-89 129
8.3 Percentage of married women who want no more children,
by education and by number of living children, 1988 131
8.4 Infant and child mortality estimates, 1978-88, by mother's
education 133
8.5 Current contraceptive use among married women aged
15-49, by education and by method used, 1988 135
8.6 Educational attainment of women aged 20-49, by age
group, 1989 136
18.1 Family make-up 227
18.2 Family sizes 230
X
List of Abbreviations
AIDS acquired immune deficiency syndrome
DRVN Democratic Republic of Vietnam
EPZ export processing zone
ICP Indochinese Communist Party
IUD inter-uterine device
NGO non-governmental organization
NICs newly industrializing countries
NLF National Liberation Front
PLAF People's Liberation Armed Forces
PRG People's Revolutionary Government
SRVN Socialist Republic of Vietnam
TFR total fertility rate
UN United Nations
UNFPA UN Fund for Population Activities
USA United States of America
VAC garden/pond/sty
VBA Vietnamese Bank of Agriculture
VND Vietnamese dong
VNDHS Vietnamese Demographic and Health Survey

xi
Acknowledgements
This book has come about, like the seminar on Women and the Family held
in Vietnam in 1993 that preceeded it, as if it is something that was meant to
happen. Unhampered by the distance, differences, and disconnections
between the USA and Vietnam, this book is possible because of the the ded-
icated and unrelenting work ofBui Thi Kim Quy, sociologist and director of
the Women's Studies Center in the Institute of Social Sciences in Ho Chi
Minh City. Without her commitment, drive, energy and demanding attention
to every detail that launched the seminar into a highly successful exchange,
this book would not have been possible. Likewise I am deeply grateful to
Professor Mac Duong, Director of the Institute of Social Sciences who pro-
posed, encouraged and in every way supported this project.
In the USA, LaMarr Kopp, Deputy Vice President for International
Programs at Pennsylvania State University not only encouraged and sup-
ported my participation in an earlier Council on International Educational
Exchange seminar in Vietnam, but was instrumental in getting the Penn
State support that made possible the seminar in Vietnam on Women and
the Family. In the process he has become a guide and a friend whose com-
mitment to international cooperation I deeply value. Early in the planning
of the seminar, John Skillman, Deputy Director of CIEE, and John
McAuliff, Director of the Indochina Reconciliation Project provided
support and encouragement with very practical advice from their long
experiences in building humanitarian and educational programmes with
Vietnam. On my trip to Vietnam in 1991, Keith Taylor of the Asian
Studies Program at Cornell University provided me with contacts and
encouragement. His ongoing support has been most significant.
On the trip to and through Vietnam that led to this book, I was privileged
to travel with an outstanding group of American friends, scholars and femi-
nists whose spirit of collective commitment and willingness to reframe their
papers in light of what we learned in Vietnam made it possible to capture
here in this book a moment of historical, crosscultural and international
exchange and one that was truly significant to all of us. Thank you Linda
Burton, Patricia Draper, Cynthia Enloe, Mimi Frenier, Lynne Goodstein,
Michael Johnson, Carolyn Sachs, David Shapiro and Linda Yarr.
The work of preparing this volume ultimately involved considerable
technical detail. I am very grateful to the Vietnamese translators of the
papers in this book and to the contributors for their papers. At Penn State,
Janine Zweig's work on entering all translated articles on to disk was

xii
 Acknowledgements xiii
invaluable to meeting any reasonable deadlines. Donna Ballock coordi-
nated submissions, entered revisions and final corrections and in all was
essential to the final preparations of the manuscript. The work of editing
and revising for Western publication involved creating technical compara-
bility among the papers without dissolving the differences that reflect so
much of the state of dialogue with the Vietnamese on research, policy and
programmes relating to women. Clare Kristofco, Mimi Frenier, Patricia
Draper and Linda Yarr helped me with this work, contributing valuable
time and energy in revisions and editing of Vietnamese articles that, as
the authors found, kept their original intent, spirit, intellect and meaning. I
want to thank them for this priceless work and especially to thank Linda
Yarr for introducing this manuscript to Timothy Shaw, editor of the
International Political Economy Series, who, with Gniinne Twomey, the
editor at Macmillan, made it possible for this book to be published.

KATHLEEN BARRY
Notes on the Contributors
CONTRIBUTORS FROM THE UNITED STATES

Kathleen Barry, sociologist and Professor of Human Development at

Penn State University, organized the seminar "Family and the Conditions
of Women in Vietnam" in 1993 that led to this volume. Her latest book,
Prostitution of Sexuality: Global Exploitation of Women, details her two
decades of research on sexual exploitation and international feminism that
led to the development of a proposed U.N. treaty, The Convention Against
Sexual Exploitation.

Cynthia Enloe is Professor of Government at Clark University in

Worcester, Massachusetts, where she also teaches Women's Studies.
Among her more recent books are: Does Khaki Become You: The
Militarization of Women's Lives (1988); Bananas, Beaches and Bases:
Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1990); and The Morning
After: Sexual Politics After the Cold War (1993).

Mariam Darce Frenier is Professor of History at University of Minnesota.

Her dissertation was 'Chinese Women and the Chinese Communist Party',
completed at the University of Iowa in 1978. In 1982 she began teaching a
course on the American War in Vietnam. During the summer of 1994 she
visited Vietnam for her fifth time and for the second time taught women's
studies at The Center for Women's Studies in Ho Chi Minh City. Her
article was written in collaboration with Kimberley Mancini at the
University of Minnesota, Morris graduate student in 1991.

Lynne Goodstein is Professor of Administration of Justice and Women's

Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph.D. in
social psychology in 1978 from the City University of New York and her
bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr Goodstein is an
expert on correctional institutions, having published numerous articles and
two books, Determinate Sentencing and Imprisonment: The Failure of
Reform (I 985) and The American Prison: Issues in Research and Policy
(1989). The director of the Women's Studies Program at Penn State for
eight years, Dr Goodstein has written extensively on feminist issues in
academe and is currently researching the status and impact of women's
studies programmes on higher educational institutions.

xiv
 Notes on the Contributors XV

Michael P. Johnson is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's

Studies at Penn State. His feminist research on families includes work on
fairness and the household division of labour, the development of an
empirical typology of gendered structures of marital relationships,
an analysis of types of violence against women in the family in
Vietnam and the United States, and a current project on the role of com-
mitment asymmetry in the creation of gendered power structures in
marriage.

Carolyn Sachs is an Associate Professor of Rural Sociology and

Women's Studies at Penn State University. She works in the area of rural
women, women and agriculture, sustainable agriculture, and international·
development. She is the author of Invisible Farmers: Women in Agri-
cultural Production. Her forthcoming book, Gendered Fields: Rural
Women, Agriculture, and the Environment, examines women's knowledge
and experiences in relation to agriculture and the environment.

David Shapiro received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton

University, and is an Associate Professor of Economics and Women's
Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. His research has focused
primarily on women, work, and fertility, both in the United States and in
sub-Saharan Africa.

Mary Ann Tetreault is Professor of Political Science at Iowa State

University. She is the author of The Organization of Arab Petroleum
Exporting Countries (1981), Revolution in the World Petroleum Market
( 1985), and The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and the Economics of the
New World Order (1995); editor (with Charles Frederick Abel) of
Dependency Theory and the Return of High Politics (1986), and
Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World (1994). She
has also written about gender in the context of Middle Eastern and U.S.
politics.

Linda J. Yarr is a Scholar-in-Residence at The American University

and specializes in Southeast Asia politics and women's issues. She
was named an Associate of the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute,
Denver, Colorado. Formerly Assistant Professor and Coordinator of
Global Women's Studies at the Friends World Program of Long Island
University, she is a co-translator of Nguyen Khac Vien's Tradition and
Revolution in Vietnam and the author of various articles on Vietnam.
xvi Notes on the Contributors
CONTRIBUTORS FROM VIETNAM

Bui Thi Kim Quy, Professor of Sociology, Director of the Center for
Women's Studies, and former head of Department of Philosophy and
Department of Religion, Institute of Social Science, Ho Chi Minh City.
Author of articles on religious and ethical issues in Vietnam and on
women's labour.

Ha Thi Phuong Tien, Center for Family and Women's Studies, Hanoi.
Research and publications on health, reproduction, labour, and condition
of rural women.

Hoang Thi Khanh, President, Workers Federation ofHo Chi Minh City.

Hoang Thi Lich, Vice Director of Center for Family and Women's
Studies, National Center for Social Sciences and Humanities, Member of
Central Executive Committee of Vietnam Women's Union. Author of arti-
cles on employment and working conditions of women.

Le Thi, Professor of Philosophy, Director of the National Center for

Women's Studies since its founding in 1987, former President of the
Institute of Philosophy and former member of the Central Committee of
the Women's Union. Author of numerous books and articles on Ho Chi
Minh and women, women's labour, family and gender relations.

Le Thi Chieu Nghi, Center for Women's Studies, Hanoi.

Le Thi Nham Toyet, Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Research

Center for Gender, Family, and Environment in Development, Hanoi.
Author of articles on the conditions of elderly women, women in mass
media, and adolescent sexual development. Her article was written in col-
laboration with sociologist Annika Johansson of the Karolinska Institute,
Stockholm, Sweden and with Dr Nguyen The Lap of the Thai Binh
Committee for Population and Family Planning.

Le Thi Quy, Professor of History and Head of programme, "Gender and

Family Studies", at the Center for Women's Studies, Hanoi, she also
teaches Women's Studies at Hanoi University, and is Managing Editor of
Science and Women. Author of articles on the role of Vietnamese women
in history and social diseases of women.
 Notes on the Contributors xvii
Nguyen Quang Vinh, Senior Sociologist, Deputy Director of the Center
for Sociology and Development, The Institute of Social Science, Ho Chi
Minh City. Research and publications on handicraft communities and folk
cultures in Vietnam, sociological survey of the Mekong Delta, and socio-
logical survey of South Mang Thit River area.

Nguyen Thanh Tam, Researcher in Philosophy at the Center for Family

and Women Studies, Hanoi. Author of articles on women and family,
single mothers, and women's health published in Vietnam Social Sciences
and Science and Women.

Nguyen Thi Hoa, Researcher of Capitalist Economy and Researcher of

Women's Studies, Center for Women's Studies, Ho Chi Minh City.
Author of articles on family happiness, family labour and social labour as
well as studies of multinationals and the revolutionary struggle of workers.

Nguyen Thi Khoa, Senior psychology researcher, Chief, Research

Section of Family Studies, Head of Project "Education in the Family",
Center for Women's Studies, Hanoi. Research and articles on the situation
of the Vietnamese family, women's role in children's education, unmar-
ried mothers, and education in workers' and peasants' families.

Thai Thi Ngoc Du, Professor of Geography, Director of Women's

Studies, Open University of Ho Chi Minh City, Head of Department of
Geography at University of Ho Chi Minh City. Author of articles and
papers on demographic and population issues in Vietnam.

Tran Thi Van Anh, Professor of Economics, Head of Department of

Women and Labour, Center for Family and Women's Studies, Hanoi.
Author of articles on economics in Eastern European countries and USSR;
policy changes toward women during transitional period with specific
attention on women in politics and employment.
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xviii
Introduction
Kathleen Barry

SILENCE

VIETNAM. The word conjures up war and veterans to most Americans -

men going to war, protesting against war, guilty from the war, angry about
the war, healing from war. From TV specials on Vietnam to the latest
spate of books and testimonials, the War in Vietnam is told and retold
usually about men, about Americans who were there. 'Since Vietnam' and
'before Vietnam' are casual phrases repeated by too many Americans of
all political persuasions as if Vietnam only exists in relation to the U.S.
war there. 'Tet', the most important Vietnamese holiday and celebration of
the Lunar New Year, still in the minds of many Americans signifies a
Vietnamese military strategy that turned the tide of the war.
I went to Vietnam in 1991 with a faculty delegation to participate in a
seminar given by Vietnamese scholars. I wanted to learn about the
country, and I knew the best way to do that was to meet and learn about
the women there. But I found myself in a mostly male faculty delegation,
attending a meeting with a mostly male Vietnamese delegation where
women's issues were a joke - laughed off with quaint sayings about how
women rule men that were supported by American men who were ever so
fatigued having to contend with feminism once again, as if again they had
gone to Vietnam to do men's stuff. That was all too familiar. It had been
the story of the U.S. Anti-War Movement and its offensive against radical
(autonomous) feminism back in 1971. When feminism, in a crescendo of
consciousness, sparked an autonomous women's movement, the male Left
responded feverishly if feebly, by trying to co-opt our movement and
undermine our claim to women's liberation. They used the Vietnam War
to try to guilt-trip us, treating it as a more urgent, more valid claim to
liberation than any that women anywhere might make and demand.
In 1971 we responded when the Left organized an anti-war conference
in Canada 'to raise the consciousness of the Women's Movement to issues
of anti-imperialism'. We, in turn, issued The Fourth World Manifesto,
feminist declaration of independence from the Left. We claimed women's
self-determination by exposing sex colonization as a common condition of
women globally, underlying all revolutionary struggle. This Manifesto
2 Introduction
was the first call from U.S. feminists for solidarity with Vietnamese
women over the 'imperialism of sex'. But as we found, it was too soon.
There was no room in Vietnam yet for independent women's movements.
Our efforts to make connections with Vietnamese women, to build global
feminist solidarity then were premature. In the U.S., Europe and the West
generally, feminism had launched an independent, autonomous (from male
parties and politics) women's liberation movement. At that time,
Vietnamese women were engaged in a nationalist struggle for Vietnam's
self-determination and reunification of their country. After the U.S.
withdrawal in 1972 and the defeat in 1975 by the North of Saigon-based
Republican forces that had been supported by the U.S. in the South,
connection with women in Vietnam was closed to us for almost twenty
years. Political borders, embargoes, and ideological barriers confined
our imaginations within patriarchal schemata and controlled our sense of
possibilities.
Exactly twenty years after the Fourth World Manifesto, in January
1991, I sat in the first Vietnam seminar organized by the Council on
International Educational Exchange and held in Ho Chi Minh City and
Hanoi, and re-experienced the women's invisibility that I had known in
the anti-war movement. But this time something was different. Although
my daily questions about women in Vietnam were rebuffed in the
meetings, quietly in hallways there were small offers of encouragement,
and when a translator arranged a private visit for me to the new Museum
of Women just opened there, I knew there was much more to discover.
This time, persistence and a long-nurtured autonomous feminism paid off.
A few days later, I was invited for a professional exchange at the Institute
of Social Science and whenever Professor Mac Duong who directed the
Institute saw me at the meetings, he reminded me of our appointment. At
the Institute, he introduced me to Professor Bui Thi Kim Quy, a sociolo-
gist who, I was told, was about to launch a new and first Women's Studies
Center. We talked about women intensively for a half-day; through a
translator we were undeterred by national boundaries or different lan-
guages. We found a spontaneously generated common ground in which
we both struggled to bring together research on women with activism.
There is something I have never been able to explain about how connec-
tions are made in Vietnam, about how, when you feel that there is nothing
left to say, or in the case of the official meetings I was attending, that it
was not worth saying anything, new possibilities arise, a new sense of
being able to make things happen opens up and new energy and enthusi-
asm ignite. Whatever that thing is, whenever I've been struck by it, intu-
itively I understand a little more about Vietnam's persistence in their
 Kathleen Barry 3
struggle for their own self-determination. It is a feeling of possibility, or
revolutionary optimism in apparent hopelessness, the very foundation of
liberation struggle. When I had reached almost complete exhaustion on
the steamily hot afternoon at the Institute, Professor Mac Duong (who had
remained at a distance during Kim Quy's and my discussion), joined us
and with a warm and encouraging gesture said, 'I invite you to return with
a delegation from the United States to continue these important discus-
sions on women.'
That was the beginning of this book. It led to a seminar and ethno-
graphic field trip in 1993, 'Family and the Conditions of Women in
Society'. The two years that it took to organize that meeting were spent in
handling and surmounting roadblocks due to the U.S. embargo that was
still in place. At Penn State the enthusiastic support of Deputy Vice-
President LaMarr Kopp provided both encouragement and real, material
support for the meeting. But this time the barriers, and the U.S. embargo,
still firmly in place, proved to be technical, albeit time-consuming details
that could neither deter nor diminish our mutual enthusiasm and expecta-
tions for this meeting.
Our meetings took place over the two weeks preceding the Vietnamese
celebration of Tet, the Lunar New Year which heralds Spring and which,
above all else, is the time for family reunion and celebration. Streets in the
South that were filled with special yellow flowers for Tet, as we moved to
the North, became filled with pink flowers of Tet in Hanoi. Professor
MacDuong welcomed us and officially opened our seminar saying that this
is 'the time for gardens of flowers to blossom in anticipation of the fra-
grance of the new year', as he noted that launching the seminar and our
collaborations had already borne fruit. The intensive five-day meeting and
scholarly exchange in Ho Chi Minh City organized by Professor Bui Thi
Kim Quy was followed by an ethnographic research trip for our U.S. dele-
gation and concluded with three days of meetings and briefings with the
Center for Women's Research under the Directorship of Professor Le Thi
and the President of the Union of Vietnamese Women, Truong My Hoa in
Hanoi. Papers and fresh research and ideas from those meetings eventually
were supplemented with other groundbreaking research in Vietnam and in
the U.S. on women in Vietnam.

VIETNAM- 1990s

What was the Vietnam of 1993- the time of our seminar, the period when
the articles and research reports that make up this book were prepared?
4 Introduction
What are/were the conditions that framed the family, that shaped women's
lives, conditions often assumed in the Vietnamese reports in this book?
Vietnam, the poorest country in Asia, and one of the most densely popu-
lated and poorest countries in the world, is still primarily an agricultural
country. In 1992, with a population near 70 million, rice is the primary
crop and chief export. Before 1980 all industry and agriculture was run by
the state and/or state-sanctioned co-operatives.
In the late 1980s Vietnam began to open to a market economy with 'ren-
ovation', or 'doi moi', which was aimed at accelerating the industrial
development of the economy. In 1986 Vietnam undertook economic
restructuring moving away from heavy industry to production of food and
foodstuffs, consumer goods and export goods increasing its exports from
1988 to 1989 by 44 percent. 1 While Vietnamese trade had been conducted
primarily with socialist countries prior to 1988, the new market policy gave
Vietnamese enterprises the 'right to export their products directly or
through an import-export company of their own choice'. This new policy
encourages 'the development of individual and private economic compo-
nents whose operations can last for a long period'. The State will not
nationalize economic units as its aim is to create free enterprise in
Vietnam. 2 Banking, currency rates, price stabilizations have all been mod-
ernized to promote a free market economy with little or no state
regulation. 3
Renovation removed state limitations from the private economic sector
development. With severe losses in 1991 both from devastating floods (the
worst in thirteen years) and from withdrawal of Soviet aid, Vietnam
rebounded in 1992. The gains reported by Premier Vo Van Kiet were
substantial:

1991 which ends with a relatively allsided success on the economic

front is also the first year that we fulfil and overfulfil the main planned
targets approved by the National Assembly. GNP, as compared with
1991, was up by about 5.3%; industrial output by 9% to 24 million tons;
capital construction of the state by 25%; director foreign investment by
73%; budget revenues by 82%; and exports by 19 percent.

The Premier explained that despite the U.S. embargo at that time exports
dramatically increased. 'Since the promulgation of the Law on Foreign
Investment, 40 countries have made direct investments in Vietnam, with
the total registered capital, under licenses, of more than US$5 billion. In
1992 the foreign investment increased by over two times against that of
last year.' 4
 Kathleen Barry 5
In October 1992 the Council of Ministers issued the Export Processing
Zone Regulation. EPZs encourage and create the conditions that make it
attractive for foreigners to invest capital, techniques and modern technol-
ogy. According to potential investors the industrial zones will produce
export goods, 'efficiently exploit labour sources', and attract techniques of
advanced technology. The economy, rapidly shifting from domestic to
export oriented production, includes the development of tourist industries.
By 1993 the Vietnamese 'doi moi' or economic renovation plan, which
put state enterprises and agencies on a cost-effective basis, encouraged a
multi-sectored market economy, focused on commodity production, and
fostered private business and foreign investments. French, Australian,
South Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese investors were the first to negoti-
ate joint ventures.
For this still primarily agricultural country, in the early 1990s private
enterprise especially meant privatization of farm and household produc-
tion. Central to new economic production has been the shift from the cadre
or the village collective of the socialist state to the private family of patri-
archy as the unit of production, 'greatly reducing the powers of the co-
operative over the family' .5 Professor Le Thi points out that 'Each
household is a rather independent production unit. It is completely entitled
to the contractual plots of land [ ... ] The household has the right of using
their farm produce. ' 6 But before economic renovation up to 1985 peasant
women were 57% of the total agricultural labourers and many women had
leading posts in co-operatives. 7 According to Professor Le Thi, 'Since
1988 the state has allotted land, forests and forest land to farmers' house-
holds. They now have the right to long-term use of land - now it is tem-
porarily provided for 5 years - although the land is still under state
ownership and they are not entitled to buy or sell the land. The allotment
of land is based on the number of workhands and members of the family
including good and bad, far and near land.' 8
Between 1986 and 1993 Vietnam had effectively promoted its goal of
encouraging private enterprise and attracting foreign investments.
Professor Mac Duong summarized the preceding year in Vietnam, when
the research for the Vietnamese reports presented in this volume was
conducted:

Although Vietnam was beset in 1992 by heavy natural calamities and

many pressing social problems, 1992 was nevertheless a good year
because it was the year the country reaped the biggest harvest, which far
exceeded the 21 m tonnes/year figure, the object of our dreams in the sev-
enties and eighties. Inflation was reduced to the lowest level compared to
6 Introduction
two years before, with prices being stable and the economy growing.
1992 was the year that witnessed the formation of a good number of
private enterprises, the opening of bureaus of foreign representation that
are in full activity, the great contributions of the oil industry to national
finances, many state enterprises having initially won back their predom-
inant position and strength, a good number of schools, hospitals, air-
ports, harbours, roads being widened and built. 1992 was the year Viet
Nam further expanded foreign relations with many countries in the
world. International organizations like UNICEF, UDF, UNESCO, NGO
organizations [ ... ] have come to VietNam to hold seminars, to supply
valuable know-how and experience, and to assist Viet Nam with many
efficient practical programmes. 1992 was also the year of promotion of
national culture in Viet Nam, of protection of public morals and
customs with characteristics of the Vietnamese nation being strongly
fostered. 9

A year later, in January 1994, the U.S. finally normalized economic

relations with Vietnam, with full diplomatic relations in mid-1995.

WOMEN'S DEVELOPMENT?

Vietnam has begun to enter a new phase of rapid industrialization and

development, but what about the women there? That a country develops
does not mean that women necessarily advance or develop at the pace of
the country. From our seminar, research papers and discussions we went
into the countryside and into the programmes that service women. We saw
possibility and we saw poverty's effects. Upon returning to the U.S., I
wrote of one visit that seemed to us to crystalize women's suffering:

Our entire delegation found that the real suffering of Vietnamese human
life, so long devalued by the U.S., was symbolized in the maternity
ward of the Tu Du Hospital for Mothers and Infants in Ho Chi Minh
City. We walked down long outdoor corridors with poverty-stricken
out-patients quietly waiting for treatment in this understaffed but very
well directed hospital. When we entered the maternity ward, we saw
rows of single beds, many with two to three women lying in various
stages of labour. Some close to delivery, others hours away.
Besides the overcrowded conditions, there was something else that
was immediately and profoundly evident - silence in a maternity ward
of labouring women. When I asked Dr Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, the
 Kathleen Barry 7
Director of the Hospital and a delegate in our seminar, how this could
be, she explained apologetically, that while labour is as painful for
Vietnamese women as for any other women, Vietnamese women have
learned to suffer in silence. They have survived this way.
As we walked on to the neonatal section of the hospital and saw incu-
bators with two to three premature babies cradled in the same incubator,
Dr Phuong explained that she often tells foreigners that those sharing
incubators are twins so that they will not think the hospital irresponsible
because it cannot afford the minimum necessary equipment to support
new life. Here we saw where women's silent suffering begins. With one
fetal heart monitor for a hospital where women deliver 60 infants a day,
this hospital has an astonishingly low perinatal mortality rate of
2 percent.
It was when we left the hospital and saw a rack of surgical gloves
drying in the sun that we realized the extent to which punitive sanctions
against this country reach directly to women's lives and bodies.
Surgical gloves that U.S. doctors would and should dispose of after one
use, in this Hospital of Mothers and Infants must be used, washed,
resterilized over and over again, each time stretching further out of
shape and becoming less and less able to be completely sterilized mean-
while leaving bulk that makes a surgeon's delicate suturing difficult and
clumsy at best. 10

The enduring costs to women of war may well be the greatest untold story
of war.
With all of its economic constraints, Dr Phuong's hospital reflected the
harmony of the Vietnamese worldview harmony, a unified and orderly
universe, 11 one that is compatible with socialism. For example, she had
received foreign aid that allowed her to build a new wing on the hospital.
For the first time, she was able to provide private and semi-private rooms
to mothers whose families could afford to pay. Since doi moi, with econ-
omic restructuring, free medical care is no longer available. The income
from these rooms allowed her to pay for services for those who could not
afford to pay - a socialist response to capitalist inequality in a socialist
country - 'from each according to their means, to each according to their
need'.
There was a wide range of conditions which reflect women's enigmatic
situation in moments of historical change. Women are increasingly
engaged in the public domain. With this change violence against women is
becoming increasingly a public reality - one that was not visible when tra-
ditional, extended family life consumed most of women's time and lives
8 Introduction
and therefore was the primary, if not only location of violence against
them. From the U.S. War in Vietnam, the Chinese War that began with an
invasion in 1978 and from the Vietnam War in Cambodia, there is a
significant sex ratio imbalance (1992; 53.29% female, 47.7% male) that
has led to a proliferation of female-headed households, increased prob-
lems in caring for the elderly, and a demand from single women who want
to have children by artificial insemination.
The effects of industrialization and economic development on the
family have been well established and now are evident in Vietnam: with
accelerated industrialization, in the shift from domestic to export produc-
tion, there is an increase in rural-to-urban migration; and these forces
taken together have the effect of restructuring the family from extended to
nuclear. With the tendency toward nuclear families, free mate selection
replaces arranged marriages and fertility rates decline. With urbanization
that accompanies industrialization and the increasingly individualistic ori-
entation promoted by competitive market economies and nuclearisation of
the family, divorce increases as does the prevalence of single parent
(usually female) headed households. Less acknowledged, yet increasingly
evident is the increase of public incidence of rape, a widespread diffusion
of pornography and an industrialization of prostitution. 12
The family in Vietnam is undergoing dramatic change. Extended fam-
ilies of three and four generations, structured by filial piety where wives'
primary obligations are to their mothers-in-law are giving way to nuclear
families and the two generations of parents and their children. In 1989
78.68 percent of working women in Vietnam live in the rural areas 13 and
women are in charge of most stages of agricultural production from
ploughing, harrowing and manuring,. to spraying insecticides. According
to Professor Le Thi, 'women more than men lack necessary conditions and
opportunities to improve their cultural and professional levels, to con-
stantly bring into full play their talents and intelligence' . 14 In the informal
sector and household economy, women's disadvantage has resulted in
'many more women lengthening their working day, increasing their labour
intensity, they are working day and night' . 15
With the 'eradication of the State subsidy system and cutting down of
State enterprises and organs staff have created difficulties for a number of
women who have lost their jobs and had to seek new occupations' . 16
Women are economically displaced in their traditional labour and mar-
ginalized in the newly industrialized economy. Prior to renovation,
women entrepreneurs were active mainly in small trade, handicrafts, not
in big business from which they were largely excluded. Marginalized
women had little knowledge of customer markets, even though they
 Kathleen Barry 9
handled the 1991 programme of loans to peasant households for busi-
nesses better than their husbands. 17 Professor Bui Thi Kim Quy has
shown that in the industrial sector, export processing zones which pri-
marily recruit female labour are paying significantly less than Vietnam's
minimum wage. 18
The effects of industrialization on the status of women are mixed. With
economic development, women are able to move into the public economy
and labour force, breaking their traditional confinement to the private
sphere. But typically, development aid and new jobs in the industrializing
economy advantage men first, especially in the competitive labour market.
Men get access to material/economic advantages from industrial develop-
ment before women and that produces a gendered time-lag between a rise
in men's as compared to women's standards of living. The gendered time-
lag sharpens sex stratification of the labour force and it intensifies female
subordination in public as well as private life.
These are among the findings from new research on women in Vietnam
presented in this book. They are conditions that give rise to women enter-
ing the migrating process looking for a better life, more cash income and
less work, and more material benefits in the urban areas. Not surprisingly
then, while Vietnam is still primarily rural, that which accompanies indus-
trialization, rise in divorce rates and prostitution, is rapidly increasing.

NATIONAL LIBERATION- WOMEN'S LIBERATION-

EITHER/OR?

To understand the struggle of women as they confront family power rela-

tions, it is important to go into the development of a women's movement
in Vietnam, a long but confining history that was forged in the context of a
national liberation struggle against French colonization of Vietnam.
Women's consciousness infused some parts of the growing movements
against colonization. By the 1920s female dependency was under close
scrutiny in Vietnam, and as Australian historian David Marr points out,
'women became conscious of themselves as a group with particular inter-
ests, grievances, and demands' .19 In the context of analyzing oppression,
subordination was recognized by some as the most extreme conditions of
oppression in Vietnam. According to Hue-Tam Ho Tai, debates on women
were vehicles for arguing topics that could not be addressed forthrightly. 20
Under conditions of nco-Confucian filial piety, in the 1930s intellectu-
als, and especially women, reacted to the traditional requirements
imposed on women: where women were treated as transferred property in
10 Introduction
their duties and obligation first to father, then husband and his family,
especially the mother-in-law, and then to their eldest sons if they are
widowed. In a world of traditional culture, ancestor worship extended the
obligations of filial piety beyond the grave and throughout time, while
for the Vietnamese moral indebtedness to one's family is something that
could never be repaid and one's success in the world only increased that
debtY The women's world was largely closed within and embedded in
the family that included the deceased and not yet born 'in a single fabric
of spiritual unity and material being' .22 Female chastity ('one-sided
chastity'), with piety toward one's parents and fidelity to one's husband,
not only were the context of female subordination in patriarchal society,
they became, to a certain extent, a metaphorical language for speaking of
the Vietnamese relation to their French colonizers.
As Marr points out, women's rebellion against these traditional roles
was possible because their submission and subordination was 'in part due
to the fact that they had never been fully cowed, and men had never
treated them entirely as chattel'. 23 With some social space to protest their
condition, women's publications of the 1920s and 1930s pressed for
increased access to education, which had been severely limited under
French rule.
However, female liberation increasingly was framed in terms of
national liberation. 24 Hue-Tam Ho Tai points out that feminism, as it
appeared in the first writings about women in the anti-colonial movement,
had to serve the cause of the nation. 25 Even then, Marxist publications in
the 1930s attacked feminism and accused it of encouraging women to
abandon their families. In one publication a 'caricature of the Vietnamese
woman emphasized her alleged desire to be equal to men in gambling,
extramarital sex, and conspicuous consumption' .26 Nevertheless, by the
1940s women's issues that included equal pay for equal work, the outlaw-
ing of polygamy, and opening education to women, were incorporated into
the demands of the Indochinese Communist Party. But Marxists lauded
women's claims for emancipation only as short-term goals to accomplish
under capitalism. Women's issues were not revolutionary causes; they
were subordinated to another revolutionary struggle, and ultimately, they
were condemned as bourgeois for their focus on customs, culture and tra-
dition, the domains of privatized oppression. Nevertheless, important cor-
rective measures were implemented such as Constitutional equal rights
and new marriage laws.
Leftist intellectuals, whose progressivism is confined by its roots in
patriarchy, have plagued virtually every movement of women for their
self-determination. Cynthia Enloe has framed the relevant question: 'How
 Kathleen Barry 11

have so many been persuaded that women's specific concerns could be

put on the political back burner for the sake of a newly emergent or politi-
cized nation?' 27 Ultimately that question is one that has to be posed and
addressed by women for whom and with whom nationalist struggles have
been waged. But in entering cross-cultural feminist dialogue, with
common commitments to addressing women's conditions, those issues are
before us whether or not they are acknowledged.

FAMILY HAPPINESS OR FAMILY FEUDALISM?

Repeatedly in their discussions of family, Vietnamese women's studies

researchers use the tern1 'feudalism' to refer to traditional family practices
such as polygamy and arranged marriage, which are illegal under the con-
stitutional reform of marriage. Here they draw upon the Marxist under-
standing of feudalism as a stage in the development of historical
materialism that predates capitalism which must be overthrown in the
emergence of the socialist state. Vietnam, in its own history, did not go
through feudalism as understood by historians. But as the Vietnamese
have found, despite reforms, the family in Vietnam today is charged with
feudal relations of power, and is structured around the veneration of elders
and filial piety. 28 Family feudalism is a stage in the historical development
of the patriarchal family, just beyond slavery, where lord, or in the case of
the family, husband, holds complete control and authority over the house-
hold, whose members, children and wife, serve him. He may be ruthless or
beneficent, but he is not held accountable outside his private fiefdom:
'each man's home is his castle'.
Countering traditional family ideology, socialists have critiqued family
feudalism. In Vietnam, this led to legal restructuring of the family through
the 1946 Constitution which established equality of men and women. At
the same time that Vietnam opened to a market economy, in 1986 it
revised marriage laws outlawing polygamy and arranged marriages, even
before the industrializing process would produce these changes. This
brought about modernization of marriage with free mate selection to elim-
inate 'one-sided chastity', or polygamy. Family feudalism is a vestige of
pre-revolutionary society.
Today Vietnamese criticism of 'family feudalism' provides a dynamic
gender analysis of patriarchal power. Identifying feudalism as the form of
family power relations exposes deeper levels of men's domination of
women in the home. On the one hand, it was refreshing to be in a seminar
where men's power in the family could be once again discussed as power,
12 Introduction
especially since Western feminism, particularly in the U.S., has followed
the backlash and retreated from a critique of the family. But on the other
hand, the absence of an autonomous women's movement or radical femi-
nism was felt. In Vietnam today there is still considerable silence regarding
sexual and physical exploitation and abuse in the family. Even in seminar
discussions it was difficult to engage discussion of these issues since, as in
many developing countries, private pre-industrial conditions in the home
are only slowly brought into the public domain where they can be exposed.
Unchallenged marital feudalism in private relations leaves women with
either male dominated marriage and the family or prostitution.
Vietnamese criticism of 'family feudalism' is interwoven with a belief
in and commitment to 'family happiness'. 'Family happiness' is a
Vietnamese expression that reflects a traditional belief in a harmonious
universe, 'a cosmological scheme based on yin and yang', loosely inter-
preted as male and female principles that are considered primordial forces
of the universe, that runs through the entire social order, 'from the family
to the state', where 'everything was a model, an icon, for everything
else'. 29 Family happiness is 'love and affection, spirit of mutual assistance,
faithfulness between husband and wife,. filial duty, respect for grandpar-
ents. At the same time, the campaign mobilizes the people to overcome the
vestiges of old and backward views and customs. ' 30 In the cultural ideol-
ogy of 1990s Vietnam, the balance and harmony of traditional Vietnamese
belief is fitted with a compatible world view of socialist ideology that de-
emphasizes economic disparity and disequilibrium and like filial piety in
family relations expects appropriate behaviour in relation to state law and
policy.
However, while socialism generally treats capitalism and feudalism as
material, objective conditions of exploitation, it often treats women's sub-
ordination as a product of ideas or ideologies.3' While socialists recognize
that major social change, most often in the form of revolution, must occur
to overcome the exploitation of capitalism and imperialism, women's sub-
ordination is treated only as the consequence of wrong ideas that can be
corrected with attitude change. But men, like any other privileged group,
do not give up power in the family or anywhere else because they are
expected to change their attitudes. Power vests oppressors in gain and
advantage which is not relinquished that easily - as the male backlash in
the U.S. shows.
Here is a nub of the cultural and political contradictions that face family
research and women's activism in Vietnam today. In contrast to the
Vietnamese critique of family feudalism, the ideal of 'family happiness' is
just that, a social ideal that originates not in analysis of material, objective
 Kathleen Barry 13
conditions, but in beliefs. It is reflected in attitudes. It is a commonly held,
but largely uncritiqued assumption that appears in most Vietnamese
research reports on women and the family. In this assumption that is not
unique to Vietnam, there is a belief that something within the family must
be fixed as if there were some prior, natural state to which it will or can
return. Addressing a similar confusion in the U.S., Coontz calls this ideo-
logical construction in the U.S. the 'nostalgia trap', a romanticization of
the family type that never existed, but is treated as if it is the reality ,32 an
idealization which masks the already hidden power relations that subordi-
nate women in the family.
From the standpoint of feminist theory, 'family happiness' can be
treated as a residual anomaly -that unexplored domain of sex/gender rela-
tions that holds unquestioned assumptions and unexplored contradictions
about patriarchal power. Vietnamese 'family happiness' is a storehouse of
unexplored meanings, a minefield of gender relations and patriarchal
power. It is a source of profound anxiety as development and industrializa-
tion are dramatically changing family structure, functions and relations.
At the same time, U.S. researchers and feminists bring to our discus-
sions a history of theory that originated in a critique of the family as the
core unit of patriarchal power which has led to Western feminism expos-
ing privatized oppression, male power in the family, in sexuality.
Autonomous feminism takes women as a class that is produced by gender
relations of power whereby men dominate women in private and in public,
intimate as well as economic, reproductive and sexual as well as material
and political conditions. An objective, materialist analysis of patriarchy
leads to revolutionary feminist politics. However, autonomous feminism,
for the most part, has been subjected to a powerful backlash in the U.S.,
which in turn has confined and conformed its potentially revolutionary
agenda. An intensely sharpened theoretical critique of patriarchy has made
possible major advances, but the backlash, and apolitical criticism within
the movement, has increasingly turned the movement inward.
Vietnamese women's advocates are not the first and, it is safe to say,
will not be the last, to tackle the sometimes emotionally and politically
excruciating relationship between family unity and women's liberation,
patriarchy and government policy. These dynamics undergird the cross-
cultural dialogue between Vietnamese and U.S. women's studies
researchers that brought this book about.
Ideal or ideology, cultural tradition or power relations - these are
dynamic forces reflected in Vietnamese women's studies research,
engaged as it is in women's struggle for equality, in their challenge to
family feudalism in Vietnam today. Like all developing liberation strug-
14 Introduction
gles, women's issues in Vietnam are unevenly addressed - activists are
advancing on some issues and, on others, are mired in anomalies yet to be
confronted. Feminist theory and analysis engaged in liberation struggle is
always coming to know deeper conditions and changing dimensions of
women's subordination.

DIFFERENCE IN DIALOGUE, COMMONALITY IN STRUGGLE

When we met with Vietnamese women's studies researchers, they were

eagerly developing gender analysis, an approach to studying the family
and women which had not been available to them before. That work had
been developing in conjunction with some few Americans and Europeans
who made early connections with women in Vietnam. In the mid 1980s
there were some international NGO-initiated seminars and programmes,
early efforts that made links with women in Vietnam. Early in the 1980s
work on women in Vietnam came from Kristin Pelzer and Jayne Warner
in the U.S. By the early 1990s a seminar on gender theory was supported
by the Swedish International Development Authority, and a conference on
women in the shifting South-East Asian economy was supported by the
Canadian International Development Agency, and an Asian seminar was
held in Hanoi with the Women's Programme of the Asian and Pacific
Development Centre. Reflecting an expansion of the social sciences in
Vietnam, these Hanoi-based meetings and others including international
United Nations agencies and the World Health Organization examined
particularly the economic and health conditions of women in Vietnam.
This book reflects a new dialogue between Western feminists and
women's struggle in Vietnam - each of us coming to it from different
patriarchal contexts, each of us with different experiences of women's
struggle, each informed with different senses of possibility in claiming
women's self-determination. The history of women's movements in
Vietnam and the relative isolation of Vietnam until the last few years has
not made it possible for women in Vietnam to develop autonomous
women's movements that have characterized an important element of fem-
inist change in many other countries. It is in this context, separated from
male controlled politics and praxis, that women's movements establish
their own self-definition and self-determination. From the insular position
of a developing socialist state, in isolation from the international economy,
but with new women's studies and women's research programmes and a
formidable Women's Union with a membership of 11 million that
stretches from the Politburo to most hamlets where it directly serves
 Kathleen Barry 15
women through needed health and training programmes, Vietnamese
women have launched new consciousness, action and research.
After the 1993 seminar, 'Family and the Conditions of Women in
Society', from our engagement with women's issues in Vietnam, we
rewrote our papers for this book. In addition, other new research was
brought together: a paper from Mary Ann Tetreault that addresses the
issues of women and revolution, and new Vietnamese research papers that
were prepared for the fifth anniversary in 1993 of the Center of Women's
Research, Directed by Professor Le Thi in Hanoi. This resulting book
spans the breadth of research conducted in both the north and south, geo-
graphically distinct, somewhat culturally diverse regions of re-unified
Vietnam, that represent different stages in the development of women's
studies. This book reflects that diversity. Neither the country nor the
people of Vietnam, neither women's studies researchers in the north nor in
the south can be homogenized, nor do the Vietnamese think of their
culture as a monolithic, uncomplicated entity.
All the more reason that our U.S. delegation and chapters match the het-
erogeneity of the Vietnamese with diverse perspectives and interdiscipli-
nary approaches. As contributors, we are different by gender, race and
culture. Further, this work is an interdisciplinary approach to Vietnam's
Women in Transition that covers the range of our disciplines from sociol-
ogy, to political science, history, anthropology, psychology. Our group, as
did the Vietnamese delegates, spans a couple of generations and therefore
did not come to this exchange with a single set of experiences or singular
world view in mind. In the Vietnam of 1993 the oldest generation were
adults during the time of the struggle for national liberation that by 1945
brought to an end a century of French colonization. With their elders,
many who had fought against the French, today's middle-aged generation
(approximately 35 to 55) came to adulthood during the U.S. war in
Vietnam. But, the younger generation, those in early adulthood in the
Vietnam of 1993, have grown up in the Socialist Republic and know that
war and earlier colonization as history.
This work presents Vietnamese research in its own style and tone, and
we anticipate the need for readers to interpret texts as they read them. This
book is meant to be a cross-cultural exchange and in crossing cultures,
meaning does not necessarily come easily. It is lost when it is homoge-
nized into that of the dominant culture. In the process of editing translated
Vietnamese texts, we have carefully guarded language and style where it
particularly reflects and reveals meaning that is different from our own.
There is an urgency that propels research on women in Vietnam which is
framed by its economic condition and fuelled by the weight of responsibil-
16 Introduction
ity researchers carry to return the fruits of their labours to the betterment of
the country. Vietnamese scholarship, and in particular the study of women
and the family in Vietnam, is focused on the critical (survival) need to
produce change that will alleviate suffering and improve society. Research
is laid out, field studies are conducted and the facts of their findings are pre-
sented, frequently in the format in which agency reports are written, with
research findings leading directly to policy recommendations. Presented in
the form of reports, often the style does not match the Western approaches
to research or theoretical articles. In recommendations for action and
policy, there is a consistent assumption of the primacy of the collective
good over individual choice. In a society that is consciously trying to maxi-
mize democratic approaches to individual relations, there is an emphasis on
responsibility to the country, and the community.
And that is why Vietnamese researchers do not eschew moral language,
nor are they confined by the need of many Westerners to avoid the
appearance of moral judgement or inference. That approach of liberal
individualistic scholarship in the West to avoid or suppress the ethical and
moral implications for society of the problems they are studying is not a
concern of Vietnamese researchers. Right and wrong, just and unjust are
framed in terms of both socialist values and vestiges of traditional moral-
ity. This tends to allow for moralisms (such as the use of the word 'licen-
tiousness' in reference to unacceptable sexual conduct, i.e. sexual conduct
outside of marriage). Language, absent from the liberal pretence of moral
neutrality, may seem not only inappropriate but particularly confining to
Western readers. Single women are considered 'lonely women' because
they are seen as not being able to achieve harmonious conditions of
'family happiness' but also because, objectively, in this stage of develop-
ment of a primarily rural and therefore highly traditional society, there
is no social space for single women, making them indeed lonely.
Homosexuality is not mentioned. It is not that it does not exist, nor is it
that the Vietnamese are unenlightened. Rather, in their present stage of
economic development, the patriarchal (feudal) family continues to define
all social relationships and any relationships outside that context have not
yet been considered an object of inquiry or a site for struggle. To chal-
lenge any condition of domination, women must first find ways to bring it
into the public domain. That begins to occur with industrialization.
The style of presentation of U.S. researchers is different. Typically adopt-
ing a more inclusive framework, they draw on diverse literature that leads to
a discrete area of inquiry. Many Western researchers are sceptical of policy
that is derived directly from research, as it is considered that they may be
short-sighted because of what they overlook in the limited framework of
 Kathleen Barry 17
their studies. However, Western readers are cautioned then not to assume
naivety where there is difference, not to look for analysis of issues that are
not configured in Vietnam ofthe 1990s as they are in the U.S. and Europe at
this time. To do so is to miss the dynamics of change, the experience of
transition - an all too often unrecorded experience of women.
As we found in our discussions and exchange, differences between
Western and Vietnamese approaches to research, writing and policy are
not so vast when they are brought together in the context of feminist
research and the global women's movement. Feminism is about change. It
confronts male domination and challenges patriarchal oppression.

The realities of different voices that speak from common experiences of

oppression, that listen and react beyond the barriers of embargoes, ideolo-
gies, and borders, gave shape to this book and led to its organization:
Vietnamese research reports which provide the newest, most up-to-date
research, insights and knowledge of the conditions of life in Vietnam are
divided into the emerging issues before women in Vietnam: moderniza-
tion, urbanization, agriculture and rural labouring, and violence against
women. After a historical overview, each section begins with Vietnamese
research and concludes with U.S. chapters that provide theoretical models
and insights from the range of feminist and women's studies research
across the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, economics, political
science and history. The volume concludes by imagining a post-war con-
dition constructed for women. This book represents a feminist commit-
ment to dialogue - to growing together from places where we have been
kept apart - a dialogue that may well be considered a real dialectic of
change.

Pennsylvania State University KATHLEEN BARRY

January 1995

Notes

I. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Hanoi, Foreign Languages Publishing

House, 1990, pp. 88-89.
2. Ibid., pp. 90-91.
3. Ibid., pp. 92-92.
4. Premier Vo Van Kiet, from Report at the second Session of the 9th National
Assembly, Vietnam Business, January 1-15,1993, p. 14.
5. Per Ronnas, Orjan Sjoberg, Doi Moi, Economic Reform and Development
Policies in Vietnam, Sweden: SIDA, 1990, p. 11.
18 Introduction
6. Le Thi, 'Development of Household Economy in Vietnamese Rural Areas:
Role and Living Conditions of Female Working People', unpublished paper,
1992, p. 2.
7. Le Thi, 'The Vietnamese Women at Present: Their Progress and Problems.',
Vietnam Social Science, 1987, p. 63.
8. Le Thi, 1992.
9. Professor Mac Duong, Director of Institute of Social Sciences, Ho Chi Minh
City, inaugural speech, Seminar, January, 1993.
10. Letter, Kathleen Barry to Senator Kerry, U.S. Congress, January, 1993.
II. Philip Jameison, Understanding Vietnam, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993.
12. Kathleen Barry, Prostitution of Sexuality, New York University Press, 1995.
13. Le Thi, 'Gender Issues and Current Process of Renovation and
Development in Vietnam', unpublished paper, 1992, p. 11.
14. Ibid., p. 12.
15. Ibid., p. 23.
16. Ibid., p. 26.
17. Tran Thi Van Anh, 'The Direct Loan of Capital from the Bank to Develop
Production and Gender Equality', Vietnam Social Sciences, 4/1992,
pp. 28-29.
18. Bui Thi Kim Quy, 'Export of Female Laborers: Problems to be Treated',
Vietnam Social Science, 1992, p. 41.
19. David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, Berkeley: UC
Berkeley Press 1981, p. 191.
20. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origin of the Vietnamese Revolution,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1992.
21. Jameison, p. 23.
22. Jameison, p. 22.
23. Marr, p. 199.
24. Marr, p. 222.
25. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, p. 95.
26. Marr, p. 227.
27. The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, Berkeley:
UC Berkeley Press, 1993, p. 233.
28. Kathleen Barry, Susan B. Anthony: Biography of a Singular Feminist, New
York: New York University Press, 1988.
29. Philip Jameison, Understanding Vietnam, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993, p. II.
30. Le Thi, 'The Vietnamese Women at Present, Their Progress and Problems',
Vietnam Social Sciences, 3-4, 1987, p. 65.
31. Christine Delphy, 'The Main Enemy', Close To Home, Amherst, University
of Massachusetts Press, 1984.
32. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the
Nostalgia Trap, New York: Basic Books, 1993.
Part I
Status of Women: In
History and Revolution
1 Vietnamese Women in a
Confucian Setting: The
Causes of the Initial Decline
in the Status of East Asian
Women
Mariam Darce Frenier and
Kimberly Mancini

INTRODUCTION

When a great doctrine [Confucianism], even if it be false, lasts for tens

and thousands of years it turns into reality itself. And people feel an
automatic revulsion when a woman not conforming to the exact
wording of the doctrine appears.
Fukuzaw Yukichi (1853-1901) 1

Using Western-language sources, this chapter will suggest questions to be

asked about the initial change in the status of Vietnamese women. This
subject is especially intriguing as that status has been and remains higher
than that of other East and South-East Asian women. Women's status is
best measured by comparing it with the status of the men in the women's
society, social class, race, and other appropriate groupings as wen as in
specific historic periods. Measures of status include examinations of
women's (and men's) occupations and incomes, participation in govern-
ment both formal and informal, position in law, participation in religion,
and position in the family. In addition, religious and social attitudes com-
paring and contrasting women and men affect status. Finally, status
remains difficult to measure, and examinations of women's roles may be
more effective: are women confined to domestic roles? which social and
political roles are they a11owed to fill?
In the United States little is known about the traditional status of
Vietnamese women. Our few studies tell us that in Vietnam, as in China,

21
22 Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting
Japan and Korea, prehistoric women held high status and lived in
matrilineal - some say matriarchal - families and societies. Since all evi-
dence indicates that the peoples of Vietnam were matrilineal - some still
are, for example, the Cham - it may prove helpful for scholars interested in
Vietnamese women to examine the matrilineal pre-histories of many
Western societies. Over time however, in all four societies women
came to have fewer rights than men and came to be seen as inferior
to them. Studies often claim that the major cause of the decline was
Confucianism2 which in Vietnam is always considered a religion.
The major Western students of early religious change and women are
Merlin Stone and Riane Eisler. Both point to religious shifts, principally in
the West although they take note of similar shifts elsewhere, from
Goddess worship to God worship. Stone dates the period of Goddess
worship in Europe from at least as early as 7000 B.C. and ending about
500 A.D. 3 Eisler explicitly connects the shift with the initial fall in
Western women's status which she finds occurring in the 5th century B.C.
in the Near East - the Sumerian area. During that time, pastoral nomads
who worshipped male gods of war and mountains - the most important
were the Aryans - invaded the Near East, bringing with them their patri-
lineal and stratified social system.
In all probability in Vietnam and Korea, as in China and Japan, god-
dominated religions were introduced to societies which originally wor-
shipped goddesses. The introductions involved cultural exchange in the
cases of China, Japan and southern Vietnam. But to northern Vietnam,
China - an advanced agricultural civilization - brought god-centered
religion through attempts at military and cultural domination.

WHAT OF EAST ASIA ?4

China

[A] 'large part of the evils from which Chinese women suffer' is due to
the 'erroneous and defective' theory of Confucianism.
Arthur H. Smith, 18995

Bond falls back on cliches about Confucianism (what would academics

and journalists do without this 'concept'?), and flimsy extrapolations
from 'traditional' Chinese culture to the present [sic].
Grant Evans reviewing Michael Harris Bond's
Beyond the Chinese Face: Insights from Psychology6
 Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini 23
Confucianism which is frequently considered the root of Vietnamese as well
as Chinese beliefs that men are superior and women inferior, originated in
China. Among the Chinese elite, Confucianism became the dominant politi-
cal, social, and economic philosophy by the second century B.C .. By the 19th
century A.D., some non-elite Chinese came to consider it one of their reli-
gions. It is frequently conflated or confused with Chinese ancestor worship,
and western scholars disagree as to whether the philosophy of Confucianism
or the religion of ancestor worship became the more important in China.
All studies of Chinese women agree that their status fell. How was that
fall intertwined with Confucianism? What can scholarship about Chinese
women tell us about similar declines in Vietnam and elsewhere?
Esther S. Lee Yao discovered that 'Archaeological evidence and ancient
writings suggest that prior to the Zhou Dynasty [1100-220 B.C.], a matri-
lineal society existed [in China].' 7 According to Hill Gates, in ancient
China - as shown by oracle bone inscriptions - during the Shang Dynasty
(c. 1526-1126 B.C.), the status of sons may have been determined in large
part by the ranking of the kin units of their mothers. Yao also pointed out
that according to the Spring and Autumn Annals, ancient Chinese recog-
nized only their mothers and not their fathers; and that archaeology indi-
cates that during the Shang Dynasty people showed respect for their dead
mothers with a special ceremony. Brotherhood was based on the mother's
surname as late as the Spring and Autumn period (722-481 B.C.). 8 And
the Chinese ideograph for surname combines two radicals: 'woman' and
'birth'; furthermore, the oldest Chinese clan names contain the woman
radical: examples are Chiang, Yo. 9
As to the causes of status decline, during the Shang Dynasty China
experienced its neolithic revolution, changing from a hunting-gathering to
an agrarian society . 10 This shift included a change from cattle breeding as
well as game hunting to agriculture, which was 'later taken over by men.
Men thus became the heads of the families, and women became their
dependents.' 11 This change seems associated with the development of a
patrilocal, patrilineal, patriarchal, and patronymic family. Esther Yao
attributes status decline to a 'transition from matriarchy to patriarchy'
during Zhou; this resulted from changed economic conditions, changed
social structure, and 'the establishment of bureaucratic absolutism' .12
Confucianism endorsed these developments, and by the 2nd century
B.C. it had become the state ideology. In addition, during the first century
B.C., the Confucian Classic of Filial Piety, in order to foster loyalty to the
state, equated the head of the family with the head of the state. 13
Chinese women experienced further status decline during the Song
Dynasty (960-1279 A.D.); the basic reasons were a movement toward
24 Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting
private property and the development of a putting-out, pre-capitalist
economic system. These economic changes, which meant a shift from a
clan-based to a pre-capitalistic class-based status, were summarized in
Zhu Xi's (1130-1200 A.D.) Neo-Confucianism.
The seven reasons for which a Chinese husband could divorce his
wife became law during the earlier Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), later
endorsed by Neo-Confucianism. (The reasons were: the wife's adultery,
her jealousy, her contraction of a loathsome disease, her garrulity, her dis-
obedience to her husband's parents, her failure to bear children, or theft
committed by her.) Eventually, these reasons for divorce were adopted by
both Korea and Vietnam.
Moving to explicitly religious change, during the first millennium B.C.
the status of Chinese women fell as the yin-yang cosmological foundations
of Chinese thought were formulated. Yin-yang was based on concepts of the
firm nature of heaven (yang) and the yielding nature of earth (yin). Daoism,
an indigenous philosophy which became a religion, incorporated the con-
cepts of yin and yang, which it deemed to be interacting and complimentary.
However, in Confucianism yin and yang came to be seen as hierarchical. 'In
time, "yin" elements came to stand for all that was negative and inferior in
the universe.' 14 This revised belief became the established ideology of China
by the 2nd century B.C., and the Chinese classics of that time adhered to this
idea. The Book of Changes states that the correct places for men and women
are like the relative position of Heaven to Earth: 'A husband, he is Heaven';
'The virtue of the Yang is firmness, the virtue of the Yin - flexibility.' 15 Yin
and yang in Confucianism assigned gender roles and 'froze them in a rigid
hierarchy of submission and dominance for nearly 2000 years' .16 Elite
Vietnamese adapted the yin/yang cosmology by the lOth century A.D.
Kenneth Scott Latourette stressed the blur between Confucianism and
religious ancestor worship. He pointed out that Chinese ancestor worship
required sons, and Confucianism emphasized ancestral rites. 17 Daughters
could not offer ancestral sacrifice, glorify the family name through official
appointment, nor perpetuate the family name. 18 However, although ances-
tor veneration is often conflated with Confucianism in studies of
Vietnamese culture, Vietnamese daughters - in some instances - could
participate in ancestral sacrifice.
Chinese religion at the domestic level is dominated by the Stove God.
The Stove God, and his wife, are hearth deities who oversee each house-
hold. Although ancestor worship is dominated by men, in modern Taiwan
the Stove God religion is dominated by women, 19 and it offered women
the possibility of reincarnation as males. 20 Since the Vietnamese also ven-
 Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini 25
erated the Stove God, it is important to discover whether women or men
were primary in this religion.
What might these studies of China tell us about Vietnamese and other
women? Economic and social changes appear to have been fundamental to
the changes in Chinese women's status. The shift from a hunter-gatherer
to an agricultural society seems similar in effect to that experienced in
areas of the West, as does the societal shift from a matrilineal to a patrilin-
eal family. These events seem to have also occurred among the dominant
ethnic group in Vietnam. Finally, clans were replaced by stratified classes
in China, as happened in the West and Vietnam. As Judaism and later
Christianity systematized and sanctioned patriarchal concepts in the west,
Confucianism and Nco-Confucianism performed these functions in China
and Vietnam.
The notable differences between China and the West appear to be the
content of their dominant ideological systems and different geo-political
aspects of the histories of the two areas. These include a politically unified
Chinese empire versus the geographically and politically disunited small
Western kingdoms, the relative technological and cultural backwardness
of Europe compared to China until the 17th century, and the later occur-
rences of feudalism and absolutism in Europe. The effect of pre-capitalism
on Chinese women was at least superficially comparable to that on
Western women.
Focusing on Vietnamese women, we are prompted to ask: in what ways
were the experiences of women in Vietnam like and unlike the experi-
ences of Chinese women? does the lesser impact of Confucianism on
Vietnam help to account for women's higher status there? are there some
aspects of Vietnamese culture and history peculiar to Vietnam which
account for differences from China in this matter?
The answers to the last two questions are 'yes' and 'yes'. As Con-
fucianism had less effect on southern than on northern China, it had even
less effect in northern Vietnam and least of all in southern Vietnam. For
example, moving from north to south in Vietnam, 19th-century families
were more likely to be nuclear in the south and extended in the north,
women were more likely to have a say in their own marriages in the south,
and women were even more active in marketing goods in the south than in
the north. These differences within Vietnam underscore the differences
between the whole of Vietnam and China. Vietnam's history of guerrilla
warfare against China, its fierce nationalism, and its connections with the
rest of South-East Asia make it distinct from China and help account for
the higher status of Vietnamese women.
26 Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting
Japan

Woman is originally an agent of the six devils and has been born as
woman to prevent man from following the way of Buddha.
Japanese Buddhist sermon, 15th century. 21

[T]he acceptance of the Confucian social philosophy and the ascend-

ancy of the samurai class resulted in a steady decline in the social stand-
ing of women.
Mikiso Hane22

As with the study of China, students of Japanese history all agree that the
status of Japanese women fell from an earlier height. Most tellingly, the
earliest history of Japan indicates that the prehistoric Japanese family
tended to be 'matriarchal' and matrilocal. The History of Wei, written in
3rd-century A.D. China, also states that Japan of the 2nd century was
ruled over by Pimiku (or Himeko ), shaman queens of small geographic
areas. 23 Evidence of matrilinearity also appears in the Nihongi (720 A.D.),
one of the two earliest Japanese sources of Japanese history. 24
In Japan the importation of Chinese writing, the copying of Chinese gov-
ernmental forms and codes, and the adoption of Chinese forms of Buddhism
began during the fifth and sixth centuries. The Taiho Code of 702, based on
Confucianism, 'abolished the matriarchal system inherent in Japan's clan
organization' 25 and established the Confucian seven reasons for divorce.
However, the Code was incompletely accepted, 26 and although the earlier
Taika reforms (645-650 A.D.) had adopted the patriarchal concepts of China,

Family life still centered around the mother [during He ian 794-1185
A.D.]. In most instances husband and wife lived apart, and the latter
kept and raised the children, but the practice of the father retaining the
children was becoming more prevalent in the late seventh century. 27

Mikiso Hane believes that during Heian women began to be regarded as

inferior. 28
After the 8th century Japanese women were prevented, by custom, from
being imperial rulers,29 but not until the lith century did women marry into
their husbands' homes and families.3° However, Japanese women experi-
enced a status rise during the 1086-1185 A.D. erosion of central power
and civil war. 'In this less structured society the freedom and strength of
women grew, and the Kamakura period became the high point in the status
of Japanese women.' 31 As Japanese military leaders reunified the country,
 Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini 27
the Samurai warriors rose to become the dominant caste in Japan. Over
time, women's participation in combat declined. (As late as Kamakura,
1185-1222, some women led warriors into battle.) However, the subse-
quent decline in the status of women, Joyce Lebra believes, was due to the
loss of women's property rights among Samurai families and their shift to
patrilocality. 32
By the 17th century the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600--1848 A.D.) froze
Japan's patrilineal social order; Samurai women were deprived of property
rights, marriages were arranged, and only husbands could divorce. 33
Nevertheless, class differences remained; even during the Tokugawa,
primogeniture was not the norm among townspeople, and daughters
could inherit. 34
Emphasizing thought systems, Joyce Lebra finds that the devolution of
women's status was a response to the influences of 'Buddhism,
Confucianism, and the Samurai ethic' .35 · There is disagreement among his-
torians regarding the impact of Buddhism on the decline in women's
status. Dorothy Robins-Mowry believes that Buddhism 'was fundamen-
tal' to the decline in the status of Japanese women. 36 Both Confucianism
and Buddhism carried 'seeds of male dominance and a class-structured
society'; however, 'Buddhism had excluded women from the hope of
achieving nirvana. It considered them instruments of defilement.' 37 Lebra
points out that 'The form of Buddhism which reached Japan through
China contained antifeminine elements not common to Buddhism in
general.' And it taught that 'woman's nature was inherently evil'. 38
Therefore, a woman could obtain salvation only by being reborn as a
man. 39
Interestingly, early sculptures excavated in Japan show female Shinto
divinities exposing their genitals and this image was later transposed to
Kannon, the Japanese version of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (who is
female in Japan, China, Korea and Vietnam and called Guan-yin in China,
Kwan Urn in Korea, and Quan-am in Vietnam). Ian Buruma said, "'Going
to see Kannon" is still a popular slang expression for visiting a striptease
parlour.' He found that Buddhism in Japan strengthened fear of women
and the vagina. 40 Another way to look at this, however, is that the positive
sexuality of the Shinto female deity was retained into Japanese views of
Kannon. The broad appeal of Buddhism in Japan includes 'doctrines [ ... ]
modified [to] permit[ ... ] women to seek Buddhahood.' 41
To combat Christianity and foreign influence, Tokugawa Iemetsu
(1625-50 A.D.) decreed that every household had to register with a
Buddhist temple. This registration meant that fathers determined whose
names to register and who was eligible for family rights. Further, registra-
28 Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting
tion often worked to the detriment of brides, who weren't registered until
the birth of their first baby boy. 42
How can this help our understanding of the initial decline in the status
of Vietnamese and other women? The fall in Japanese women's status
occurred later than the fall in Chinese women's status. (The timing of the
initial fall in the status of Vietnamese women is more elusive than either at
present.) Since some would argue that the status of Japanese women fell
below that of Chinese women by the 19th century 43 due to Japan's adop-
tion of primogeniture, the time and the degree of status fall seem unre-
lated. Furthermore, Japan - more clearly than China- probably illustrates
an example of a society in which women's status fell, rose, then fell again.
(The West gives us another example of such aU-shaped shift- a rise in
ancient Rome then a fall to 19th-century Western Europe and a rise to late
20th-century Western Europe.) As in China, the implementation of the
centralized state and of a dominant ideology, in Japan Buddhism then
Neo-Confucianism are associated with decline in women's status in Japan.
In general, the status of Japanese women was affected primarily by social
change- in particular the abandonment of equal inheritance- and by mili-
tary change, the rise of a warrior group.

Korea

The husband must manifest dignity and the wife docility ere the house
will be well governed.
Youth's Primer, Korea, 19th century 44

'It is generally believed that matriarchy was the rule in early Korea and
Japan - in contrast to some parts of China.' By matriarchy, Roh Chang
Shub seems to have meant that families were matrilocal and matrilineal in
early Korea. This family system lasted 'especially among King families'
until c.700 A.D. 45
Probably most differently from Vietnam, Korea wholeheartedly adopted
Neo-Confucianism. According to Shima Matsuhiko, Korean society was
'one of the most rigidly patrilineal descent systems known to ethnogra-
phy' .46· Although Korea was influenced by Chinese kinship ideology and
especially by the arrival and spread of Neo-Confucianism, Neo-
Confucianism was introduced in Korea during the late 13th century, that is
during the Koryo Dynasty (918-1392 A.D.). 47 The speculation of John K.
Fairbank and others may be useful in explaining Shima's allegation.
Because of the small size of Korea, it 'may have become more uniformly
and fully permeated by Confucian ideas than China was itself'. 48 More
 Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini 29
importantly, Confucianism was increasingly successful as a 'political
pattern' for Korea which completely adopted the Chinese examination
system as its own. 49
As Nco-Confucian national examinations and official assignments
became the new index of social status, Korea rejected economic wealth as
an index of such status. 5° 'The wholehearted adoption of the examination
system made Yi dynasty Korea [1291-1910 A.D.] much more fully sini-
cized than the earlier Korean state had been.' Nevertheless, Korea retained
clear hereditary class divisions - as did Japan - after its adaptation of
Chinese class forms. 5 1
The Yi Dynasty was the period during which Korean women's status
initially declined. Writing in 1896, George Heber Jones, writing in a
Christian missionary publication, noted that Korea 'had no law of seclu-
sion', but during the Koryo Dynasty (918-1392 A.D.), women 'became the
special objects of violence. Buddhist priests were guilty of widespread
debauchery of homes [ ... ] the most popular sport of court and provincial
noble was a raid upon a home known to contain a beautiful woman'. 52
While his observations may be biased, the Yi Dynasty may well have used
previous occasions of violence against Korean women to establish seclu-
sion -as seems to have happened in Ancient Athens but not in Vietnam.
During early Yi, daughters could inherit equally with sons, ancestor rites
were performed by daughters as well as sons, and women could own, control
and receive property.53 But by the 17th century exclusively patrilineal descent
was the rule, 54 and furthermore, after the 17th century Koreans strictly
adhered to male primogeniture. 55 By the end of the Yi Dynasty, Korean fam-
ilies were patrilineal, widow remarriage was discouraged - a basic tenet of
Nco-Confucianism, and only male lines were considered to be important.56
The predominant Korean thought systems were 'patrilineality' (ancestor
worship), Confucianism and shamanism. 57 Ancestor worship in Korea was
at least as important as was its counterpart in China. 58 However and again,
ancestor veneration in China as well as in Korea and Vietnam goes largely
underexamined as a source of changes in women's status.
The effects of Confucianism, in contrast, are underscored. In Korea
Nco-Confucianism -perhaps even more than in China- was used to legit-
imize the segregation of the sexes after the age of 7. 59 (The Heian
Japanese aristocracy practiced sex segregation based on Shinto beliefs
about impurity.) Segregation in the Korean case involved upper-class
women and girls remaining indoors after the age of lO and covering the
head and face with a 'sleeved apron', the chang-ot. As in China and Japan,
a respectable Korean woman was only to be seen by specified males in her
and her husband's families. 60
30 Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting
However, in Korea unlike in China or Japan as far as we can discover,
sex segregation meant the development not only of courtesans, dancing
girls, shamans and nuns as women operating outside accepted gender roles
but also of state-supported women physicians. 61 Considered 'public
slaves', these doctors were intensively trained, credentialed several
hundred at a time, and performed acupuncture under a system established
by the government in 1409.62 In addition, some palace women held gov-
ernment service positions up to the upper 5th ranks and received annual
emoluments equivalent to men's. 63
Women shamans have been important in China and Vietnam, and espe-
cially in Japan, as well as in Korea. However state-supported women
physicians seem - as far as East Asia is concerned - unique to Korea.
They were established because it was forbidden that women be examined
by male doctors. 64 In this, Korea was similar to some Islamic cultures
which also established women doctors to serve women patients - modern
Egypt for example.
While Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean societies differed in
their application of Confucianism and Nco-Confucianism as well as in
their experiences of economic and social change, all implemented some
form of respect toward those knowledgeable in the Chinese classics. In
Korea- as well as in Vietnam- the Chinese examination system was fully
adopted. And while in both Korea and Vietnam a few women were
allowed to become governmental civil servants, the examination system in
Vietnam evidently came to exclude women (it always excluded women in
China).
By the 19th century, in England for example, formal higher education
was the exclusive prerogative of men. Therefore as medicine and law were
professionalized, that is came to require formal education, women were
excluded from these professions. Has the impact of the professionalization
of governmental service in Vietnam, China and Korea - and to a lesser
extent in Japan -been neglected as a reason for the decline in the status of
women in these societies?

WHAT OF VIETNAM?

The adoption of Confucian ideals came to restrict the hitherto compara-

tively free life of women, first of the upper classes, and progressively of
society in general, in those countries which adopted Chinese culture -
Korea, Japan, and to a lesser extent, Vietnam.
Whyte and Whyte 65
 Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini 31
Recently the spirit of thinking highly of men and slighting women, a
product of Confucianism, seemed to be restored in some places [in
Vietnam].
Le Thi Quy66

Archaeology indicates Vietnam's stone age began as early as 500,000 B.C.;

it was succeeded by a bronze age beginning about 5000 B.C. It appears
then that before Chinese influence, Vietnamese society was matrilineal
and matrilocal. 67
According to Mai Thi Tu and Le Thi Nham Tuyet, 'the coming of patri-
archy to Viet Nam coincides with the late neolithic' (c.2000 B.C.), and
class divisions appeared during the era of the Hung kings, ending
c.300 B.C. However, marriages remained free; and children bore neither
their fathers' nor mothers' family names - they had their own names.
Furthermore, female deities and heroines still are venerated today. (While
female deities are venerated in China and Japan, the most respected female
human heroines are Pan Chao, a Chinese historian, and Murasaki Shikibu,
Japan's most famous novelist. In Vietnam, the most venerated humans are
the military Trung Sisters; and Ho Xuan Huong, a woman poet of the 18th
century, is more famous in Vietnam than any human heroine in China.)
Tellingly, 'the four oldest Vietnamese temples, dating from the lst century
A.D., are dedicated to the cults of four women: Lady Zau, Lady Dau, Lady
Gian and Lady Tuong•.68
First Chinese contact came when a southern Chinese warlord, Trieu Da,
conquered part of northern Vietnam in 298 B.C. In 111 B.C., the Chinese
completely annexed the Nam Viet (the southern Viets) and began 1000
years of colonization of Vietnam. Throughout that period, the Vietnamese
rebelled against their Chinese overlords.
The first successful rebellion occurred in 39 or 40 A.D. Infuriated after
a Chinese governor executed her husband, Trung Trac led an insurrection.
Victorious, Trac was proclaimed ruler and renamed Trung Vuong
(She-king Trung). When China defeated Trung and her sister Trung Nhi
three years later, the Trung sisters- following Vietnamese practice- com-
mitted suicide. The Vietnamese finally expelled the Chinese in 939 A.D.
While Vietnam celebrated the Trung sisters and many other Vietnamese
heroines, according to tradition China imposed patriarchal institutions and
religions upon Vietnamese culture. Buddhism may first have arrived as
early as the 3rd century B.C., brought by two Indian monks: Sona and
Uttara. 69 Chinese Mahayana Buddhism came to Vietnam by the 2nd
century A.D., and Buddhism briefly became the state religion after China
was expelled in 939. Furthermore, Vietnam adopted the Chinese civil
32 Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting
service system, based on Nco-Confucianism. However, differently from
Chinese practice, a mandarinate for Vietnamese women was created in the
13th century. Women like professors Ngo Chi Lan and Doan Thi Diem
created schools, and many of their students were examination winners and
became high mandarins to the imperial court. 70
More importantly, and again unlike many Chinese women, Vietnamese
women continued to work in production as well as in the household - this
was also true of most Japanese women. Certain professions were histori-
cally reserved for Vietnamese women: for example, dance and mid-
wifery. Peasant women customarily cultivated rice and vegetables and
spun and dyed cloth. Women ran sampans, gathered wood in forests, and-
most conspicuously- managed small businesses. 71
Nevertheless by 939, Vietnamese custom considered girls both inferior
from birth and more dominated by their passions than men. Furthermore,
most Vietnamese now lived in patrilineal families: 72

The role of women in traditional Vietnamese society was determined by

a fascinatingly complex mixture of Confucian ethics, indigenous
customs bearing traces of matriarchy, and contradictory legal codes,
further complicated by the varying degrees to which different social
classes were penetrated by each of these elements. 73

In law and custom, Vietnamese women retained high status. Daughters

inherited equally in the 17th and 18th centuries, and children could set up
households separate from their parents. 74 Furthermore, 'the husband had
no rights of inheritance if his wife died without issue'. 75 As Yu Insun
remarked: 'Where the Chinese family is marked by the authority of the
father over all the other family members, the Vietnamese family is charac-
terized by the wife being virtually equal to her husband and by the individ-
ualism of the family members.' 76
To date there has been little speculation about the causes of the initial
decline in the status of Vietnamese women. It is acknowledged that:
'According to Confucian philosophy, Vietnamese women are bound by
the duties of conjugal fidelity and obedience to their fathers and hus-
bands.'77 Yet, Confucianism is one of Vietnam's 'three religions'; the
others are Buddhism and Daoism.
Ta Van Tai has contrasted the position of Vietnamese women under the
Code of the Le Dynasty (1428-1788 A.D.) which reflected Viet-
namese customs, with that under the code of the Nguyen Dynasty
(1802-1945 A.D.) which reflected the Chinese code of the Qing Dynasty
(1644-191 I A.D.). The Le Code sanctioned beating wives, if no injury
was inflicted. 78 However, it codified important women's rights: the sec-
 Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini 33
ondary wife could never be promoted to the status of principal wife -
which contrasted with Chinese codes as well as the Nguyen Code79 - and
protected the rights of the primary wife; men could be put to death for for-
nication (women could only be exiled 80); neglect, sexual or otherwise, was
grounds for a wife to divorce her husband; daughters could inherit prop-
erty; and they could even inherit huong-hoa (property set aside for ances-
tral veneration) if no male heir Iived. 81 David W. Haines studying the Le
Code came to the conclusion that 'the important questions in assessing
Vietnamese society may lie not in discussions of whether or not
Vietnamese society is or is not patrilineal, or is or is not equalitarian, but
rather in how enduring and sometimes competing principles of lineality,
seniority, and equality together form the underlying dynamic of
Vietnamese kinship' .82· In the case of the property and child custody rights
of widows, seniority seems to have taken precedence over Jineality. 83
Even under the 19th-century Nguyen Code which incorporated more
Confucianism than previous dynastic codified Jaw, earlier Vietnamese
custom prevailed, especially the right of women to inherit as both daugh-
ters and wives. 84 Ever since the Le Dynasty, established 1428, 'the
Vietnamese folk cultures' dedication to women's equal rights has pre-
vailed' .85 · And while Vietnamese adopted the seven reasons for divorce,
Alexander B. Woodside stated: 'it would be dangerous to assume that the
"seven grounds for expulsion" ever enjoyed a consistent sovereignty in
Vietnamese life. [ ... ] Women, on the whole, held greater informal rights
in Vietnamese society than they did in China. ' 86
'Vietnamese toleration, even support of female property rights of inher-
itance, was unique in the history of East Asian classical civilizations.'
Concerning that uniqueness, he pointed to explanations: Vietnam's 'matri-
archal' past, contact with the 'matriarchal' Chams, and women's part in
agriculture and handicrafts during the war with China 1406-27_87 Given
the studies of Yu Insun, David W. Haines, and Woodside himself, these
reasons need reconsideration.
Broadly, Vietnamese custom, especially in regards to women's right to
inherit, survived the imposition of law based on Chinese legal codes. In the
studies used here, we have some historical data which indicates that the
status of women in Vietnam remained higher than that of women in the other
three East Asian societies. What we need is more understanding as to why.

CONCLUSION

What we know from studies of the West and of the other East Asian soci-
eties indicates that in order to understand the initial decline in the status of
34 Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting
Vietnamese women, we need to look at economic and social change
driven by the adaptation of advanced agricultural technologies and by the
development of pre-capitalism. A look at the development of a stratified
class-based society from a kin based one is essential. In addition, the
development of ideas of parenting as primarily women's work, then of
combat and religious leadership as primarily men's work, and the placing
of these in hierarchical order, needs examination.
Since women's studies programmes exist both in Hanoi and in Ho Chi
Minh City, Vietnamese scholars are doing and will continue to do the
primary scholarship on Vietnamese women. At present (1995) the concerns
of Vietnamese women's studies scholars are of necessity centred on
20th-century history, sociology, anthropology, economics, and so forth.
That scholarship concentrates on the collection of data, and that collection
is so essential that analytical approaches are few. We hope that in the
future some of the work of these scholars can be framed in structural
analyses of Vietnamese women's status in the past and present.

Notes

I. Kiyooka Eiichi (trans. and ed.), Fukuzawa Yukichi on Japanese Women:

Selected Works, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1988, p. 26.
2. Usually, this refers to Nco-Confucianism. Most recently and proposed as
useful for modern times, Nco-Confucian virtues and values are summarized
by Tu Wei-ruing as: loyalty to state, filial piety, purity of mind, selflessness,
dedication, sacrifice (p. 750), brotherly affection, conjugal harmony, trust in
friends, modesty, benevolence, learning (p. 756), moral rectitude (p. 757),
political unity, and social harmony (p. 769). 'The Search for Roots In
Industrial East Asia: The Case of the Confucian Revival', Martin E. Marty
and R. Scott Appleby (ed.), Fundamentalisms Observed, Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 740-81.
3. Merlin Stone, When God was a Woman, New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976, p. xii.
4. The English version of this paper uses the pinyin transliteration system for
Chinese language terms, except where long use dictates otherwise, as in
Confucius. We also use traditional name order, surname first, for all four
East Asian naming systems.
5. Arthur H. Smith, Village Life in China, Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, orig. 1899, 1970, p. 232.
6. Grant Evans, 'Shrinking the Chinese Mind', Far Eastern Economic Review,
April 9, 1992, p. 31.
7. Esther S. Lee Yao, Chinese Women Past and Present, Mesquite, Texas: Ide
House, 1983, p. 6; also seeS. Y. Teng, 'The Role of the Family in the
 Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini 35
Chinese Legal System', Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 11-12, 1977,
p. 120-55, p. 123n.
8. Yao, pp. 13-16.
9. Yao and Hill Gates, 'The Commoditization of Chinese Women', Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 14, No. 41, 1989,
pp. 799-832. See for a critique of this position, J. Holmgren, 'Myth, Fantasy
or Scholarship: Images of the Status of Women in Traditional China', The
Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No.6, 1981, pp. 147-70.
I 0. S. Y, Teng. 'The Role of the Family in the Chinese Legal System', Journal
ofAsianStudies, Vol. 11-12, 1977,pp.120-55,p.123.
II. Wai-kin Che, The Modern Chinese Family, Palo Alto: R & E Research
Associates Inc, 1979, p. 24.
12. Yao, p. 37.
13. Yao, pp. 132-33.
14. Elizabeth Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul Ltd, 1978, p. 12.
15. Croll, p. 13.
16. Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, p. I.
17. Kenneth Scott Latourette, The Chinese: Their History and Culture, Vol. ii,
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934, p. 196.
18. Croll, p. 23.
19. Maurice Friedman, The Study of Chinese Society, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1979, p. xviii.
20. Friedman, p. xx.
21. Dorothy Robins-Mowry, The Hidden Sun: Women of Modern Japan,
Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press Inc., 1983, p. 23.
22. Mikiso Hane, Premodern Japan: A Historical Survey, Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press Inc., 1991, p. 2.
23. Mikiso Hane, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988, p. 4.
24. Joyce Lebra et al. 'Preface', Lebra (ed.), Women in Changing Japan,
Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press Inc., 1976, p. 4.
25. Lebra, p. 4
26. Lcbra, p. 5
27. Mikiso Hane, Japan: A Historical Survey, New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1972, p. 50.
28. Hane, 1988, p. 4.
29. Lebra, p. 4.
:n Cherry Kittredge, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women,
New York.: Kodansha International, 1987, p. 133.
31. Lebra, p. 7.
32. Lebra, p. !. Also see Tonomura Hitomi, 'Women and Inheritance in Japan's
Early Warrior Society', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32,
July 1990, p. 592--623, p. 592.
33. Hane, 1988, p. 5.
34. Hane, 1988, p. 76.
35. Lebra, p. I.
36. Lebra, p. 12.
36 Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting
37. Lebra, p. 22.
38. Lebra, p. 7.
39. Also see Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient
Japan, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd., orig. 1964, 1969, p. 217.
40. Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask: On Sexual Demons, Sacred Mothers,
Transvestites, Gangsters, Drifters and Other Japanese Cultural Heroes,
New York.: Pantheon Books, 1984, p. 8.
41. Robins-Mowry, p. 22.
42. Robins-Mowry, p. 3
43. For example: Nakane Chie, Kinship and Economic Organization in Rural
Japan, New York.: Humanities Press, Inc., 1967, p. 25.
44. George Heber Jones, 'The Status of Woman in Korea', The Korean
Repository, Vol. 3, 1896, pp. 223-29, p. 224.
45. Roh Chang Shub, A Comparative Study of Korean and Japanese Family
Life, Ann Arbor: University of Microfilms Publications, diss. L.S.U., 1959,
pp. 26-27.
46. Shima Matsuhiko, 'In Quest of Social Recognition: A Retrospective View
on the Development of Korean Lineage Organization', Harvard Journal of
Asiatic Studies, Vol. 50, June 1990, pp. 187-229, p. 187.
47. Shima, pp. 187-88.
48. John K. Fairbank et a/., East Asia: Tradition and Transformation, Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, rev. 1989, p. 301.
49. Fairbank, pp. 300-301.
50. Shima, p. 119.
51. Fairbank, p. 306.
52. George Heber Jones, p. 225.
53. Mark Peterson, 'Women Without Sons: A Measure of Social Change in Yi
Dynasty Korea', Martina Deuchler (ed.), Korean Women: View from the
Inner Room, New Haven: East Rock Press, Inc., 1983, p. 37.
54. Shima, p. 88.
55. Shima, p. 91.
56. Peterson, p. 36.
57. Ch'oe Kilsong, 'Male and Female in Korean Folk Belief, Asian Folklore
Studies, Vol. 43-2, 1984, pp. 227-33, p. 227.
58. Shima, p. 88 and 120.
59. Hesung Chun Koh. 'Yi Dynasty Korean Women in the Public Domain: A
New Perspective on Social Stratification', Social Science Journal, Vol. 3,
1975, pp. 7-19, p. 10.
60. Homer Bezaleel, Hulbert, 'The Status of Woman in Korea', Korean Review,
Vol. 1-12, Dec. 1901, pp. 529-34, p. 531.
61. Hulbert, p. 533.
62. Hesung, p. I 0.
63. Hesung, p. 8.
64. Hesung, p. I 0.
65. Robert Orr Whyte and Pauline Whyte, The Women of Rural Asia, Boulder,
Colo.: Westview Press Inc., 1982, p. 27.
66. Le Thi Quy, 'Some Views on Family Violence', Social Sciences, 4, 1992,
pp. 81-87, p. 83.
 Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini 37

67. Truong Buu Lam, Professor of History, University of Hawaii, conversation,

January 1992, Council on International Educational Exchange, Bangkok.
68. Nguyen Tai Thu (ed.), History of Buddhism in Vietnam, Hanoi: Social
Sciences Publishing House, orig. 1988, 1992, p. 232.
69. Mai Thi Thu and Le Thi Nham Tuyet, La Femme au VietNam (Woman in
Vietnam), Hanoi: Editions en Langues Etrangeres, 2nd ed., 1978, p. 20.
70. Mai Thi Thu and Le Thi Nham Tuyet, p. 67.
71. Richard J. Coughlin, The Position of Women in Vietnam •. Ann Arbor:
University Microfilm, Yale University, Southeast Asia Studies, orig. 1950,
1969, p. 8.
72. Coughlin, p. 19.
73. William S. Turley, 'Women in the Communist Revolution in Vietnam',
Asian Survey, Vol. 12, summer 1972, pp. 793-805, p. 793.
74. Yu Insun, Law and Family in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century
Vietnam, Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, orig. 1978, 1987,
p. 76.
75. Yu, p. 155.
76. Yu, p. 2.
77. Jack A. Yeager, The Vietllamese Novel in French: A Literary Response to
Colonialism, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987, p. 63.
78. Ta Van Tai, 'The Status of Women in Traditional Vietnam: A Comparison
of the Code of the Le Dynasty (1428-1788) With the Chinese Codes',
Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 15-2, 1981, pp. 97-145, p. 104.
79. Ta Van Tai, p. Ill.
80. Ta Van Tai, p. 117.
81. Ta Van Tai, pp. 120-5.
82. David W. Haines, 'Reflections on Kinship and Society Under Vietnam's Le
Dynasty', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, 1984,
pp. 307-14,p. 313.
83. Haines, p. 312.
84. Haines, p. 313.
85. Ta Van Tai, p. 141.
86. Alexander B. Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative
Study of Nguyen and Ch 'ing Civil Government in the First Half of the
Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971,
p. 98.
87 Woodside, pp. 45-6.
2 Women and Revolution in
Vietnam
Mary Ann Tétreault

Vietnam's Confucian tradition pictures revolution as a normal, cyclical

process that restores an ideally imagined status quo ante. The state is
believed to participate in the same ethical system of virtuous conduct as
society as a whole and the families that comprise it; a ruler demonstrates
his righteousness by presiding over domestic tranquillity .1 Thus, domestic
turmoil signifies a personal moral deficiency in the ruler. It shows that the
'mandate of Heaven', the correspondence between the ruler's rectitude
and the cosmology of the universe, has been lost. 2 During such times,
Vietnamese look for a new leader whose. moral stature promises to restore
harmony.
The 'occupation and "pacification"' of Vietnam by the French under-
mined this Confucian order. 3 French dominance of Vietnamese rulers
meant one of two things. Either the world was wrong and virtuous
Vietnamese should withdraw from public life to set a moral example for
their peers, or Vietnamese conceptions of 'the way', the proper ordering of
society, had to be re-examined. Both strategies opened Vietnam to pene.:
tration by Western ideas: those who withdrew had no programme for
change while those who looked for other answers ranged widely for them.
As a result, Confucian ideas about social hierarchies were challenged.
In the early 20th century proposals for women's formal education began
to be made by Vietnamese intellectuals, and women were invited to attend
public lectures at a short-lived but influential school in Hanoi. French
support for women's formal education among the upper classes weakened,
however, once women joined the anti-colonial movement. 'Women's'
books - even cookbooks - often featured advertisements for overtly anti-
colonial publications, and women's educational and social groups evolved
into forum for public discussion of national issues. Vietnamese intellectu-
als also vacillated in their recognition of women's oppression and their
support for women's rights. None advocated raising women's status by
changing the law. Even Marxists 'failed to get the point entirely' by acqui-
escing in the conservative assumption that women belonged in the home,

38
 Mary Ann Tetreault 39
finding in their own analyses women's inborn 'feminine strengths such as
virtue, patience, and loyalty' .4
In spite of their views about sexual equality, Vietnamese intellectuals
used gender as a model for analyzing conditions in Viet Nam under col-
onialism. Censorship prevented an open political discourse that might crit-
icize the regime directly. Thus 'debates on women became primary
vehicles for arguing about topics that could not be addressed forth-
rightly' .5 Both conservatives and radicals used women as symbols in their
analyses. Conservatives argued that colonialism caused social change and
corruption. Wanting to preserve the 'national essence', they took refuge in
a Nco-Confucianism that emphasized the family as the foundation of
society and female subordination as the foundation of the family. Radicals
adopted the image of Camille as the talisman of their revolution against
both the colonial 'father' in France and 'the Vietnamese paterfamilias at
home' .6 They invited Vietnamese to see women as one of many oppressed
groups in their society, and revolution as the way to liberate them all.
'This tendency to generalize grievances cannot be overemphasized.
Without it, the Vietnamese would never have been able to mount a sophis-
ticated mass attack on French rule.' 7
Vietnamese revolutionaries did more than use gender as a code through
which to discuss the penetration of their society by the French. They
appealed directly to women to participate in the struggle to liberate their
country, promising them in return equal political, social, and economic
rights and status under a new regime. These appeals attracted women who
felt oppressed by the old regime. Even though Vietnamese legends glorify
female heroes like Trieu Au and the Trung sisters, the status of women in
Vietnamese society from the Han invasions in the third century B.C. to the
establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) in 1954
was always formally and informally subordinate to men. 8 Vietnamese
women seeking equality found revolutionaries to be the only group in their
society willing to commit themselves to achieving it. It is not surprising
that so many responded by joining the movement.

WOMEN, THE FAMILY, AND REVOLUTION IN VIETNAM

The traditional Vietnamese family was patriarchal and authoritarian. Its

relationship to the structure of society increased the value of women as a
target group for political mobilization. The family was the economic unit
of Vietnamese society. Polygamy remained legal throughout Vietnam
40 Women and Revolution in Vietnam
during French rule, and was not even nominally abolished in the south
until 1958. 9 As in other countries, polygamy in Vietnam underpinned a
subsistence economy dependent on the labour of women- wives, daugh-
ters, concubines, and mostly female servants. 10 As forced labour, these
workers worked because men made them, either through private coercion
or by resorting to community sanctions against unco-operative behav-
iour.11 In families where affection and consent motivated labour, women
worked so that the family unit could survive. 12 For the revolution to
succeed, women had to be motivated to work not only for themselves and
their children, but also for the movement and its army. Many observers
linked the mobilization of women by the revolution to improvements in
the status of women in Vietnam, especially in the north. 13
Women's political mobilization was mediated by the Women's Union,
established under the auspices of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP)
in 1930. The focus of the Women's Union, like its name, has changed
since its founding. What did not change was its role as the party organiza-
tion responsible for the political mobilization, education, and representa-
tion of Vietnamese women. Organized at every level of society beginning
with the village, the Women's Union can claim as a member virtually
every woman who has held a position of authority in the Vietnamese
government. 14
The Women's Union was one of the 'functional organizations' estab-
lished to build a social base for the ICP. From its inception, the ICP took a
stronger line favouring women's liberation than any other group seeking
to lead the revolution or Vietnamese society as a whole. 15 The statement of
party principles made shortly after the ICP was founded listed the libera-
tion of women as the party's tenth- and last- goal. 16 Women's liberation
was part of the generalization of grievances that permitted a broad-based
assault on the colonial regime. It was also an end in itself. In Ho Chi
Minh's words, 'Women are half the people. If women are not free then the
people are not free.' 17 The ICP recognized the importance of women to the
revolution by sending a woman, Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, to represent the
party at the Seventh International Congress in Moscow in 1935. 18 Female
workers and peasants took part from the beginning in the upsurge of revo-
lutionary activity following the foundation of the ICP and women carried
the bulk of the supplies destined for the secret bases of the revolutionar-
ies.19 Some women became revolutionary martyrs: Nguyen Thi Minh Khai
was captured and guillotined by the French in 1941.
The ICP was a key component of the Viet Minh, the united front coali-
tion of Vietnamese formed by Ho Chi Minh in 1941 to combat the
Japanese. The Japanese formally ended the French colonial administration
 Mary Ann Tetreault 41
in 1945. That August, during the confusion attending the end of World
War II, Ho moved into Hanoi and proclaimed the establishment of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Women were policy-making members
of the Viet Minh throughout the period, and a female Viet Minh leader,
Nguyen Khoa Dieu Hong, took a public role during the August
Revolution, making an 'appeal for national salvation' to an enthusiastic
crowd at a large rally. The Viet Minh offered more than words to
Vietnamese women. Women who previously had no rights to land were
given a share in land in the areas taken over as the revolution proceeded in
the countryside. 20 In 1946, the new constitution proclaimed the economic
and political equality of women and men, defined the rights of women
within the family, and provided for female suffrage. Vietnamese women
voted for the first time in their history on 6 January 1946, sending ten
women to the Chamber of Deputies, 2.5 percent of the total. 21
During the French war (1946-54), women assumed larger roles in local
communities. Some engaged in combat, mostly as members of small
bands of commandos. In the early 1950s about 840,000 female guerrillas
operated in the north and some 140,000 in the south. 22 Women also
engaged in local 'struggle' movements (see below), community mobiliza-
tion, intelligence gathering, and the transport of materiel. The latter was
especially critical when main force units were engaged. The Dan Cong
labour battalions ferried supplies to the front. Two thirds of the Dan Cong
were women. 23 During the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Dan Cong trans-
ported virtually everything needed by the attackers on their backs or bal-
anced on bicycles, moving through the monsoon rains that made using
motor vehicles impossible. 24
The quality of the revolution changed after 1954, and the role of women
changed with it. Cochinchina, the most recently settled area of the country,
was also the region that had been most deeply penetrated by the French
and thus most affected, socially and economically, by colonialism. The
greater wealth of the southern population and the looser structure of its
rural life made villagers in the south harder to organize against the regime
than villagers in the economically marginal northern and central sections
of the country. 25 Prior to the expulsion of the French, the communist party
in the south faced strong competition, primarily from the Catholic church
and the syncretic sects, for the leadership of the nationalist opposition. 26
After partition, the new DRVN regime in the north was more interested
in building its institutions and rebuilding its economy than in fighting a
revolution in the south. The stability of the regime was threatened in 1957
as scattered local uprisings and a full-scale revolt in Nghe An province
were mounted against its harsh land reform policy. 27 These uprisings and
42 Women and Revolution in Vietnam
an internal struggle for control of the party contributed to the lack of
involvement by the DRVN in the southern movement before 1960. 28
Southern opponents of the U.S.-backed, Roman Catholic, Ngo Dinh
Diem regime were quiet, waiting for the elections promised in the 1954
Geneva Accords, which they expected would provide them with a blood-
less victory. But in 1955 Diem announced that elections would not take
place and he increased his efforts to liquidate his opponents. The southern
insurgency resumed in 1957. 29 As the armed sects were decimated by
Diem's army and police and the Catholic church became more closely
identified with the regime, the mostly communist Viet Minh, with its
mostly Buddhist values and its emphasis on incorporating women into the
struggle against Diem, assumed the dominant position in the continuation
of the revolution in the south. 30
Madame Nhu, Diem's sister-in-law, sought to counter the Viet Minh's
appeal to women by forming her own women's groups, the Women's
Solidarity Movement, which David Halberstam describes as 'an apparatus
for family espionage', and the Paramilitary Girls, whom Madame Nhu
called her 'little darlings' _31 But like other 'popular' organizations created
by the Diem government, they were ineffective. The regime was too
Catholic and too brutal in its suppression of its domestic opponents to
appeal to peasants in the countryside. 32 Even so, the size and reach of the
Viet Minh contracted during this time. The Viet Minh got little assistance
from the north, while the Diem regime was strengthened by economic and
military assistance from the United States.
The material poverty of Diem's opposition dictated reliance on
'People's War' as a strategy. This required mobilizing the whole popula-
tion against 'My-Diem' -the government of the south assisted throughout
the period by U.S. military and economic aid. People's War tactics
included strikes, community action against local civilian and military
officials, sabotage, and, most important of all, 'political struggle', intense
and repeated attempts to persuade neutrals or partisans on the other side to
join the revolution. 33 This emphasis on politics and ideology was intended
to support partisans as much as to convert opponents.
The southern revolutionaries were 'remarkably committed, tough
people, and their personal and political lives were largely inseparable' .34
U.S. troops, for most of whom ideology meant attachment to 'the big PX',
could not understand why their enemies were such good fighters. Many
attributed the bravery of the enemy to drugs. 35 Political motivation was
the key to the success of the southern revolutionaries who had minimal
resources and lived under constant fear of exposure and death. Northern
 Mary Ann Tetreault 43
party leaders were much more secure because they controlled the govern-
ment and society in their half of the country.

[W]hile the same men led the Party, its members in the north and south
were becoming increasingly distinctive in terms of their local Party's
internal life and styles of existence. Southern Revolutionaries were
highly motivated and devoted, informal, and forced to make correct
decisions quickly.[ ... ] Party leaders in the south assumed ever-greater
responsibilities[ ... ] and were[ ... ] in much closer contact with the
masses.[ ... ] To be a Party member in the North was a social asset and
a[ ... ] source of authority.[ ... ] [l]ts huge size[ ... ] offered ambitious
people the possibility of abusing power. 36

Differences in the nature and salience of the conflict from south to north
shaped the conduct of the post-1954 war in each half of the country. In the
south, the success of the revolution was literally a matter of life and death.
In the north, the southern insurgency took second place to the desire to
consolidate the regime, build the economy, and gain political power in the
DRVN. Once U.S. bombing of the north began, the interests of northern
and southern party members converged, but their different situations
affected the way they mobilized their resources, including women. U.S.
bombing threatened the infant economy of the north, already crippled by
an economic boycott imposed by the United States. Women's activities
during this phase of the war were critical to its eventual success and
women, in turn, increased their autonomy in villages where patriarchal
relationships had begun to be reasserted and reinforced as the new regime
consolidated itself after the failure of its land reform programme. 37 As
more men went into the armed forces after the mid-1960s, women became
the majority of workers in many villages. In 1967 government regulations
encouraging and even mandating women's participation in decision-
making positions went into effect. 38 Industrialization in the north after
1954 had proceeded similarly to industrialization in other socialist devel-
oping countries, concentrating on heavy industry and collectivized agricul-
ture. When the U.S. bombing campaigns began in 1965, about half of the
country's industrial infrastructure was still composed of small forges or a
few machine tools located in huts or caves in the countryside. 39 U.S.
bombing encouraged further decentralization. Though it reduced overall
efficiency, decentralization ensured the continued production of needed
materiel despite the heavy bombing which reduced substantially produc-
tion from the centralized factories owned by the state.
44 Women and Revolution in Vietnam
The feminization of agriculture partly reversed the post-1957 weaken-
ing of party commitment to collectivization because women were among
the most likely villagers to eschew family-based work to join co-
operatives.40 This halted, for a time, the reversion to patriarchy - the
'family farm' -in many villages. The state's role in agriculture expanded
as farmers became more dependent on chemical fertilizers and mechanical
equipment such as pumps to flood and drain rice fields. Even so, local ini-
tiative remained strong. Production responsibility was vested in produc-
tion brigades, hamlet-sized working groups, rather than in village
leaders.4' A free market in agricultural products existed throughout the
war, despite vacillations in government policy toward it. 42 Food produc-
tion remained stable from 1965, the first year of extensive bombing of the
north, through 1972, when direct participation in the war by U.S. troops
officially ended. In agriculture as in industry, the basic organization of
production remained highly decentralized and structurally resistant to dis-
ruption from the bombing.
The reliance of the DRVN on a premodern organization of its economy
in order to decentralize sufficiently to preserve its productive capacity was
echoed in the reliance of southern revolutionaries on the premodern struc-
tures of family and village to disperse and conceal personnel engaged in
revolutionary activities. Vo Nguyen Giap, the leading general of the north-
ern forces, said that 'until the war in the south [I] knew nothing about
"people's war"', even though the earlier, anti-French, phases of the revo-
lution had depended heavily upon underground political actions and
popular mobilization. 43 In the south after 1954, the distinction between
friend and enemy was existentially as well as tactically unclear, and the
war itself was not conventional in any sense.
Villages formed the main arena in which People's War was fought and
peasants were the group that each side tried to win over. Many peasants,
presumed by the Viet Minh to be the natural constituency of the revolu-
tion, were confused and frightened by the conflict. Unclear as to which
side was 'right', given the pain inflicted by each 44 and the inability of
either to take permanent control in most of the country, many preferred to
sit the conflict out on the sidelines until one side or the other should
capture the Mandate of Heaven. 45 Yet without peasant help, Viet Minh
cadres would suffer massive casualties and the revolution would melt
away, not only because of the lack of support from the north but, more
crucially, because of the physical elimination of southerners committed to
continuing the struggle against Diem.
The extent of domestic repression by Diem weakened the Viet Minh
and threatened it with extinction.
 Mary Ann Tetreault 45
As early as January, 1954, police-state measures against anyone who
disagreed with the prevailing edicts of the Diem regime forced all oppo-
sition into the agonizing choice of self-imposed exile (if rich), total
silence (if less fortunate and thus forced to remain in Viet-Nam), or
armed resistance. 46

At the same time, the repression sparked massive resistance throughout

the population. In January 1960, after Communist Party leaders finally
authorized a resumption of armed struggle in the south, a series of demon-
strations by thousands of peasant women began in Ben Tre province under
the leadership of Nguyen Thi Dinh. 47 Reacting to large-scale indiscrimi-
nate killing and looting by government troops, the unarmed women had
large numbers and the moral authority of passive resistance. Government
forces were stymied in their efforts to drive the women away and the dis-
trict chief was eventually forced to accede to their demands. Following
these demonstrations, various local and regional groups joined individuals
who had opposed Diem and formed the National Liberation Front. 48 The
NLF membership was eclectic. At first even the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao,
the two largest religious sects, belonged to the organization, which
embraced virtually all of the old Viet Minh coalition as well as three
southern political parties, members of ethnic minority groups, students,
farmers, and intellectuals.49
The NLF was a formidable force for two reasons. One was its land
reform policy which was far more appealing to Vietnamese peasants than
the indifferently applied programme of the U.S.-backed Diem regime. 50
The other was its policy of building on real and symbolic family relation-
ships to sustain its cadres. 51 Frances Fitzgerald calls this the 'Children of
the People' strategy. It meant that NLF cadres would depend upon village
residents to protect them and, in return would obey their wishes. Unlike
representatives of the Diem government, the NLF reversed the normal
hierarchy of family and nation. Villagers became the 'parents' and the
cadres their 'children'. The NLF had to be accommodating because it
depended upon villagers for sustenance and concealment. Unlike their
opponents, NLF members could not exploit the population from the rela-
tive safety of national or provincial capitals, nor from behind a wall of
native soldiers and foreign military and civilian advisers. 52 Even where
the cadre had no blood relationship to local inhabitants, appealing to them
as 'father' or 'mother' could evoke a protective response. Nguyen Thi
Dinh writes about a time when she was arrested, beaten, and threatened
with rape. She saw an old woman outside the hut where she was being
held and shouted to her, 'Mother, I've been arrested. Please come in and
46 Women and Revolution in Vietnam
ask them to release me so I can go back to my child.' The old woman
came in and pretended that Madame Dinh was her daughter, enabling both
women to escape when the soldiers were called away. 53
NLF strategy relied on the fact that many of the original cadres sent to
the villages were local residents and most of the families they appealed to
were their own or had relatives in the revolution. 54 Where cadres were
strangers, the NLF utilized other techniques to foster a family feeling
between its members and local villagers. For example, the NLF retained
the old Viet Minh practice of organizing older women in the villages into
'Foster Mothers' Associations' whose members were charged with serving
as surrogate mothers to young guerrillas 'who were away from home for
perhaps the first time in their lives' .55
Yet there were limits to this strategy. Not all villages could be sup-
plied with local cadres, and strangers were looked at with suspicion, at
least at first. This problem was aggravated by high levels of attrition in
1963-64 followed by the wholesale replacement of local cadres with
strangers who frightened the villagers. 56 Despite their reputation not all
cadres behaved like children of the village. Some showed favouritism,
some were disrespectful of the elderly, and some committed crimes
against the population. 57 Offenders were 'rejected' by villagers but,
unlike villager rejection of government troops, this was the result of
specific offences rather than general hostility. 58 After offenders were
removed by their superiors, support for the NLF increased. But as attri-
tion rates soared, some cadres were returned to villages where they had
alienated members of the population. 59 The resulting disaffection of the
villagers was aggravated by the bombing that a village 'liberated' by the
NLF drew from U.S.-GVN forces. The bombing showed that
the Mandate of Heaven had not descended on the NLF, and weakened
the faith of the villagers in the idea that it would eventually prevail.60
Even so, the ability of the NLF to hold or reclaim villages in the south,
and the tendency of villagers to protect individuals they knew against out-
siders, enabled the Children of the People strategy to save the lives of
many of the regime's opponents. When the NLF strategy was successful,
cadres found refuge and built bases throughout the countryside from
which they ambushed and harassed their enemies and recruited new
adherents to their side. Throughout the war in the south, large areas of the
countryside were unsafe for government troops, especially at night. The
NLF also formed alternative village political systems throughout rural
South Vietnam, where local populations paid increasingly onerous taxes
to the NLF. 61 This dual sovereignty period even supported underground
societies located near U.S. military bases. 62
 Mary Ann Tetreault 47
The Children of the People strategy rested on the cultural symbol of the
nurturing mother. Another symbol underpinned the legitimacy of the
'Long-Haired Army', a term coined by the Diem regime to describe the
women of the Ben Tre uprising. It gradually came to stand for all women
fighting for the NLF. Madame Dinh's feats resonated with the legends of
Vietnamese women in the past who had fought off occupying forces. This
model for Vietnamese women was the antithesis of the nurturing mother
who stayed in the background in a supporting role.
Madame Dinh was made a general of the People's Liberation Armed
Forces (PLAF) based on her credentials as a co-founder of the NLF and
the leader of the Ben Tre uprising. Her position also reflected the
significance of women in the PLAF; Arlene Eisen reports that about
40 percent of the PLAF regimental commanders were women. 63 As in the
north, most southern women served in local and regional guards rather
than in the national forces. Thus, the PLAF was only a small segment of
the total number of female forces engaged in revolutionary activity.

The regular forces were not very large but services, self-defence, and
the guards were very large and mostly women.[ ... ] [In the south] more
women than men participated in the war. In enemy-occupied areas, the
women were very important because if we wanted to send troops we
needed places for them to stay, and to provide for them. After the
women got ready, we could send troops in. All the supplies were carried
by women. The forces that we sent in first to survey an area were
women. Our struggle was carried with two principles: first, military and
second, uprising. There women played a very important part. 64

The extensive participation by women in the revolution in the south was

reflected in high rates of female casualties. Le Tan Danh reports that from
1954 to 1965 female revolutionaries in the south suffered 250,000 deaths,
40,000 disabilities as the result of torture, and 36,000 imprisonments.65
Nguyen Van Luong, president of the People's Committee of Binh Tri
Thien province, tells of casualties from a broader perspective.

The majority of the women in the workforce now are married. Most are
not married who took part in the war. After thirty years of war, many
could not marry. In many cases couples just married and went to the
war. Afterward, they are too old to have children. 66

Women also shared in the civilian leadership of the NLF and the
People's Revolutionary Government (PRG). Memoirs of the period, such
48 Women and Revolution in Vietnam
as Truong Nhu Trang's 1985 book, note instances when women took part
in policy making and planning, suffering the consequences of their activi-
ties when they were taken prisoner by the southern regime. 67 But despite
their bravery and ubiquity in the movement in the south, women had
difficulty gaining the respect of their male peers. They were not recruited
to be cadres until the male pool was depleted by high casualties. 68 Eisen
believes that women in the north occupied a higher status than their sisters
in the south because the southern branch of the Women's Union was an
illegal organization, retarding both the mobilization of women and the
education of men. 69 Although some male party leaders from below the
seventeenth parallel acknowledge the contributions of women to
the success of the revolution in the south, Women's Union leaders from
the south remain more cynical than their northern sisters about the extent
of women's liberation in Vietnam.7° This may be because women in the
south exercised more authority during the war than northern women. They
are more aware both of the extremity of the situation that was required to
give them their opportunity, and the decline in their status today as
compared to that time.

SYMBOLS AND STATUS

The cultural symbols of the nurturing mother and the heroine who leads
the people to expel the foreign invader are both interpreted as models of
female autonomy in writings about the revolution by Vietnamese men and
women. Unlike the analytical forms of discourse traditional in the west
that emphasize abstract concepts, analytical discourse in Vietnam uses role
models and personalization to convey values along with information. Such
symbols carry multiple messages: the bravery of the Vietnamese people,
the totality of national mobilization, and the extent of sacrifice demanded
by the revolution.
Symbols featuring women were also used to mock or impeach the
enemy. The most ubiquitous cartoon from the revolution shows a small
Vietnamese peasant woman holding a rifle on a large U.S. pilot, marching
him off to POW camp. This is an ambiguous symbol from a feminist per-
spective because the weakness of the woman is the core of the message
about the impotence of the enemy. Female revolutionaries also appear on
postage stamps, such as the commemorative issued in 1969 to honour the
women of Ben Tre and their leader, Nguyen Thi Dinh. Madame Dinh's
face on the stamp memorializes a female leader at a crucial moment in the
history of the revolution. The most famous of the many war memorials to
be found throughout the country also features a woman. It is in downtown
 Mary Ann Tetreault 49
Hanoi and marks one of the sites of the 1972 Christmas bombing. The
figures of a woman and a child are used to personalize the destruction of
the bombing of civilians. Here also the use of a female symbol carries a
mixed message, the sort of 'women and children' cliche common where
the home front and the war front are depicted as gender-specific sites.
Despite the ambiguity of some of the symbols, however, the depiction of
women in art dealing with women's revolutionary roles tends to affirm
their agency rather than their victimization or their status as 'helpers' of
the 'real' revolutionaries.
The integration of these symbols into the cultural life of the nation is
something else altogether, however. In the Museum of the Revolution in
Hanoi, which boasts the most extensive collection of photographs and
artifacts from the revolutionary period, little in the collection features
or even includes women. Women have a separate museum but, as
Americans know from their own experience, separate is not equal.
Women's and men's pictures and artifacts are integrated most com-
pletely in the War Crimes Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, but this is an
ambiguous situation in which to celebrate gender equality because it
memorializes victims, not agents. The largest photograph from the
American War is of the heaps of mostly female bodies left after the mas-
sacre at My Lai.
Although the symbolic representation of Vietnamese female revolution-
aries shows agency and power, these symbols are not accorded equal
status with those representing male revolutionary experiences. As a result,
memories of women's contributions to the revolution are fading faster
than memories of men's contributions. A similar mechanism can be seen
in the Truong memoirs. Women in the photographs are seldom identified
by name and only a few are discussed in the text, often in the context of
victimization. The destruction of much of the NLF infrastructure during
the Tet offensive, antagonism between the two halves of the ideologically
and geographically divided party, and the experientially divided con-
sciousnesses of the interpreters of the past obscure the NLF in the minds
of the present generation. The status and contributions of the women in its
ranks are the faintest of the shadows left behind.

SUBSTANCE AND STATUS

La femme a une place importante, un grand role dans le

mouvement, revolutionnaire, tout comme depuis plusieurs
ctecennies, elle a participe activement au mouvement
revolutionnaire dans son ensemble. 71
50 Women ar.d Revolution in Vietnam
This 1959 statement reflects the position of the leadership of the revolu-
tion with respect to the importance of women to the movement. The post-
revolutionary regime did honour its promise to elevate the status of
women in the new order. But despite great gains, the status and power of
women in Vietnam today still compare unfavourably to the status and
power of men.
In other chapters in this volume, the post-revolutionary gender order in
Vietnam is described in some detail with regard to education, industry,
agriculture, and family law. Politics, the military, and the church tend to
be the last bastions of male domination in most societies and Viet Nam is
no exception. Women have never held more than a few positions in the
political leadership of the DRVN or the PRG. For example, women made
up at most 17 percent of the central committee of the PRG in 1965 despite
their crucial role in the resumption of the southern insurgency and their
large numbers among guerrillas and main forces fighting in the south. 72
This is unfortunate as the revolutionary period was the high point of
women's representation on central committees. Women headed five min-
istries in 1982, but only three in 1986, although gains were made during
this period with respect to women's representation on provincial people's
councils and committees. Women have been a minority in the National
Assembly throughout the history of the DRVN. Their proportion rose
from a low of 2.5 percent in the first (1946) assembly to 32.3 percent in
the assembly elected in 1975. In the three subsequent elections, the pro-
portion of victorious women dropped, falling to 17.5 percent after the
1987 election. 73
Nguyen Thi Binh explained the decline in the proportion of women
elected to the assembly in 1976 and 1981 as the result of a heavier residue
of feudal attitudes in the south. 74 The disappointing election result in 1987
were mitigated by the greater visibility of women in positions of leader-
ship in the assembly. Women held no commission presidencies in the
1981 assembly but in the 1987 assembly led the legislative, social, and
external affairs commissions. A woman was also chosen to head
Vietnam's delegation to the United Nations.
The deterioration in Vietnamese women's electoral fortunes coincides
with the gradual disappearance from public life of the 'grand old women
of the revolution'. Both trends reduce women's political authority and the
legitimacy of their claim to leadership positions in the national govern-
ment. A counter-trend shows an increasing number of women holding
office at the provincial level but, despite decentralization and increased
local autonomy, the overall position of women in the political power-
structure of Vietnam is declining.
 Mary Ann Tetreault 51
CONCLUSIONS

Vietnamese women responded in large numbers to appeals by revolution-

ary leaders to join in the struggle to free Vietnam from colonial rule and
establish a socialist state committed to women's liberation. In return, from
the earliest days of the August Revolution, the post-revolutionary govern-
ment enshrined women's rights in its constitutions and laws. Ironically,
given the greater level of integration of women and men in fighting forces
in the south as compared to the north, reunification stalled women's
progress in electoral politics. Still, the government has continued to rein-
force and expand legal protection of women and families, and the rights of
women to an education that enables them to compete successfully with men
in the job market. State and party officials refer to the Women's Union as a
powerful influence on policy, which itself raises the status of women and
contributes to the legitimacy of their claims for social and political equality.
Legal intervention has characterized state policy to incorporate gains for
women into social and political frameworks, providing remedies for women
whose personal situations revert to 'feudal' forms. However, the decision of
the regime to reinstate patriarchy in return for rural support also reinstated
structural impediments to the realization of women's rights enshrined in
Vietnam's constitutions and laws. These impediments are reinforced by
gender inequality in the symbolic construction of the revolutionary past and
memories of women's participation in the revolution, and are excused as
persistent legacies of Confucian - or Confucianesque - social and cultural
patterns. However, they undermine gains made by the revolution.
In his analysis of the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville con-
cluded that post-revolutionary France was not greatly dissimilar from the
society of the ancien regime. Theda Sko~pol's analysis of the French,
Russian, and Chinese revolutions comes to a similar conclusion. 75 Social
revolutions make great changes in class relations and in the relative power
of the state as opposed to society. Yet there are vast continuities between
pre- and post-revolutionary societies and cultures. Over time, these can
challenge novel social arrangements and keep old notions of legitimacy
and old patterns of social relations alive, even when the identities of the
groups occupying the various positions in the patterns change.16 The
Vietnam experience demonstrates how these continuities are constructed.
Revolutionaries pay tremendous attention to who gets to run the state after
the shooting is over. They compose a 'state class' of persons who have
limited means for achieving high levels of status and power other than as
their deserts from revolutionary success.77 After 1954, the leadership in
North Viet Nam was concerned to maintain, consolidate, and gain power
52 Women and Revolution in Vietnam
for itself. It was less concerned to maintain, consolidate, and gain power
for the opponents of the southern regime, or for women and other mar-
ginal groups in the north who had supported the revolution but offered
few resources to support men struggling for dominance in the new state.
By ignoring the southern revolutionaries for so long, the DRVN con-
tributed to the divergence in ideology, culture, experience, and
identification that has made the reintegration of the country so difficult
and so painful. By ignoring women, it ensured the continuation and
strengthening of social groups and structures that undermine the
legitimacy, power, and reach of the post-revolutionary state.
Conservatives and radicals believe that a harmony between personal life
and larger social structures is necessary for long-term stability. English
conservatives tried to restrict women's personal freedom as part of a strat-
egy to stave off 'Jacobinism' and class conflict which they feared would
break out in England in imitation of the revolution in France. They
believed that preserving the patriarchal family would also protect the
broader social and political status quo. 18 Some may doubt the logic or
truth of this assumption yet its opposite is visible in post-revolutionary
Vietnam. Failure to overthrow the patriarchal family along with the old
regime validated the positions of conservatives who, from the beginning,
wanted no more from the revolutionary process than the removal of the
French. This validation keeps Vietnamese women and families in the
private space, retarding the development of social policy that could make
women's paper liberties realizable in practice. It also maintains a social
structure that challenges the authority of the state to command resources
and pursue its own interests.
The paucity of women in important positions in government and indus-
try in Vietnam today demonstrates the failure of the regime to consolidate
the cultural as opposed to the class and political gains made by the revolu-
tion. It is also indicative of a structural contradiction in the consideration
of gender as an analogue to class. Women's interests as women may and
often do conflict with their economic interests, group interests, and even
their personal situations. Catholic and middle-class women under Diem's
regime joined Madame Nhu's organizations even though Diem had abol-
ished polygamy- reluctantly- only in 1958 and did not enforce the new
law after it was passed. Women adjust to the desires of husbands and in-
laws in socialist rural communes even when this means that they must
work longer hours than men and neglect their infants in the process. The
organization of women as a revolutionary class and expectations that they
will be consistent in the pursuit of their class interests thus defined is
borne out by events only in a minority of cases.
 Mary Ann Tetreault 53
This helps to explain why gains made by women during periods of revo-
lutionary upheaval tend to erode over time. Women themselves fail to main-
tain solidarity with one another; men, from their positions of structural
superiority, place obstacles in the paths even of the ones who try. Though
few women favour gender identity over other identities, most men do. The
recurrence of patriarchy as a mode of social control in rural villages in
Vietnam after 1957 and throughout the country after reintegration in 1975
provides strong evidence of the ease with which men can adjust their ideo-
logical prisms to block out inconsistencies arising from the pursuit of male
gender interests. It also reflects the extent to which control over women is a
measure of male 'success', both as a source of economic gain and as a
counter in status competition. As in China, economic liberalization has
intensified the rate of female exploitation. Recently the sale of female chil-
dren into prostitution has become widespread once again in Vietnam.
This basic difference in the expression of gender in social organization,
coupled to the political compromises that are routinely made in order for a
new regime to entrench itself, keep social structures that oppress women
alive and well despite the massive upheavals in political control and class
structure that revolutionary transformation brings about. Even gains in
legal protection made by women through participation in revolutionary
movements may be more fragile than corresponding gains made by men.
Women are uniquely vulnerable to the revival or resurgence of social pat-
terns whose locus in society and connection to an idealized past make
them seem innocuous or even irrelevant to male members of the state
class. Yet the longevity of political changes brought about by revolutions
is hostage to remnants of the past whose power rests in their ability to
control people and other resources independently of the state. A revolution
that fails to liberate women, leaving their fate to the whims of despots in
the private sphere, also fails to protect the liberation of men from assault
and erosion when these despots leave their houses to seize control in the
public sphere as well.

Notes

This chapter is taken from 'Women and Revolution in Vietnam', in Women and
Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World, ed. Mary Ann Tetreault, Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1994.

I. David G. Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1981, pp. 58-59.
54 Women and Revolution in Vietnam
2. Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in
Vietnam, Boston: Little Brown, 1972, p. 30.
3. Marr, p. 60.
4 Ibid., pp. 242-43.
5. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 91.
6. Ibid., p. 90, 92.
7. Marr, p. 235.
8. Ibid., pp. 191-99. Mai Thi Tu and Le Thi Nham Tuyet, Women in VietNam
Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1978, pp. 30-31.
9. Bernard B. Fall, Street Without Joy, New York: Schocken Books, 1972,
p. 131.
10. V. Spike Peterson, 'An Archaeology of Domination: Historicizing Gender
and Class in Early Western State Formation', Ph.D. diss., American
University, 1988, pp. 173-75.
11. See, for example, Le Ly Hayslip, with Jay Wurts, When Heaven and Earth
Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace, New
York: Doubleday, 1989, pp. 20-22.
12. Mai Thi Tu, 'The Vietnamese Woman, Yesterday and Today', Vietnamese
Studies 10 (1978), p. 15.
13. See, for example, Gerard Chaliand, The Peasants of North Vietnam,
Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969.
14. Mai and Le, p. 30-31; Arlene Eisen, Women and Revolution in VietNam,
London: Zed Books, 1984, pp. 119-34.
15. Marr, p. 235-36; Douglas Pike, Vietcong: The Organization and Techniques
of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1966, p. 174.
16. Mai and Le, pp. 112-13; Nancy Wiegersma, Vietnam: Peasant Land,
Peasant Revolution: Patriarchy and Collectivity in the Rural Economy,
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988, p. 94.
17. The wording of this quote varies from source to source. This is the version
told to me by Duong Thi Duyen, Secretary for Western Affairs of the Viet
Nam Women's Union, on 4 January 1988 in Hanoi.
18. Eisen, p. 87.
19. Pike, p. 178; Mai and Le, pp. 118, 124.
20. Eisen, p. 97; Francois Houtart and Genevieve Lemercinier, Hai Van: Life in
a Vietnamese Commune, London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 165.
21. Eisen, p. 244.
22. Mai and Le, pp. 10 I, 161.
23. Ibid., 163.
24. Douglas Pike uses this as evidence that women were exploited by male
communist revolutionaries, for whom they were merely 'the water
buffalo[es] of the Revolution'. Pike, p. 178.
25. Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural
Society in South Vietnam, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979,
p. 230.
26. Ibid., p. 184-85; Fitzgerald, p. 155; Bernard B. Fall, Viet-Nam Witness,
1953-1966, New York: Praeger, 1976, pp. 141-59.
 Mary Ann Tetreault 55
27. Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, New York: Harper
and Row, 1969, p. 191.
28. Wiegersma, p. 202; R. B. Smith, An International History of the Vietnam
War: Revolution Versus Containment, 1955-1961, New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1983, pp. 93-99.
29. Fall, Viet-nam Witness, pp. 169-89.
30. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in
Vietnam, New York: Random House, 1988, p. 122.
31. David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam
During the Kennedy Era, rev. ed., New York: Knopf, 1988, pp. 24-28.
32. Sheehan, pp. 101-105.
33. Frank Denton, 'Volunteers for the Viet Cong', Rand Corporation
Memorandum RM-5647-ISA/ARPA, 1968, ix; Tam Vu, 'People's War
Against Special War', Vietnamese Studies 11 (n. d.), pp. 50-55, 64-66.
34. Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the
Modern Historical Experience, New York: Pantheon, 1985, p. 270; also
W. P. Davison and J. J. Zasloff, 'Profile of Viet Cong Cadres', Rand
Corporation Memorandum RM-4983-1-ISNARPA, 1968; Kondrad
Kellen, 'A View of the VC: Elements of Cohesion in the Enemy Camp in
1966-1967', Rand Corporation Memorandum RM-5462-1-ISA/ARPA,
1969; Nguyen Thi Dinh, 'No Other Road to Take', recorded by Tran Huong
Nam, trans. Mai Elliott, Data Paper 102, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell
University, 1976.
35. Charles C. Moskos, Jr, The American Enlisted Man: The Rank and File in
Today's Military, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1970, p. 152.
36. Kolko, p. 269.
37. Wiegersma, pp. 166-67.
38. Ibid., pp. 157-58.
39. Kolko, p. 266.
40. Wiegersma, pp. 159-60, 179.
41. Ibid., p. 161.
42. Kolko, pp. 265-66.
43. Quoted in Fitzgerald, p. 140.
44. For example, see Hayslip, pp. 94-97.
45. Fitzgerald, pp. 150-57; Rand Corporation, Viet Cong Infrastructure in
South Vietnamese Villages, Rand Vietnam Interview Series PIE, Interim
Reports 165-66, Santa Monica, 1972. This attentisme is clear in the Rand
interviews. Questioners asked defectors and captives what percentage of
their villages supported the NLF and what percentage did not. NLF sup-
porters were generally reported as a positive number: 3 or 10 or 30 percent
of the villages the respondents came from. The remainder of the village
populations were almost never judged to be GVN supporters, however.
They were described as 'neutral'.
46. Fall, Viet-Nam Witness, p. 138, emphasis in the original.
47. Nguyen Thi Dinh, 'No Other Road to Take', pp. 62-74.
48. Wiegersma, p. 203.
49. Mai Elliott, 'Translator's Introduction', Nguyen Thi Dinh, 'No Other Road
to Take', pp. 11-13; Pike, pp. 82-84.
56 Women ar:d Revolution in Vietnam
50. Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1972.
51. Rand Corporation, VietCong Infrastructure.
52. Fitzgerald, pp. 157-64.
53. Nguyen Thi Dinh, 'No Other Road to Take', p. 74.
54. Ibid., also Rand Corporation, Viet Cong Infrastructure; Hayslip, When
Heaven and Earth Changed Places.
55. William Andrews, The Village War: Vietnamese Communist Revolutionary
Activities in Dinh Tuong Province, 1960-1964, Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1973, p. 77.
56. Rand Corporation, VietCong Infrastructure.
57. Ibid., also Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places.
58. Konrad Kellen, 'A View of the VC: Elements of Cohesion in the Enemy
Camp in 1966-1967', Rand Corporation Memorandum RM-5462-1-
-ISA/ARPA, 1969, pp. 9-10.
59. Rand Corporation, VietCong Infrastructure.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. The term 'dual sovereignty' comes from Charles Tilly, 'Does
Modernization Breed Revolution?', Comparative Politics 5 (1973). The jux-
taposition of NLF and U.S. bases is described in Tom Mangold and John
Penycate, The Tunnels ofCu Chi, New York: Berkeley Books, 1986.
63. Eisen, p. 105.
64. Nguyen Van Luong, in an interview with the author, 6 January 1988, in
Hue.
65. Le Han Danh, 'The Long-Haired Army', Vietnamese Studies I 0 ( 1966),
pp. 61-62.
66. Interview with the author, 6 January 1988, in Hue.
67. Truong Nhu Trang, A VietCong Memoir, New York: Vintage Books, 1985,
pp. 110-11.
68. Rand Corporation, Viet Cong Infrastructure.
69. Eisen, p. 123.
70. Compare the views of southerner Nguyen Thi Dinh, reported in the
Christian Science Monitor, 4 November 1987 (when she was president of
the Women's Union), and those of northerner Duong Thi Duyen, vice-
president of the Women's Union, revealed in an interview with me on 4
January 1988. Madame Duyen attributed the relative lack of women in top
economic and political positions in Vietnam to the lack of formal educa-
tion during the war (which should have affected men at least as much as
women). She saw the drop in the number of women elected to the
National Assembly in 1987 as due to a failure by the Women's Union
to campaign effectively. Madame Dinh, in contrast, was reported as
believing that the inferior position of women in post-revolutionary
Vietnam was the result of men clinging to their outmoded Confucian
values -and privileges.
71. Le Duan, then general-secretary of the Workers Party, cited in Nguyen Thi
Dinh, 'La Loi Sur Ie Mariage et Ia Famille et !'emancipation de Ia Femme',
Bulletin de Droit 1 (1987), p. 4.
 Mary Ann Tetreault 57
72. This figure was calculated from the list presented in Nguyen Huu Tho,
'Personalities of the Liberation Movement of South Vietnam', Commission
of External Relations of the NLF, mimeo, n.d. It represents a high estimate.
The list is incomplete; it omits the 'secret leaders' of the NLF discussed in
Pike, pp. 216-17, also alluded to in Truong Nhu Trang, A Viet Cong
Memoir. Trang identifies himself as one of these secret NLF leaders. It is
unlikely that any secret member was female as the secrecy itself was neces-
sitated by the high position in either the government of South Vietnam or a
major private corporation that these NLF leaders held. None of these posi-
tions was occupied by a woman.
73. 'Women's Participation in State Administration and Economic
Management', Women of Vietnam 4 ( 1987), p. 27; Eisen, pp. 244, 246;
interview with Doang Thi Duyen.
74. Quoted in Eisen, p. 246.
75. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans.
Stuart Gilbert, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1955; Theda
Sko~pol, States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979.
76. Mary Ann Tetreault, 'Women and Revolution: What Have We Learned?' in
Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World, ed. Mary Ann
Tetreault, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.
77. Sko~pol, pp. 164-67.
78. Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988. For a discussion of revolutionaries and
their efforts to harmonize politics and everyday life according to a new
pattern, see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French
Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Part II
Family and Modernization
3 Women, Marriage, Family,
and Gender Equality
Le Thi

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE FAMILY AND ITS POSITION IN

PRESENT-DAY VIETNAM

In Vietnam the family has long since occupied an important place in the
life of each individual and in the current development of society. Public
opinion is becoming more and more aware of its role in the country's task
of renewal.
The important role of the family rests mainly in its assuming the func-
tion of reproduction of mankind (through the procreation of offspring) and
of a work force (through recovering, and the caring for the health of
family members after a day's labour and study). At the same time, it
shoulders the heavy responsibility in the reproduction of material and spir-
itual wealth for society and in securing a livelihood for its members. This
article highlights the economic function of the present-day Vietnamese
family, as an active factor contributing to the overall development of
society.
In years to come, Vietnam will pursue policies to develop a market
economy with mariy components and programmes to set up industries of
large, medium, and small scale. Together, with the consolidation of the
economic components of the state sector, the government is earnestly
encouraging the growth of private household economy under many forms:
farms, cottage industry, service shops, and family handicraft production
units in towns and the country. The family consequently has an important
position in the implementation of Vietnam's economic strategy for the
next ten years.
It is in accordance with the level of social development that the scope
of division of labour has disparities with regard to the caring for and edu-
cation of the people. Certain kinds of domestic work are being provided
outside the home with the growth of the service sector which enables
society to attain assistance for families in such welfare activities as caring
for babies, education, looking after the health of the people, food cater-
ing, linen washing, etc. Nevertheless, the division of labour between the

61
62 Women, Marriage, Family and Gender Equality
family and society will remain operative for a long time, regardless of the
development of modern civilization and of scientific and technological
achievements. Society is not able to take over from the family those func-
tions which are fundamentally its responsibility, such as procreation, the
reproduction of the labour force, the realization of a balance between psy-
chology and feelings, and of the happiness of every individual. This holds
true especially in Vietnam which is a developing country whose economy
still is underdeveloped in several sectors; the position and role of the
family in the development of present-day Vietnam is becoming all the
more important.

THE VIETNAMESE FAMILY

In Vietnam the concept of family is commonly used to denote the social

group formed on the basis of marriage and the consanguinity evolved from
this relationship: parents, children, patrilineal, and matrilineal relatives.
There are several family forms in Vietnam today. The traditional family
includes husband and wife and children born in lawful wedlock and, in
many cases, also includes grandparents of both lineage. Families some-
times include a number of persons raised by the family, but who have no
blood relationship. Mutual responsibilities and common interests in econ-
omic, cultural, and sentimental life hold the family members together.
Among them, there abide legal linkages recognized and protected by the
state, and obvious regulations on permissions and bans on sexual relations
between certain family members. Marriage registration is an administra-
tive document recording the official recognition. The state and the law
protect the married couple's rights and duties. The wedding ceremonies
are for relations, friends, and society to bear witness to the couple's agree-
ment with all the duties and rights devolved to both parties.
Nevertheless, in Vietnam nowadays, as in many other countries of the
world, couples live as husband and wife without being officially married.
Together, with the children born to them, they also form a family. There
also are cases of married men who live with a second or third woman, or
take a concubine, either surreptitiously or openly, and to whom children
are born. They, too, form a family, which often gives rise to complex
social relationships, family contradictions, antagonism and drama. We
should also pay attention to incomplete families of fathers- or, more often
mothers -living with their children. This single family unit may be caused
by death of a spouse, divorce, or by unmarried women having children
out of wedlock.
 Le Thi 63
Thus, the concept of family usually refers to relationships between
members within the family, whereas that of household emphasizes the
relationship between the family and the state and society. The concept of
household is taken to mean a group of people living under the same roof
with a common fund of expenses and receipts. They may be people of
blood relationships, other relatives, or mere friends and acquaintances.
There are cases of households of single people living alone, and those of
two or three women or men, or the household may be aged persons getting
together. In Vietnam, especially, there are many collective households of a
number of cadres and functionaires of government agencies and state
enterprises, or of school and university students sharing lodgings.
However, they have no common funds of expenses and receipts, and many
live as single persons away from their families.
In present-day Vietnam, in both city and rural areas, in the great major-
ity of cases a family is identified with a household. In the 1989 population
census, the concept of household includes all people with marriage or
blood relationships, or those who were brought up by the family, with a
common fund of expenses and receipts. Each household is issued a house-
hold registration document which clearly identifies the number of
members of the household, the head of the household, and the relation-
ships of household members to him or her. It is a legal document enabling
the local government to manage the cell of society, which is the family.
Family rights and duties to be performed towards society are usually
determined according to the character of the family household (two
generations, three generations, complete or incomplete families) and the
number of members of each household.
Many state socio-economic policies of renewal impact on households.
During the years when the policy of giving land to families for long-term
use was implemented in rural areas, the area of land distributed was com-
puted on the basis of the number of household members in the labour
force. Preferential treatment was accorded to families of disabled military
men or women, of war-dead, and of aged lonely people, etc. In the city,
the allocation of housing was also based upon the numbers of people in
the household and the characteristics of each household.

CHANGES IN STRUCTURE AND SIZE OF THE PRESENT-DAY

VIETNAMESE HOUSEHOLD

In 1979 Vietnam's population stood at 50,463,418. By 1989 it had grown

to 62,650,942 people, which reflects a yearly growth rate of 2.28%. The
64 Women, Marriage, Family and Gender Equality
Table 3.1 Proportion of number of households according to the number of
persons in households in 1979 and 1989

Number ofpeople in household 1979 1989

1 person 6.9% 5.8%
2 persons 10.4% 9.7%
3 persons 13.5% 15.0%
4 persons 15.0% 18.9%
5 persons 14.4% 17.2%
6 persons 12.5% 13.4%
7 persons 10.1% 8.9%
8 persons 7.3% 5.6%
9 persons 4.6% 2.9%
10 persons 5.3% 3.4%

total number of households was 5,665,978 in 1979 and 12,958,000 in

1989, thus a rise 3.09% per year. These figures indicate an increase in the
formation of many more small households during that time, with the size
of the average household falling from 5.22 persons to 4.88 persons per
household.
During this-ten year period, the number of single-person households
decreased while the number of households from three to six persons grew.
This is linked to the development of the structure of two-generation fami-
lies. The proportion of two-generation families in the entire country
accounts, on the average, for 60% to 80% of the total number of house-
holds in all localities.
Two-generation households [nuclear families] grew, especially in the
rural areas in the north and the centre of Vietnam, due to the state granting
households the right to use land for long periods of time based on the
number of persons in the family. Newly married couples also were given
land as a place to live. There is, therefore, a correlation between these
measures and the wish of people to marry early, establish their own house-
hold, have children early in the marriage, and have two children as defined
by state policy. Old members of the family continue to keep land even
though the household is fragmented by the separation of the young people.
They also obtain tax relief, thanks to the policy of preferential treatment
for the aged. As a result, in recent years in the rural areas of a number of
provinces in the Red River Delta, the number of from one- to two-person
households has accounted for 25% of the total number of households.
Whereas in the Mekong Delta and in the mountainous regions, according
to the 1989 population census, this percentage is lower.
 Le Thi 65
The impact of the urbanization process - the setting up of factories and
industries - which has drawn labour from the country to urban areas, has
affected the family. The young get married once they have achieved stabil-
ity in life and work. The fragmentation of the two-generation households
in cities also is affected by the allocation of housing to families. The pro-
portion of three- and four-generation families still makes up from 15% to
20% of the total of households in key cities because housing conditions
are not yet favourable for household segmentation.
The process of internal migration from areas of the Red River Delta to
regions further north or towards the southern highlands and some provinces
of the south also has accelerated the formation of two-generation [nuclear]
families. This is due to the fact that the majority of migrants, married or
unmarried, are young people who have left to build a new life away from
home, leaving behind the old members of their families. The formation of
two-generation familie~ satisfies the need of young married couples and
their children to live in freedom and independence. These young couples
want to raise their standard of living by making a living independently and
no longer relying on their old parents for their daily bread. Women enjoy
egalitarian and democratic conditions of work and life. Such conditions are
generally non-existent in three-generation [extended] families in which
relations between mother and daughter-in-law are fraught with difficulties
and there is no sympathetic understanding between the old and the young.
As families in Vietnam are usually prolific, few grandparents have to
live in loneliness. They usually live with the youngest of their children
(when he is still a bachelor) or with the eldest son. In some cases they live
with their daughters. However, they cease to have any final say in econ-
omic matters, but only assist their children in livestock breeding, garden-
ing, caring for grandchildren, and doing domestic chores. If they live by
themselves, they have, generally in the countryside, their children living
nearby who make frequent calls on them to help plough and harvest. On
the other hand, relations of enlarged families being still strong in Vietnam,
assistance from paternal or maternal aunts and uncles is always readily
available and given to young and old people alike. Advice offered and
pressures exerted by members of the enlarged families are, however, at
times restrictive of liberties, especially for the young and women.
The process of the formation of nuclear families usually evolves with
the development of a commodity economy. In Vietnam, however, many
nuclear families in rural areas (where 80% of the country's population is
concentrated) are still firmly bound to the economy of self-sufficiency.
Each household is an autonomous closed unit of production. The hiring of
labour is undeveloped and in its infancy, and relations with the market are
66 Women, Marriage, Family and Gender Equality
extremely limited. The paucity of economic, cultural and social informa-
tion has adversely affected the activities of members of the families, and
does not enable them to assert the role of the individual in the community,
or to assert their spirit of active ingenuity in production and commerce.

MARITAL SITUATION OF WOMEN WITHOUT HUSBANDS

In Vietnam 80% of the total of families are complete and about 20% are
incomplete, the latter being those which have fathers or mothers who are
absent; the proportion of father-absent families is higher than that of
mother-absent families. Studying the marital situation in general and the
marital situation of abandoned wives in particular is a sine qua non to
obtain deeper understanding of the role and responsibilities of the
Vietnamese woman in family and society.
As Table 3.2 makes clear, the proportion of bachelors is higher than
that of single women because men's average age of marriage is higher
than women's. In the whole country the average marriageable age for men
is 24.1, while for women it is 23.2. In the city the average marriageable
age for men is 27, for women 22.7. It should be noted that the recorded
number of married women stands at 12,495,000, which is higher than that
of 11,899,000 married men. In the total population, the proportion of
females is higher than that of males, with the percentage of females stand-
ing at 51.34% and accounting for 53.6% of the people within age range of
15 to 60 years old (census of 1989). This disparity is reflected in the

Table 3.2 Population over 15 years old classified by gender and marital
situation in 1989

Marital Situation Male Female Total

A p A p A p

Unmarried
(Men and Women) 7,465 37.4 6,982 31.3 14,447 34.2
Married
(Men and Women) 11,899 59.4 12,495 56.0 24,395 57.7
Widows/Widowers 402 2.0 2,417 10.0 2,819 6.7
Divorced 51 0.3 178 0.8 229 0.5
Separated 70 0.3 201 0.9 271 0.5
Not Defined 59 0.3 52 0.2 111 0.3
Total 19,946 100.0 22,325 100.0 42,271 100.0

A: Amount (thousands) P: Percentage

 Le Thi 67
polygamy which still exists, although it is illegal. With polygamy there is
no registration of marriage as such marriages are not legally recognized by
the state, although there is general knowledge that unmarried women with
children born to them (including former wives who reside in acceptance)
declare themselves to be lawfully wed at population censuses. Another
reason for the disparity in the male and female populations is that many
women live separately (with no divorce as yet), as their husbands are
going abroad. The women identify themselves as married in the census.
Feudal ideas still have a deep influence on the women in the family. If a
wife is childless, her husband gives himself the right to take a new wife.
His family openly expresses the wish for this and his wife has no alterna-
tive but to comply with and accept it or to divorce. In contrast, if the
husband is childless, his wife has but to endure.
The proportions of widows, divorcees and wives separated from hus-
bands are all higher than those of men having the same status (see Table
3.2). In absolute terms, there are 2,796,000 widows, divorcees and wives
separated from their husbands compared to 523,000 men in the same situ-
ations. Out of the total amount of 15,285,708 married women, the propor-
tion of these categories of women accounts for 18.24%, whereas from the
total of 12,412,265 married men, there is only a proportion of 4.20% of
widowers, divorcees and husbands separated from their wives. The ra-
tionale for this state of affairs is that after being a widow, divorced or
separated, few women remarry a second time because they find it difficult
to get remarried, being already at a mature age and having children with
which they are preoccupied. Not uncommon is the fact that when divorced
or separated, the women must acquiesce to keep the children. Men
remarry for a second or third time- even at advanced ages - because they
cannot bear loneliness and bringing up the children on their own.
Moreover, the proportion is high of widows in the group of women at
advanced ages because generally women live longer than men.
Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that the influence of ancient moral-
ity is still pervasive among women who are expected to uphold and praise
vows of chastity and virtue. When a husband passes away, the wife is
expected to worship him and bring up their children. She is imbued with
the spirit of benevolence and the love for their children and in her mind she
is resigned. Women, bereft of their husbands when just in their twenties
(especially wives of military men who died young), do not wish to remarry
if they have one or two children. They live with their parents-in-law or by
themselves, and they work to provide for their children's subsistence until
the latter are grown up. They are expected to accept this as a source of joy
and happiness. Many divorced and separated wives share the same attitude.
68 Women, Marriage, Family and Gender Equality
A survey of Hai Trung village, Hai Hau county of the province of Ha
Nam Ninh, counted 367 widows in 1991; only 18 have remarried with the
other 349 still in bereavement. There are eight divorcees in the village;
none have remarried. The proportion of divorces is not high: 18 divorces
among 900 couples wedded from 1980 to 1989. Many of the separated
wives are being abandoned against their will by their husbands. The hus-
bands leave home to go away for work, do not return to see their family,
do not send money to maintain their children, or abandon their wives
without divorce. In many a case they took new wives somewhere else.
Moreover, in the special situation of Vietnam, from 1975 till now, many
men go abroad, leaving behind their wives and children. In the 1989
census, their wives usually declare themselves to be separated from their
husbands because they do not actually know whether the latter will or will
not renew their marriage relationships. They are not formally divorced as
yet. The 1989 census records no files related to unmarried women with
children but in reality unwed women with children do exist in consider-
able numbers. However, the proportion in agricultural co-operatives is
lower than that for state farms and forestry plantations.
Women, no longer young, generally cannot find a home, but motivated
by the desire for a child, they have had licentious relations with many
men. So, after a child is born, the mother has to endure hardships to bring
up the baby and is subjected to the opprobrium of public opinion. The
man, on the other hand, shirks his responsibilities, and goes off to another
part of the country. Some men can be found ready to offer assistance for
the maintenance of the child, but this is done in secrecy to avoid nuisances
that may cause disunity in the family, or arouse jealousy on the part of the
legitimate wives. Even the law prohibits polygamy.
The situation in many state farms and forestry plantations registers an
accentuated gender imbalance. Female workers of a team of production
often account for from 60% to 70% of the work force. They hail from
distant provinces in the delta and feel lost in localities established deep into
the forest, which result in their having little chance to marry. The proportion
of unmarried women with children is markedly high in forestry production.
An example can be cited in comparing the situation of the agricultural co-
operative of Minh Dan and the team of forestry production of the same
locality (in the county of Ham Yen, province Ha Tuyen): Table 3.3.
It is clear from this table that the proportion of unmarried women with
children in state forestry plantations is definitely higher than that of agri-
cultural co-operatives. On the contrary, the proportion of widows in
forestry production teams is low because - viewed as a whole - the team
family is composed of younger people. Also the proportion of the
 Table 3.3 Proportion of unmarried women with children

Name Unmarried With Absent Separated Divorced Widows Proportion

Women with Husband of Husband
Children Absented
Families
Team of
production 21.1% 0 2.1% 2.1% 2.1% 27.6%
Minh Dan
(forestry)
Minh Dan
Agricultural 2.8% 0 0 0.5% 7.5% 10.8%
co-operative

Data from the 1991 Survey by the Studies on Women Centre.

$
70 Women, Marriage, Family and Gender Equality
husband-absent families of the team of forestry production is almost three-
fold compared with the proportion of the same category of people in agri-
cultural co-operatives.
In actual life, the number of unmarried women with children belongs to
many different categories. There are unmarried women in their thirties
having children out of wedlock; widows, including widows of dead military
men, who later have children out of wedlock; and divorced and abandoned
women bearing children by a second other man. But their common trait is
that they must bring up the children by themselves with the limited assist-
ance of the collectives and production teams. If they live in their viiiage,
they can receive mutual help and the consolation of parents and relatives
while delivering and bringing up their children. As members of the agricul-
tural farms or forestry production teams they live away from home (their
parents being in the delta), and are therefore subjected to hardship under the
obligation to be self-sufficient in every aspect and work to bring up the chil-
dren and to take care of the families. There is, at present, no law compelling
unlawful fathers of innocent children to give assistance to the mothers for
their maintenance, as well as no policy to mitigate the hardships endured by
abandoned women in the bringing up of their children.
Women with husbands who are absent for long periods are not com-
puted by population statistics because they are still married. However, in
many villages in the lowlands, over-populated with little land, there are a
great number of men with specialized skills: bricklayers, joiners, housing
construction workers, wood craftsmen. They leave home to work in the
cities or towns or the highland provinces. They are absent from one to
many months, from one year to two years, and return on occasion to see
their families - usually at the Lunar New Year (Tet) festivals - to bring
money for wives, then depart again. This is also the case of party cadres or
military men who are performing their services away from home. Their
wives have to work the land by themselves without the help of their hus-
bands and must look after parents and children, and thus find themselves
in dire hardship. With these people separation is voluntary but necessary,
with ihe hope for reunion in the future when the husbands have accumu-
lated enough money. But not lacking are instances of the go-away hus-
bands who strike up acquaintances and have children with other women,
neglecting their first wives left behind in the villages.
The proportion of women having their husbands away from home is
markedly high in a number of localities, such as the villages of Hai Trung
of the province of Ha Nam Ninh where there numbered 336 such persons,
accounting for 12.2% of the total of households in the village. At the
cooperative Cam Vu, of the Cam Binh county of province Hai Hung, the
 Le Thi 71
number of families under the same condition occupies a proportion near
9% of the total of households.
Previously, during the war, men went to the battlefields; women were
expected to do everything concerning domestic chores. And nowadays, in
peacetime, it is the struggle for life that burdens the women. Although
married, they have no choice but to resign to their men absenting them-
selves, to living in loneliness, while remaining faithful to their husbands
and devoting themselves whole-heartedly to their children and, in many
cases, to the parents-in-law. This is the specific feature of traditional
morality of the Vietnamese woman.

THE WOMAN AND THE FAMILY WITH ISSUES POSED TO

ENSURE HAPPINESS AND GENDER EQUALITY WITHIN THE
FAMILY

The Vietnamese woman bears a very heavy load of work with a low stand-
ard of living. Public services are under-developed and require that every
food processing operation - cooking, water drawing, washing, caring for
the sick and the old - be performed by the family itself. The one among
others who does the most is the woman, mother, and wife. In addition to
this great amount of work, the woman must also work in the rice fields, in
society, in the office and factory. She takes care of the children and holds
the secondary job. As a result, she has little time left to rest, to engage in
social relations, or to enjoy culture. Her lack of knowledge and education
as well as lack of time, adversely affects the education of her children.
From our research in the country, many women indicate that they have no
time and knowledge to help their children in their education. This also
holds true of many government functionaries and workers.
If the woman does everything, what is the gender equality in the
family? From survey figures computed of three target families of peasant,
worker and intellectual, the results are almost homogeneous with only dif-
ferences in degrees: customarily, husband and wife co-operate in produc-
tion; in the country in the North, however, it is the wife who is responsible
for the heaviest load of work and most of the phases of agricultural pro-
duction; as for domestic chores, she is the sole doer. Who then makes
decisions as to family activities - especially in such issues as house con-
struction and repairs, purchase of expensive materials, education, career
orientation and marriage for the children? The husband is the one to play
the role of decision-maker and of manager of production and family activ-
ities, including even the giving birth to one, or more than one, child.
72 Women, Marriage, Family and Gender Equality
Nowadays, the proportion of families in which husband and wife consult
together on common affairs is on the rise -chiefly in families of intellec-
tuals and city families. Compared to the old society, equality and democ-
racy between husband and wife have made progress in sharing
responsibilities for the care of the family and for raising of the children.
However, for all the families, the responsibilities and work that the woman
must and actually does assume are still very heavy.
There are comments about 'the wholehearted devotion' of the
Vietnamese woman. But she is really over-taxed in her burden of work.
Public opinion, relatives, husbands are prone to praise one-sidedly, to
underline the woman's responsibilities, and make light of her interests and
her right to enjoyment, both materially and mentally, and her need for
social activities and contact. She must endeavour to labour in production,
no less hard than the husband, in order to increase the family earnings. At
the same time she must do all kinds of domestic work, but is nevertheless
relega'ted to a second position below that of the husband in the family.
Mention should also be made of the state of violence existing at present
in the family: husbands insult and beat up wives and children. Parents-in-
law ill-treat their daughters-in-law. The families of the husbands and
members of their enlarged families, as a rule, side with the men in the
oppression of their wives. If the husband takes a concubine, his family
condones it; but, if a woman commits adultery, it is a serious crime and
she is insulted and beaten up. She can even be rejected and chased back to
her parents' home. Childless women are forced by the husbands to consent
to divorce or to their husbands' taking concubines. Feudal ideas and back-
ward customs subject the women to suffering and inequalities. Even in
sexual relations between wife and husband, a good number of women
have to suffer from the excessive demand of their husbands, who go so far
as not to spare them when they are sick and tired. However, the women do
not dare reveal such things.
With regard to family planning, there are husbands who strongly oppose
it, and have beaten up and forbidden their wives from having contracep-
tive rings placed, in order to have more children and an adequate number
of boys and girls - especially cases when they have not given birth to
boys. As for husbands who support family planning, the majority of them
want their wives to abide by it while they themselves will not use
condoms or have sperm conduits tied because they fear that such medical
measures affect adversely sexual prowess. There is no care for the health
of the woman being impaired if she submits herself to contraceptive ring
placing, to frequent fetal curettage and menses regularization operations to
plan and space pregnancies. It is but right for our friends of the West to
 Le Thi 73
state that it is an elementary right to be the master of one's own body; for
innumerable women this right is thwarted.
Consequently, when discussing the building of cultured !'amilies, the
fostering of family happiness, it is not enough to appeal to only one side,
to make demands only on the woman who is praised as the centre of
family life, as the pillar, as the living soul of the family, etc., who must
make sacrifices, be resigned, kind-hearted, good mannered, do-all, and
taking care of everything in the family to ensure a full life for husband and
children. Family happiness is yet the happiness of the couple, husband
and wife, parents and children. Two pillar people, husband and wife, need
to have sympathetic, understanding, harmony of feeling and actions, the
shouldering and sharing of common family affairs, and the bringing up
and education of children. There is no solid and soul-lifting happiness if it
depends only on one side - especially on the woman alone. This will
sooner or later lead to the breaking up and shattering of the tranquil but
artificial existence of the family.
Today the woman wishes to enjoy equality in her profession and family.
She wants to build the happiness of the family and at the same time con-
tribute her worthy part to the affairs of society. She should be helped to
accomplish their double functions: this requires the existence of appropri-
ate social policies pertaining to the woman at work, in society and in the
family, and, foremost, the cooperation and understanding of her life
companion and other in the family.
4 Divorce and its Impact on
Women and Families in Ho
Chi Minh City
Thai Thi Ngoc Du

INTRODUCTION

War, and its far-reaching impact on society, and the subsequent changing
of roles and expectations results in divorce for greater numbers of fam-
ilies. Through divorce decrees issued from 1980 to the present in the
People's Court of Ho Chi Minh City, one can follow the evolution and
characteristics of divorce in the City. This study of divorce in Ho Chi
Minh City reveals the factors that lead to divorce, the characteristics of the
petitioners, and the reasons they petition the court for divorce. Combined
with observations and judgements gleaned from discussions with judges,
lawyers, and other experts, we can determine the factors, incidence, and
effects of divorce on women and their families.

WAR AND ITS EFFECTS ON THE COUNTRY

From 1954 to 1975 Vietnam was divided into two parts with widely differ-
ing political regimes and societal conditions. War, and the partition of the
country, could not help but give rise to abnormalities in matrimonial life.
A large number of people had to leave their families temporarily, being
regrouped to the North. Women, seeking to earn a living, had to go out
into society to replace men in various tasks. The result was that women
became more enterprising and independent. In the South - with the war
against the Americans - people in both rural and urban areas left their
families to live and engage in activities in liberated zones. In those zones,
controlled by the former regime, the majority of young people were
drafted into the armed forces or served in the governmental machinery.
Saigon was the major place of concentration of these forces.
Overall, the number of young and middle-aged people killed on both
sides worsened the imbalance in the population structure. The number of

74
 Thai Thi Ngoc Du 75
Table 4.1 Population shift: Ho Chi Minh City Census - April 1, 1989

Ages Total Males Females

21 to 40 1,372,809 610,775 762,034
44.5% 55.5%

young and middle-aged males declined, while the number of widowed

women increased. The census taken in Ho Chi Minh City on April 1, 1989
illustrates the shift in population.
The proportion of females age 21 to 40 is higher than the female pro-
portion of Ho Chi Minh City's total population (53% of total population).

DIFFICULTIES AND ADJUSTMENTS IN POST-WAR VIETNAM

From 1975 to the present, Vietnamese society and families, especially in

Ho Chi Minh City, have gone through the upheaval of the post-war period.
War created population imbalances in the numbers of men and women,
and families faced trying economic times. Shifts in the aspirations of the
people and the ways men and women view their roles changed society.
Some of the most important consequences are summarized here:

• A great number of male heads of families, generally middle-aged, had

gone to concentration and re-education camps for long periods (from
three years to longer than eight). Families experienced little stability
either while the husbands were at the camps, or when the husbands
returned and could not adapt to new circumstances in society.
• Some cadres of the North (born in the North or regrouped to the
North) and of the South, in general, took part in building the new
regime. Another segment came back to the City after having fought in
the South. Those who once held positions of power now were inte-
grated into a much different societal environment.
• Boatmen (illegal migrators), mostly young males who fled the country
from 1975 to the present, create imbalances in the sexual composition
of the young population. Male family heads also fled, creating
absences in the families they left behind.

From 1975 to the last years of the eighties, Ho Chi Minh City has gone
through difficult economic times. The people's standard of living fell
76 Divorce and its Impact on Women and Families
much lower than before 1975. Earning a living became hard for families
of young people who had no possessions and no capital in reserve.
Since 1986, as a result of Vietnam's policy of opening up to the world, Ho
Chi Minh City has attracted Vietnamese from overseas, foreigners interested
in business or visits to families, and other tourists. The majority of young
Vietnamese men and women nurse a desire to go abroad and to escape a life
of destitution. They know they stand a better chance of achieving that desire
through marrying foreigners or Vietnamese who live overseas.
Vietnam is being transformed from a feudal society to a society that is
adopting new ideas about marriage and family. The women are leading a
more independent life, and becoming more conscious of their rights and
happiness.

THE EVOLUTION OF DIVORCE HO CHI MINH CITY

An analysis of divorce statistics reveals key characteristics of the men and

women in Ho Chi Minh City. The number of divorced and separated
women is three times greater than that of men, which indicates that males,
generally, can remarry more easily after divorce than females can (see the
following table). In addition, the number of widowed, divorced and sep-
arated women equals one quarter the number of married women. The sta-
tistics show that more young people divorce, but divorces do occur after
10 to 15 years of marriage. Thus, families may not be really stable despite
several years together. And, the number of divorces by mutual consent
account for the greatest proportion - 60% -of all petitions.
To see these trends, two sources of statistical data are most reliable:
those compiled by the Agency of Statistics and others from Ho Chi Minh
City's People's Court. Much disparity exists between them. Statistics of
the City's statistics agency are computed from the People's Court, and the
Justice Service registers a higher number of divorce cases than the court's
statistics. Owing to time and means being limited, it has not been possible
to conduct research on the evolution of the divorce situation according to
cohorts.
Result of the general census of Ho Chi Minh City's population taken on
April 1st, 1989: (Table 4.2): The number of divorcees in the age range
from 22 to 30 accounts for a substantial proportion, underlining the ten-
dency to divorce on the part of young married couples. In 1985 young
couples constituted 36.67% of the total divorces, and in 1989, they were
34% of the total. It is noteworthy that the number of divorces in the age
range from 41 to 50 make up a growing proportion, in variance with the
 Thai Thi Ngoc Du 77
Table 4.2 The divorce situation
People from age 13 years and older
April 1, 1989 General Census of Ho Chi Minh City population
Unit: People and %

Number of People Percentage

Total Male Female Total Male Female
Total 2,890,741 1,302,787 1,587,954 100 100 100
Unmarried 1,213,952 589,946 624,006 41.99% 45.28% 39.30%
Married 1,442,436 675,950 766,486 49.89% 51.88% 48.27%
Widowed 176,271 22,425 153,846 6.09% 1.92% 9.69%
Divorced 30,669 7,562 23,107 1.06% 0.58% 1.45%
Separated 27,413 6,904 20,509 0.97% 0.54% 1.29%

Source: Ho Chi Minh City's Statistics Agency, general census of Ho Chi Minh
City population, April 1989.

tradition of Vietnamese families of former times. In this age range, in

1985, they were 9.6% of the total divorces; in 1989 they were 12% of the
total. (See Table 4.3)
Of the number, the proportion of males is a little higher than females.
Statistics from Ho Chi Minh City's People's Court of petitions for divorce
recognized by the law show that the number of divorce petitions filed
between 1989 and 1991 dropped from 6796 to 5891, while the percentage
of divorces granted by the Court rose from 62% to 72.2%, with a trend
toward divorce by mutual consent.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PETITIONER FOR DIVORCE

While statistics are not complete, we can make a number of observations

about the details and characteristics of divorce from the cadres involved in
judging divorce cases. The young are more likely to divorce, and wives
increasingly petition the courts. Of the divorces not mutually requested,
wives are nearly twice as likely as husbands to petition the court.
A growing number of young couples, and those with less than two chil-
dren, are petitioning for divorce (1991 data). Fifty-five percent of petitions
were from petitioners with one or two children, while 20% were from peti-
tioners with more than two children. Thus, the majority of petitioners for
divorce already have children. The breakdown of these marriages not only
affects the two parties, but also their children of minor ages who need to
live in a unified family in order to have stability. The number of petitions
78 Divorce and its Impact on Women and Families
Table4.3 Annual divorces granted by age group
1985 1986 1987 1988 1989
Total 6782 6974 7546 8838 8750
Males 3391 3487 3773 4419 4375
Females 3391 3487 3773 4419 4375
Distributed by age ranges
From 18-21 131 154 200 165 271
Males 30 33 90 60
Females 101 121 110 105 271
From22-25 780 915 822 1512 1221
Males 292 312 . 329 648 503
Females 488 603 493 864 718
From26-30 1707 1746 1861 2513 1755
Males 698 730 882 1236 924
Females 1009 1016 979 1277 831
From 31-35 1904 2034 2180 2172 2579
Males 964 1044 1035 1116 1295
Females 940 990 1145 1056 1284
From36-40 946 941 1079 1057 1265
Males 551 580 542 510 654
Females 395 361 537 547 611
From 41-45 616 578 567 510 636
Males 391 334 368 270 371
Females 225 244 199 240 265
From46-50 389 338 480 436 424
Males 194 221 303 316 254
Females 195 117 117 120 170
51 and over 309 268 356 477 599
Males 271 233 224 263 374
Females 38 35 132 214 225

for divorce presented by wives stands through the years higher than that of
petitions presented by husbands: in 1991 they occupy 30% of petitions,
those by husbands 18%, and the remainder by both parties.
In the old society, Vietnamese women shared a common psychology
and set of beliefs about life and marriage. Wives lived in resignation and
were ready to sacrifice their happiness for that of their children. They were
tolerant and given to forgiveness. The breakdown of the family was, for
the wife, invariably a loss. That there are a growing number of wives who
petition for divorce speaks of changes: women are more conscious of their
 Thai Thi Ngoc Du 79
own rights, more economically independent, and more imbued with the
ideal of equality. They find it difficult io accept the feudal life which still
survives rather widely among Vietnamese men.

DIVORCE PETITIONS AND THE REASONS FOR PETITION FOR

DIVORCE

While more than 80% of the petitions for divorce base their requests on
'family contradiction', analysis of the statistics clarifies the situations
leading women to divorce and reflects the changes inpost-war society.
Poverty and ill-treatment by her spouse and his family lead some women
to petition the court. In other post-war cases, the return of husbands and a
clash of views and changing expectations resulted in petitions for divorce.
Finally, the changing country - opening up to the world - can cause
upheaval in the family.
Data from 1991 provides details of divorce petitions. Based on arbitra-
tion and presentations by parties in divorce cases before the court, the
grounds for divorce petitions can be categorized as follows:

Reasons for Petition Number of Petitions in 1991

1. Precocious marriage 1
2. Forced marriage 0
3. Concubinage 234
4. Marriage conflict, being beaten up, ill-treatment 4770
5. Adultery 238
6. Deception of beauty, money, position, age 2
7. Illness, infirmity, state of children 15
8. One of the parties sent to re-education camps or convicted 8
9. One of the parties residing abroad 0
10. One of the parties is missing or away for a long time 257
11. One of the parties is a foreigner who has left for home 0
12. Other grounds 164

This distribution tends to not bring out the real cause leading to divorce.
For example, if a real cause is poverty, the cause may be categorized as
job-family contradictions.
A number of grounds for divorce are related to Ho Chi Minh City's situ-
ation after the war. Wives are most of the petitioners for divorce on
grounds that the spouse has been missing for a long time. From 1975 to
80 Divorce and its Impact on Women and Families
1985 a number of people, the majority of whom were male, left the
country illegally. They usually left their wives and children behind, with
the hope for reunion later. In many cases, however, reunion failed to mate-
rialize. Owing to a long separation, each of the parties has gone his or her
own way, leading a new life. This category of grounds has only a tempor-
ary character and is related to a very special phenomenon (now extinct) of
families in Ho Chi Minh City after the war.
From 1980 to 1985, the cases in which males returned to their families,
but ended up in court petitions for divorce were:

• Families before separation were plagued by contradictions, which

wives and husbands had failed to resolve at the time.
• Re-educated persons, who previously had an easy life in which their
wives were, as a rule, freed from any worries, were now confronted
with difficulties in their material and spiritual existence. Their wives
needed their support and protection, but did not receive it. Under these
circumstances a number of families broke down.
• Husbands, once released from re-education camps, could not adapt
themselves to the new life that had become more difficult, especially
when their position and role within the family had diminished in
importance. They previously had power and had provided the liveli-
hood for the family, but were now unemployed and maladroit. Their
wives, however, were enterprising, and the mainstay of the family.
Out of this state of affairs were born complications which gave rise to
grievous dissensions.

Discrepancies in adaptation to post-war urban society also lead to the

breakdown of families and marriage. During the war, owing to the special
circumstances, there was the common sharing of difficulties; and discrep-
ancies did not emerge. In the post-war period, Ho Chi Minh City's envir-
onment was much different and more complicated. In this City the
standard of living is higher, there are more pleasures than in the battle
zones or in what was formerly North Vietnam. After a long time of self-
deprivation and austerity, some men have yearned for the mode of epi-
curean living of the arrivistes. The husband may not have a high level of
education, but now he has position and power, which causes him to find
his wife not to be his equal and therefore gives rise to a contradiction.
Furthermore, there are other factors of the living environment which
adversely affect the unity of the family: an extramarital affair, or the
degradation of morals such as drunkenness or gambling, etc.
 Thai Thi Ngoc Du 81
From 1986, with the policy of opening up to world, a growing number
of overseas Vietnamese and foreigners have come to the city to visit their
families or for business. On the other hand, the programmes of departure
for family reunion abroad for military and civil servants of the former
regime and for returners from re-education camps are being speeded up.
Like young people in other developing countries, the widespread psychol-
ogy of Ho Chi Minh City's youth is the dream to be able to set foot on a
developed land. Such occasions rarely offer themselves to the majority of
young girls and boys. Thus the girls seek out the chance to marry foreigners
or overseas Vietnamese. This way of exploitation and a speedy marriage
lead to contradictions and more hearings on divorce cases having 'a factor
of a foreign country' (divorce with foreigners). In recent years, such cases
have been few, but they do reflect a characteristic of the marriage situation
in Ho Chi Minh City during the first phase of the opening-up period.

CAUSES THAT LEAD TO DIVORCE

A review of the causes leading to divorce can be categorized into three

groups.

1. Differences in Modes of Living or Outlook on Life

Ho Chi Minh City, with its hectic activity, can add to problems of hus-
bands and wives differing in their views or outlook on life. This category
is the cause of about half of the total of divorces. Ho Chi Minh City is an
economic centre, and a gate to receive new ideas and cultures from all
areas of the world. It is here that various modes of living and life outlooks
clash with one another: traditional, slow-changing and disciplined family
life versus a liberal and free concept of love, marriage and family; or life
inspired by spiritual and humanist values versus a more utilitarian mode of
living highly valuing money and material things. This dichotomy creates
conditions for the emergence of various life philosophies and modes of
living, whereas former circumstances did not permit choice. This type of
cause usually exerts influence on couples in their middle-age who have
shared life for a relatively long period. At the court, the following grounds
are often used by the parties:

• Husbands who get high portions and wealth lead a fast, decadent life
and neglect their families.
82 Divorce and its Impact on Women and Families
• Husbands adopting an ascetic way of life, find themselves unable to
adapt to the materialistic society; whereas their wives yearn for
affluence at any cost.

2. Economic Differences

Economic difficulties constitute one of the causes giving rise to disunity

and divorces among young married couples. On getting married, young
people do not foresee and do not mentally prepare themselves to cope with
difficulties in life. If they are not supported by families on both sides, they
are likely to divorce. There are a good number of cases in which young
couples divorce for lack of a dwelling, the husbands being incapable of
supporting their wives and children.

3. Impact of External Factors

One of the reasons for the increasing breakdown of the families of young
couples (there are many cases of marriages that do not last one year) lies
in short periods of acquaintance and the time for mutual understanding
has been too short. In Vietnamese traditional families, parents of members
of the enlarged family could interfere or play a principal influential role in
the founding of marriages and in the personal affairs of the children. The
wife had the duty to act as a daughter-in-law towards the family of her
husband, especially towards his mother and older sisters. To live in filial
piety, to live in love and to know how to behave towards the family of the
husband (or the family of the wife) is a fine tradition, a sine qua non.
However, in the old feudal society, abuses from filial piety strained rela-
tions both between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law and between
parents and families of the husband and daughter-in-law. The abuser had
grievous consequences.
Nowadays, in Ho Chi Minh City, the trend towards nuclear families
composed only of husband, wife, and their children of minor age is
gaining ground. Young women balk at co-living with the families oftheir
husbands because they chiefly fear playing the role of 'daughter-in-law'.
However, young couples usually can not have a house of their own
because prices of houses in Ho Chi Minh City are exorbitant compared to
the limited earnings of these people. Thus, they have to board with the
larger family. Economic difficulties, together with enlarged families, are
above these young women's capacity for endurance. In many petitions for
divorce, the ground for their presentation is because the husband's family
puts up obstacles or exerts influence on the husband.
 Thai Thi Ngoc Du 83
In the modern urban way of life, men, having the principal role of par-
taking in professional activities, enjoy plenty of occasions for entering
into a number of different environments outside the family. Also, from
the demographic assessment of a post-war City, the imbalance of the
sexes tips towards a surplus of females in the age range from 20 to 35.
These conditions, together with more liberal concepts of morality, have
given rise to family contradictions in which a third person is involved.
Adultery is usually committed by males and this leads to divorces among
young couples, rather than among couples who have been together
for years and are fulfilling common obligations towards children and
families.

CONSEQUENCES OF DIVORCES FOR MEN, WOMEN, AND

YOUNG PEOPLE

As noted above, in recent years there are, in addition to the divorces by

mutual consent, more petitions for divorce presented by wives than by
husbands. The court's general propensity is to grant divorce decrees more
easily if wives are petitioners, which emanates from the observation
referred to above concerning the psychology of Vietnamese women: to
petition for divorce is an undesired act which psychologically women can
hardly accept. To have petitioned therefore proves that married life is no
longer bearable for them. Of people petitioning for divorce, the number
with more than two children still in minor ages occupies a high proportion.
In the majority of cases, wives are granted custodial rights over the chil-
dren, chiefly when they are minors.
Effects on Mothers. Mothers who bring up their children by themselves
under the present trying socio-economic conditions face many problems:
the incomes of these families are generally low; women have difficulty in
finding employment; more are exposed to the threat of unemployment than
men. In addition to economic stringencies, mothers who bring up children
by themselves confront obstacles in their education: no time is left to
devote themselves to their children. They struggle, especially parents who
care for their children after they have divorced and the other has founded a
new family.
Divorced women are exposed to many handicaps in their attempts to
rebuild their happiness. With the present economic situation and sex struc-
ture of Vietnam's population, divorced women have more difficulties in
becoming remarried than divorced men, although women are no longer
subject to the narrow prejudices of the former feudal society.
84 Divorce and its Impact on Women and Families
Effects on Children. As their mothers encounter economic and employ-
ment difficulties, the children lose their opportunities to complete their
education and have to make a living early in life. Children face an unstable
future. From the psychological point of view, children who grow up in
broken homes face obstacles in the formation of their personalities. Both
factors, economic difficulty and psychological block, interact to lead many
children to the path of being uneducated, unskilled, and of breaking the
law. The above are the observations of educators and researchers in soci-
etal problems. There is the need to probe further into the conditions of the
children and to analyze the complex impact of other factors, such as
broken homes.
Effects on Society. The growing number of divorced and widowed
mothers bringing up their children bring pressure to bear in the need for
their employment. The state should be concerned with the training of and
the finding of employment for women, and should implement a policy of
support for these mothers. Organizations of social workers with know-
ledge and experience must contribute their part to assist mothers and chil-
dren for the purpose of helping them build a stable and happy life.
Divorces have the consequence of increasing social problems in an already
fragile environment, such as that which exists in Ho Chi Minh City.

MARRIAGE, DIVORCE, FAMILY AND THE LAW

In Vietnam the marriage and family law has a progressive foundation.

Many of the Articles guarantee or protect women and families. However,
some aspects of the law, especially in the failure to penalize wrongs, result
in emotional, spiritual, and material difficulties for women and children
after divorce.
Article 1 of the law of marriage and family: 'guarantees the implemen-
tation of the voluntary, progressive, one wife-one husband, equality
between wife-and-husband marriage with a view to founding a democratic
family in permanent unity and happiness'. The law protects women from
the polygamy originally recognized in feudal society. Women are free to
select their life companion, with no imposition on the part of their parents.
Article 4 of Chapter I and Articles in Chapter IT (marriage) solidify the
protection by the law of the one-wife-one-husband family, equality
between the two parties in duties and interests towards the family.
When divorced, the women and their children are protected in their mate-
rial interests: 'When dividing properties, the interests of the wife and minor
children must be protected' (Article 41 of Law of Marriage and Family).
 Thai Thi Ngoc Du 85
The greatest defect of the law of marriage and family, consists in the
law taking no consideration of the wrongs of either of the two parties
when divorce is sought: 'the People's Court proceeds to adjudication in
cases in which either the husband or the wife is petitioner if arbitration
fails. If, on examination, the situation is found to be critical, co-habitation
impossible to go on, the objective of marriage unrealizable, then the
People's Court pronounces a decree for divorce (Article 40).'
According to Vietnamese society, marriage is a contract bearing a
special character which affects not only the family, but also public order.
Clear regulations are required for this kind of special contract. Thus, when
annulling a marriage, offences and wrongs should be examined so that the
responsibilities of each partner are identified and compensation is appro-
priate. Vietnam's law of marriage-family does not judge the wrongs of
wife or husband; this creates conditions for couples to divorce easily, the
court having just one important base which is: can or cannot the objective
of marriage be realized. The offending parties may wilfully cause family
contradictions, then petition for divorce; they are not bound by any moral
obligation, or material compensation, or to accept losses in the division of
property.
In the present societal and family situation of Ho Chi Minh City, the
law of divorce causes women sentimental, spiritual, and material losses.
By not apportioning wrongs, there often occurs the situation of offending
husbands themselves petitioning for divorce, and enjoying the same rights
as their wives over property. Also, by not apportioning wrongs, mainten-
ance to provide for children is only symbolic and husbands are not legally
bound over for not paying it. This has caused mothers with custody quite a
few problems.
There are cases in which wives who are ill-treated by their husbands do
not petition for divorce because children and property issues are not satis-
factorily settled on the basis of apportioning wrongs in divorce decisions.

CONCLUSIONS

Social disturbances during the war and post-war periods have brought
about abnormal circumstances in many families: wives and husbands have
been long separated, living apart in different social environments. This has
had a great impact on the divorce situation in Ho Chi Minh City. Long-
term effects of this cannot yet be assessed.
However, a look at the evolution of the situation in Ho Chi Minh City
reveals that divorces increased every year as is the general tendency of
86 Divorce and its Impact on Women and Families
urbanized societies. This trend manifests progress taking place in the per-
ception of each woman, with regard to her position and role in a democra-
tic progressive society. Women are more economically independent, more
conscious of their right of equality, of the right to live more for them-
selves, and not to endure unconditional self-sacrifice for husbands and
children as in the feudal society.
On the other hand, this trend is also signaling regressive aspects in a
society that is transforming itself. Traditional social concepts and values
guaranteeing the solidity of the family have to be faced while utilitarian
propensities gain ground. Finding methods of support to ensure the solid-
ity of the family in a social context undergoing many changes is necessary
to contribute to consolidating the stability of society and to achieving the
happiness of children and women.
5 Remarks on Women Who
Live Without Husbands
Nguyen Thanh Tam

INTRODUCTION

In Vietnam, although single life is not yet a popular tendency for either
men or women, one should not let pass unnoticed the increasing number
of families comprising a mother and her children. The women have a
child, even though they know they may be spurned, reproached, and
driven away by parents and society and will have to subsist on decreased
incomes. By deciding to bring about happiness for themselves by giving
birth to a child out of wedlock, the women have valiantly confronted not
only the old social prejudices, but also the material inadequacies and
difficulties. This essay discusses the lives of these women and recom-
mends clear policies and concrete help to improve their lives.
Sociological researchers have sought the origin of this lonely families 1
[single] phenomenon either in the sexual imbalance (caused by the war) or
in the uneven distribution of the population structure. Field surveys carried
out at the forestry sites for the exploitation of raw material used in paper-
making in Ha Tuyen, Hoang Lien and Vinh Phu provinces have proved
this explanation of sex imbalance.

SOCIAL PREJUDICE AND THE NEED OF INDIVIDUAL

HAPPINESS

With the function bestowed by the Creator, it is needless to debate the

problem of the woman's right to enjoy the happiness of the mother in the
family. But in present-day Vietnam, in addition to the very harmonious
families, not a few women have borne an unfortunate life: they must bring
up their child without their husband.
In the 1960s and 1970s, our women who had children without husbands
still suffered from the severity of social prejudices. Public opinion,
the office, the family and relatives are ready to condemn the phenom-
enon of having children without marriage. That outdated way of honest

87
88 Remarks on Women Who Live Without Husbands
preservation of morality and virtue of the society and family has resulted
in inhuman consequences causing heart-rending and tragic endings. If they
are cadres or workers, the women usually have to accept slighting eyes,
and must write a self-criticism and sometimes have to attend meetings
throughout the night to receive these condemning words. If the degree of
violation is considered to be serious, they may be dismissed from employ-
ment and expelled from mass organizations. If they are ordinary people,
they are spoken to scornfully and sneeringly by the village and are driven
out of their house by their parents because they 'have subjected their
family customs and habits to indignities'. Everybody seems to turn his or
her back on them. The child may be mistreated by the mother and aban-
doned to die or to grow up with a complex because he or she was born out
of wedlock.
In relating her life, Mrs T, a woman worker of the silvicultural farm in
Vinh Phu province, revealed:

When I decided to have a child [in 1984] I and he [the father of the
child] had to write our self-criticism. The management organized a
meeting lasting for several nights in order to oblige me to receive
[acknowledge] all the mistakes. Afterwards my salary was demoted, my
bonus and all other subsidies were cut.

At the same farm, Miss H, who was 28 years old, gave birth to her
second child out of wedlock with the hope that this time she would have a
son. For that reason, her salary was also decreased, her bonus was cut
and the silvicultural farm intended to fire her. After promising not to
relapse into such a mistake again, she had to work as a baby-sitter only 30
days after the birth. In many villages, even the women who have been
faithful to their husbands for decades, but who want to have a child as a
source of joy after their husband's death at the front, are sneered at and
condemned.
Preventive measures have not brought this phenomenon to an end.
Despite the fence of feudal morality, the number of families where the
women live with children but without their husband is increasing and
usually concentrates in silvicultural and agricultural farms and even in vil-
lages and cities. Though the babies are not regarded by the families and
collectives as in lawful wedlock, they are the pride of their mothers who
often take loving care of them. It is clear that when the woman does not
get married for whatever the reason, she can have children. The child
fulfils the woman's personal need of happiness, despite the old customs
and habits. Mrs M, a woman worker of the Ha Tuyen silvicultural farm,
 Nguen Thanh Tam 89
told us: 'I have to try to have a child.' At the same farm, Mrs M, Mrs L,
and Mrs H all affirmed that the child is a source of happiness, a reliance
when they grow old. They may have no husband, but it is imperative for
them to have children, though their lives are still poor and hard.

FROM THE INNERMOST FEELINGS TO COMMON LIFE

Each woman interviewed has her own life and family, but all have the
same wish: to have a child, despite the risk that they may be scorned,
reproached and driven away by their parents.
At the M.D. village, a beautiful woman had an infirmity from her child-
hood. The man who came to her was a mason who came up from the low-
lands. But they could not get married because her mother was afraid lest
her daughter would be miserable. The result of that furtive love was the
birth of a son to the woman without her having a marriage certificate.
Mistreated by her elder brother and sister-in-law, the young mother has to
live alone in a hut which is made by her mother's pity.
In the same village, Mrs N's circumstances were different. She was six
years older than her lover who lived with her for more than a month. After
the parents of both sides disagreed, he returned to his home and did not
come back for several years. The poor woman has been living with her
small child until now.
In the silvicultural production teams, the women living with their chil-
dren and without husbands are much more common than in the agricul-
tural co-operatives. In the team no. 7 of the D.H. farm, there are four
families of women living with children but without husbands. In the team
MD of the silvicultural farm T. Th., the families of such lonely women
[single] comprise one fourth of the total number of team families.
The young women come to the silvicultural farms for many reasons: by
accidental inspiration, or to fulfil the dream of escaping the hard life in the
countryside, or by assignment of the college after graduation. They live far
from their families, parents, and relatives. While working very hard, they
have no spiritual life and recreation. Because the number of men at the
farms is small, many girls have resigned themselves to their fate, handing
their bodies to married men or unfaithful lovers. This is the case for Mrs
H, Mrs N, Mrs L and many others. After sneaking love affairs at the
working site, a number of those men have returned to their native land
and to their wives. They have left behind the women workers with chil-
dren of a tender age. But what can those women do further when the law
only protects monogamy?
90 Remarks on Women Who Live Without Husbands
Through the woman's innermost feelings, we can determine the causes
of the emergence of lonely [single] women's families. They concentrate
on the following:

1. The sex imbalance is relatively great (in many silvicultural production

teams, the women make up from 60% to 70% of the total workforce).
In the forestry area, the main reason lies in the population structure,
and the uneven distribution by sex in the production teams. Many
women cannot find a husband in this working environment that is
short of men.
2. On the side of the men, they may thirst to fulfil the sentimental
insufficiencies caused by living far from their wives, or their unwhole-
some passions coincide with the women's desire to have a child.
3. There are women who either made a mistake, were past marriageable
age, or have had infirmities and, therefore, are not chosen by men for
marriage. A child fulfils a need to balance the womens' sentiment and
psychology. In addition, widows who had not yet had children wish to
have children as a sentimental support for the rest of their lives.

All these factors have provided society with a new kind of family: the
family composed only of mother and children, that is, the family of
women without husbands. Returning to the origin of these families, we
realize more clearly that the treatment, the looks, the punishment measures
of the past were inhuman, including the angles of conception, assessment,
and law. If, in the old feudal society, the talented and brave woman Ho
Xuan Huong spoke in favour of the women 'who were pregnant without
husband' and to discard the standard of feudal virtue and chastity to
worship one's husband's memory, why- in the last decade of the 20th
century - do the women continue to suffer from strict and rough preju-
dice? With the society's wish for their individual happiness, the sympathy
of the society for those women today has made them not too low, and their
children not discriminated against, but. ..

Sympathy is Not Enough:

It is Necessary to Have Clear Policies and Concrete Help

By deciding to bring about happiness for themselves by giving birth to a

child out of wedlock, these women have valiantly confronted not only the
old social prejudices, but also material inadequacies and difficulties. They
want the men who have passed their lives to share some part of the burden
 Nguen Thanh Tam 91
in raising the children, but they do not passively rely on them. Moreover,
they know the sentiments which the men have reserved for them may be
only pity or a sudden lust, and not a deep love to have an enduring
attachment.
All the lonely [single] woman families are living in continuously
difficult circumstances. They have to bring up one or two children (with
its many expenditures) in the condition of abolishment of their budget sub-
sidies. In the countryside, productive work needs labour. Without a man to
do heavy jobs, the woman has to do it herself or must engage workmen
and so sustain a lower income. In addition, the women worry about having
clothes for the child and for herself and about the roof which may col-
lapse in the next season of rain and storms. And, she has plenty of
difficulties which can rush in at any time. All this makes us realize that
spiritual encouragement is very necessary, but it cannot replace material
help.
In reality, though the welfare fund is small, the silvicultural production
teams have shown concern to the families of the women without husbands.
They have been helped in dismantling materials when building houses,
and this does not include the labour help of the team members. But in
some rural areas, families without husbands never receive any help from
the authorities, except some particular cases or families enjoying policies
of priority. But in some localities, the wives of martyrs have their subsi-
dies cut when they have a child out of wedlock, such as the case of Mrs D
in the C.D. cooperative (Vinh Phu province). In general, the parents and
relations of the lonely [single] women are poor; that's why the help in
money and materials is often small.
What is worth noticing here is that there has been a change in the policy
towards the lonely [single] women without husbands: the child born out of
wedlock is recognized by the law and his/her mother also enjoys the same
rights as the other mothers.
What we want to bring about for the lonely [single] women's families to
lessen their burden of poverty is beyond what their present social condi-
tions will permit. Therefore, economic subsidies are still the first and fore-
most need. But if there is no common stipulation - a concrete policy of
subsidies for the lone women - in different localities, they will be treated
in a casual way.
We should not think that in a society with innumerable different family
'nuclei', that the help for the lonely [single] women's families will encour-
age others to follow in that direction. Think of the future in front of us. Let
us not allow the childhood of the fatherless children to become a memory
of melancholy and self-pity when they grow up.
92 Remarks on Women Who Live Without Husbands
Note

I. In the early 1990s the term for single women and single heads of families is
'lonely women'. Reflecting the tension in the passage from traditional, rural
society to urban industrialization, this term most often means both 'single'
and 'lonely', reflecting how few other options there are for women in tradi-
tional society than marriage. 'Single' has been added parenthetically to the
text where the author uses the term 'lonely women families'. (Editor)
6 Abortions in Two Rural
Communes in Thai Binh
Province, Vietnam
Le Thi Nham Tuyet, Annika Johansson
and Nguyen The Lap

INTRODUCTION

Free abortions are a constitutional right of Vietnamese women. Compared

to women in many other countries who suffer from the consequences of
illegitimate and unsafe abortions, the Vietnamese women have a great
advantage. However, the present development in Vietnam- with rapidly
increasing abortion rates- presents special problems and concerns. This is
a study of abortion in two rural communes in Thai Binh, carried out in
1992. There have been no population-based studies about abortion in
Vietnam, and little is known about the topic. We have chosen a descriptive
and exploratory approach, to describe, in a defined locality, the extent and
type of abortions made during one year; to explore the cause of the
unwanted pregnancies leading to the abortions and their consequences, as
experienced by the women; and to look into some aspects of support and
decision-making within the family and the wider social network with
regard to family planning and abortions.

POPULATION AND FAMILY PLANNING IN THAI BINH

Thai Binh Province, located in the Red River Delta in the North of
Vietnam, is one of the most fertile and high yielding rice-growing
provinces in the north. Thai Binh has no major industrial or commercial
centre, nor any seaport or railway. Of its population of 1.7 million, over
95% live in the countryside making their living as rice farmers. Fishing
and salt-making along the coast, as well as handicrafts are also important
sources of income. Socially and economically Thai Binh has a homoge-
neous population that was in a precarious balance with the environment.

93
94 Abortions in Two Rural Communes
Land shortage that has been severe in Thai Binh for many years, is
increasing due to the natural increase of the population during recent years
and with the returning soldiers and labor migrants from the cities.
Birth rate and population growth in Thai Binh has been relatively low
over the last decade compared to that of other provinces. In 1989 the birth
rate in Thai Binh was 2.16 and growth rate 1. 75, while national rates were
3.10 and 2.10, respectively. However, the density of the population- over
1100 per square km - is among the highest in the country, and in the world
(Table 6.1 ).
To slow down the growth rate, the province has placed high priority on
family planning, following the national policy which stipulates a
maximum of two children per couple with three to five years of spacing
between them (Council of Ministers Instruction No 162, 1988). Maternal
and family planning services are provided in a network of communal
health centres and inter-communal clinics, backed up by district and
provincial hospitals. The main contraceptive method is the IUD, used by
about two-thirds of women of reproductive age in Thai Binh, while other
modern contraceptives are only slowly beginning to be accepted and used
(Table 6.2). The province is considered to have one of the most successful
family planning programs in the country in terms of contraceptive use and
fertility reduction. However, a sequel of this is a high and rapidly increas-
ing rate of abortions.

THE ABORTION ISSUE

In traditional Vietnamese society, abortions were considered immoral and

were severely condemned. At Vietnam's independence in 1945, abortion
was legalized, but long before that they were accepted in public opinion.
Since 1981, when the national population and family planning programme
was launched, all public health services more easily agree to perform abor-

Table 6.1 Population, density, birth rate and growth rate in%,
Thai Binh and whole country

Million Population/sq.km BR GR
Thai Binh 1.638 1.065 2.16 1.75
whole country 64.412 195 3.10 2.10

Source: 1989 Census.

 Le Thi Nham Tuyet et al. 95
Table 6.2 Use of modem contraceptives among women of reproductive age in
Thai Binh

Method %
IUD 66
Contraceptive pills 1
Condoms 0.5
Sterilization 1.5
Other 4
No modem method 28

Source: Commission for Population and Family Planning, Thai Bing 1992.

tions than in the past. Today induced abortions are freely available upon
request. The women are given free medicines and have the right to some
allowances after the operation.
When abortion services became available in Thai Binh in the early 1980s,
the abortion rate increased rather slowly, but from the late 1980s the increase
was quite dramatic. From 1985 to 1989 the rate more than doubled from 330
to 707 abortions per 1000 live births. In 1990 it had reached 850, a rate
which had more than doubled by September 1992. Abortions increased not
only in Thai Binh but in many other provinces of the country (Table 6.3).
In 1991 there were a total of about 1.6 million abortions perfom1ed in
the country, most of them before the 12th week of pregnancy (Table 6.4).
Between 1990 and 1991 the proportion of late abortions had increased
from 3% to 4%.
Compared to other agricultural provinces from which data are available,
the abortion rates in Thai Binh are high, almost as high as those in the
larger cities of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. If the trend continues

Table 6.3 Abortion in 1991 : ratio of

abortions per 1000 live births

Thai Binh 1190

HaBac 820
Tien Giang 860
HaNoi City 1350
Ho Chi Minh City 1690

Source: National Commission for Population and Family Planning.

96 Abortions in Two Rural Communes
Table 6.4 Gestational age at the time of abortion

Gestational age, The two communes Whole country Whole country

weeks % (n ::; 228) 1990 1991
<6 31 18 25
6<8 49 78 72
8 < 12 20
12- 0 3 4

Source: NCPFP.

uncurbed, in the coming years Thai Binh will face a situation where there
will be twice as many abortions as births. This trend, a cause of concern to
health managers, poses a severe strain on medical services and accounts
for a disproportionate share of the costs for family planning services.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: THE COMMUNES

Dong Hoa and Hoang Dieu - average-sized, rice growing communes -

were selected for the study. Both lie in the vicinity of Thai Binh town and
belong to the municipal health services. Each has a health centre serving
the commune population, where family planning services also are pro-
vided. IUD insertion and menstrual regulation is performed weekly at the
health centres, while abortions after the eighth week are referred to the
district hospital.
Dong Hoa has a population of slightly over 7000 inhabitants; Hoang
Dieu has almost 10,000. Socially and economically the communes are
similar, and both have a Catholic minority of about I 0% of the population.
There is a striking difference between the two communes with regard to
births and abortion rates during 1991. In Hong Dieu the abortion rate was
twice as high as that in Dong Hoa, while birth rates and third child per-
centages were lower than in Dong Hoa and lower than the average for the
province. To understand the possible causes for the differences, the results
from the survey have been analyzed for the two communes separately.

Total Population Birth %3rd Abortions per

Rate child /000 births
Hoang Dieu 9688 1.5 18 1100
Dong Hoa 7230 2.3 28 540
 Le Thi Nham Tuyet et at. 97
THE SAMPLE SELECTION AND METHOD

The survey was based on a purposive sample of all women in the two
communes who had undergone abortions in 1991. Altogether 249 cases of
abortions were recorded, of whom 21 women could not be interviewed for
the following reasons: moved from the commune (4), unmarried and
declined the interview (1), the name was not possible to identify (16).
Thus, 228 women remained for the survey.
The 228 women identified were interviewed using a questionnaire which
included background data, reproductive and abortion history, contraceptive
use and the women's experience of the abortions and their consequences.
There were also some questions on decision-making and support related to
family planning and abortions, between husband and wife and within the
wider network of kin, neighbours, and community groups.
Open interviews using tape recorders were conducted with six women,
to voice their experiences and views related to abortions in more depth.
These women had a history of at least two abortions; some even had five.
They do not represent an average picture, but were selected because of
their special experiences. The interviews were transcribed and translated
into English, and have been used in the analysis to raise topics of interest
and to illustrate survey findings.

INTERVIEW BIAS

We have not attempted any tests for possible interviewer bias in this study
but will raise one issue here: the male-female issue. Abortion is strictly
private which is preferably discussed woman-to-woman or man-to-man. In
our field work in Thai Binh, these matters were discussed in what to a
foreign researcher seems a surprisingly open and public manner even
between men and women. Both men and women interviewers carried out
the survey, and that may have influenced the interview situation and the
results, but differently and probably less than would be the case in a
Western research setting. We do not know to what extent, but leave the
question open as a reminder when interpreting the study findings. However,
the in-depth interviews were conducted only by female interviewers.

RESULTS: OCCUPATION AND ECONOMIC LEVELS

Most of the women interviewed were rice farmers. The farming occupation
was a bit more common in Dong Hoa (92%) than in Hoang Dieu (80% ).
98 Abortions in Two Rural Communes
As an indicator for living conditions, we asked about food sufficiency
for the family. Over 80% said that they had enough food for the family all
year; 7 percent had enough to make savings, and about 10% said that they
lacked food for two months or more of the year. There was no significant
difference between the two groups of women.

RESULTS: AGE, RELIGION, AND EDUCATION

Age groups DongHoa% Hoang Dieu%

<19 I 0
20-24 10 8
25-29 18 22
30-34 30 30
35-39 19 24
40-44 17 13
45-49 5 3
Total 100 100

The majority of the women were between 30 and 40 years of age, with
a similar age distribution between age groups. As mentioned, both com-
munes have a Catholic population of about 10%. In the sample there
were 4% Catholics among the Dong Hoa women, and 10% among the
women from Hoang Dieu. It is commonly assumed that the Catholics
are more opposed to abortions than non-Catholics. The tendency in our
study does not confirm this assumption: there were more Catholics in
the sample of women in Hoang Dieu where the abortion rate is the
highest.

RESULTS: EDUCATIONAL LEVEL OF THE WOMEN

Level of education DoangHoa% HoangDieu%

No education 0 I
First primary (1-4) 11 II
Second primary (5-9) 75 60
Secondary (10-12) 14 16
Higher education 0 12
Total 100 100
 Le Thi Nham Tuyet et al. 99
Only one women was illiterate; two-thirds had stopped school after
primary level; and 15% had been to secondary school. The women from
Hoang Dieu were slightly better educated: 12% had some higher educa-
tion, of whom 3 women had a university degree. In Dong Hoa no woman
had gone beyond secondary school.
In Hoang Dieu one woman was unmarried and one was widowed. All
other women were married, and most of their husbands lived at home per-
manently. In Hoang Dieu 13% of the men worked and lived away from
home; in Dong Hoa this group totalled only 4%. Thus, there were no
significant differences between the two groups of women, but there was a
tendency that in Hoang Dieu slightly more women had a higher education.
There were more employees among them and more who had their hus-
bands working away from home. Concerning religious affiliation, the
Catholics were slightly underrepresented among the Dong Hoa group of
women, which is the commune with the lower abortion rate.

RESULTS: PREGNANCY, ABORTION AND LIVE BIRTHS

The 228 women had a total of over 900 pregnancies. Of them, almost 60%
had resulted in live births, while over one-third had ended in abortion. The
remaining were either miscarriages or still-births. Thus, the 'average
woman' in this group had a history of 4.1 pregnancies, 1.5 abortions, and
2.4 live births. There were no significant differences between the two
communes. As this group of women was a purposive sample of all women
who had undergone abortions in 1991, it does not give a representative
picture of all the women in reproductive ages in the communes.

Abortions and live births in relation to pregnancies, and average numbers

(n = 228)

Total number % Average number

per woman
Abortions 341 37 1.5
Live births 548 59 2.4
Still-births
and miscarriages 39 4
Pregnancies 928 100 4.1

For two thirds of the women undergoing abortion in 1991, it was the
first time; for 25%, it was the second time, while less than 10% had their
100 Abortions in Two Rural Communes
third or more abortion. The number of abortions in different age groups
was:

Number of abortions by age of the woman (n = 288)

Number of women by age group

No. oftotal Total n Women 20-24 25-29 30-34 35-59 40-44 44-
abortions %

I 147 4 18 35 41 26 19 8
2 56 25 I I2 I6 I5 II I
3 I5 7 I 6 8
4 5 2 3 2
5 5 2 2 2 I
Total 228 100 20 47 68 51 33 9

The government's family planning policy emphasis is on 'consciousness

and responsibility', however, in some areas (for example, Thai Binh) the
'fine method' which fines the family that does not follow the policy is still
being used occasionally. Seventy percent of the abortions were performed
for women over 30 years of age, while abortions for women younger than
25 and older than 45 years of age were relatively rare. The 25 women who
had had three or more abortions were, with one exception, over 30 years
of age.

RESULTS: DESIRED FAMILY SIZE AND DECISIONS ON

ABORTION

Fertility behaviour is influenced by a complex set of cultural, socio-

political, and economic conditions. Judging from the interviews and the
data from the women's reproductive histories, it seems that the majority of
abortions in this group were performed both with a view to adjust family
size to household resources and plans, and to adhere to the family size plan-
ning policy. Most of the women had had their first abortion after the second
or third child, when they were already in their early middle-age and the
couple presumably wanted to stop having children. The penalties for sur-
passing the two-child family norm are a little bit severe, especially in
Hoang Dieu. In fact, most of the women already had two children or more:
 Le Thi Nham Tuyet et al. 101

Number of children Number of women %

0 2 1
I 46 20
2 81 36
3 99 43
Total 228 100

Twenty percent of the women had an abortion after the first child. These
women were in the younger age groups and wanted to space births. Some
of them had decided to wait with the second child until they had finished
the building of a new house for the family; some just wanted to avoid the
fine they would have to pay for having the children too closely spaced.
Asked about the desired number of children, the majority of women said
that they wanted two children - one boy and one girl - while less than one
fourth said that they wanted three children or more. Thus, the desired
number of children was said to be somewhat lower than the number they
actually had.
The husbands' views on number of children were quite similar, accord-
ing to the wives, except that the husbands put more emphasis on having
boys. 'Would your husband accept having only two girls?' was a question
to the women, to which 60% replied negatively. The son preference is a
prominent feature of the Vietnamese culture. Only sons can maintain the
family line of descent, and it is their responsibility to provide for the
parents in their old age. The preference for boys is reflected in our material
in that there were very few abortions performed in cases where the woman
had only girls. 1

RESULTS: REASON FOR THE UNWANTED PREGNANCY

The main focus of interest in this study was to understand why the
unwanted pregnancy occurred, leading to abortion, and what the conse-
quences were for the woman. The complexity of the woman's behaviour
and choice, or lack of choice, in handling her sexual relations and fertility
is difficult to grasp in a questionnaire survey of this nature. In fact, the
pregnancy may be wanted but circumstances may compel the woman to
decide on abortion. Or the 'costs' of contraception may be judged by the
102 Abortions in Two Rural Communes

woman as higher than the risk of getting pregnant, so she chooses not to
use contraceptives. There are also the cases of contraceptive failure, or
lack of access to effective methods.
The 228 women were asked about whether or not contraceptives were
used before the pregnancy that led to abortion. Of all women undergoing
abortion in 1991, one-third had used contraceptives but they had failed
(IUD failure, 14% ), while 64% did not use any means of contraception.
Among the two-thirds of women (n = 145) who had not used any means
of contraception, a variety of reasons were given. The majority referred to
the problem of finding a suitable method:

Menstruation cycle and withdrawal method failure

Reasons for non-use of contraception (n = 145) %

Have tried, cannot find a suitable method 69
Still breast feeding 16
Husband dislikes contraceptive use 2
Husband travelling 5
Wife dislikes contraceptive use 5
Doesn't know where to get advice 3
Total 100

For almost all of the women who had tried contraceptives before but
failed, it was the IUD that had caused the most problems, as seen in this
interview:

The case of Th

Th. is 34 years old. She married at 28, had her first daughter at 29, and
another child a year later. The couple decided to stop having more chil-
dren as they felt they could not afford a third child. Then the problems
of Th. began. In four years she had five abortions. The first three were
done after she had got pregnant using an IUD. Failing in IUD use, the
couple decided to use the rhythm method, which worked for a while,
but after another year she was pregnant again and had her fourth abor-
tion. She was then advised by the doctor to use contraceptive pills,
which she did for some months, but they gave her a strong backache:
'I went to the health centre to have the backache treated by acupunc-
ture. It became all right and I started taking pills again. But the backache
resumed and I decided to give up the pills. My husband brought home
some condoms that he had been given at the health centre to distribute to
 Le Thi Nham Tuyet et al. 103
other men in the commune. We tried to use them, but they caused me
inflammations. We took up the rhythm method, but as my menstrual
cycle was not so regular, I must have miscalculated and I am now preg-
nant again. But right now I am too busy, and I have to wait until after the
harvest to have an abortion. I don't know how to deal with contracep-
tives now ... '

A number of women replied that they were still breast-feeding and

therefore didn't use any contraceptives, as they didn't expect to get preg-
nant. We have no information on the period of exclusive breast feeding at
the time of weaning for these women, which influences the return of fertil-
ity. However, there are indications from other studies that the period of
exclusive breast feeding is shortening and also that the traditional period
of abstinence after delivery is relaxing. A change in traditional patterns of
child spacing could explain the relatively high number of pregnancies in
this category.
One third of all the women had used some methods of birth control, but
still got pregnant:

Contraceptive failure (n = 75)

Method Used %
IUD 33
Condom 5
Withdrawal 41
Rhythm method 21
Total 100

Most of the pregnant women used a 'natural method' more or less regu-
larly, while one-third said that they had become pregnant while using the
IUD. From the interviews, it appears that many have tried using the IUD
but failed and then turned to natural methods. Others refuse modern con-
traceptives altogether and tried their best to regulate fertility by relying on
withdrawal and on the period of lactation amenorrhea.
One conclusion from these data is that problems of IUD use are very
often connected with the unwanted pregnancies. The complaints raised
about the IUDs were many: headaches, backaches, abdominal pains, irreg-
ular bleedings, displacement of the IUD, the IUD being 'too big'. Some of
these problems may be due to inadequate quality of the medical services,
and may be also due to the problems of genital infections, which are
common. Furthermore, even with good services there are always women
104 Abortions in Two Rural Communes
for whom the IUD is not suitable. The lack of good alternative methods
compels these women to keep on using a method for which they are physi-
cally unfit. It is also likely that psychologically the level of tolerance to
side-effects is lower than it would be if the women felt that they had a free
choice in family planning matters, if they had access to a variety of
methods, and were well informed about advantages and disadvantages of
these methods.
Concerning the husbands' involvement in fertility regulation, we note
that very few were said by their wives to oppose contraceptive use (2% ).
From some of the interviews it appeared that husbands are very concerned
about their wives' health problems and are co-operative in trying alterna-
tive methods of contraception. However, so far it has been difficult for the
men to take active responsibility for contraception, as the only modern
male method available, condoms, has not been promoted and they are
associated with problems such as giving the women inflammations.
Vasectomy is now being introduced, but there is strong cultural resistance
in the society against both male and female sterilization.

RESULTS: COMPLICATIONS OF ABORTIONS

In general, it seems that the women become aware of their pregnancy very
early. If the pregnancy is unwanted and if there are no practical or other
constraints, shortly after they became aware that they are pregnant, they
go to the commune health centre for a menstrual regulation. One-third of
all the abortions were performed before the 6th week of the pregnancy,
half between the 6th and 8th week, and none after the 12th week (Table
6.4). But sometimes the women's work-load prevents them from seeking
early treatment, and also from taking proper care of themselves after the
abortion:

The case of N., 28 year old, 3 children, 2 abortions

'In May, when I became aware that I was pregnant, I could not go to the
health centre to suck out the fetus because it was harvest time and my
husband was away from home. When I was 2 112 months, I had to go to
the district hospital to have the fetus scraped out. The abortion was done
free of charge, without having to pay. In addition, I got medicine and
tonic without having to pay. But I had no nourishing food to eat because
we had little money, and no rest afterwards. The day after, I had to go to
the fields. I felt a strong headache and bellyache, and I was dead tired.
My health deteriorated and I had to use antibiotics and bought some
 Le Thi Nham Tuyet et al. 105
medical herbs from the herbalist in the market. After some time I gradu-
ally got better and I have now completely recovered.'

The women were asked to describe what type of complications, if any,

they experienced after the abortion. It should be noted that the survey was
carried out in February, and the women were asked about the events during
the preceding calendar year, i.e. events that may have happened between 2
to 13 months earlier. Thus, their memories of how they felt after the abor-
tion, as well as the time period for the complication may have varied.

The case of Th., 34 years old, 2 children, 5 abortions

How was your health after the last abortion?

'It was quite normal. I felt somewhat dizzy and had a backache, so I
always have some medicine at home to take.'
And how was your sleep?
'When I knew I was pregnant I could not sleep well. I was very afraid to
get pregnant and worried about the abortion. I would get my normal
sleep back only after the abortion.'

What is considered 'normal' is as much culturally defined as it is a

physical status that can be described objectively. To these women it was
'normal' to be dizzy and have a backache and a headache after the abor-
tions. When 18% of the women in the study say that they felt 'normal'
after the abortion, we do not know exactly what they meant. However, the
82% who did not feel 'normal' gave a full picture of the types of compli-
cations they experienced after the abortion:

Complications after the abortion (n = 188)

Complications after the abortion (n = 188) %

Tired 68
Insomnia 28
Headache 54
Neckache 43
Loss of appetite 32
Abdominal pains 20
Prolonged bleeding 15
Decrease of menstruation 34
Increase of menstruation 17
Vaginal discharge 30
Fever 7
106 Abortions in Two Rural Communes
Most ofthe women had more than one symptom. The complaints indi-
cated a general state of being ill, while medical complications such as
infections seemed to be less frequent.

RESULTS: INFLUENCE AND SUPPORT IN THE ABORTION

DECISION

The fear of getting pregnant and of having to go through an abortion was

frequently brought up in the interviews. Most women in the survey - two-
thirds - stated that they were afraid of the abortion. The fear may have
been related to the operation itself. We can also assume that the kind of
support the woman gets from the family members and other close people
is important for the confidence or lack of confidence she feels:

The case ofT., 31 years old, 2 children, 3 abortions

Did your husband agree to your abortions?

'Sometimes yes, sometimes no.'
Why did he disagree?
'He said that abortions are very harmful to the woman's health. His
parents had told him that.'
When he didn't agree, what did you do?
'I didn't want another child, so I went myself to the hospital. I went
without the knowledge of either my husband or my parents-in-law. I
was afraid that they would neither want me to have the third child, nor
allow me to have an abortion in any form. So I had to leave for the hos-
pital in a quiet and secret way, early in the morning, without the knowl-
edge of anyone. Unfortunately the medical workers performed the
operation late in the afternoon, so I returned late in the evening.'

T. was one of the few women in the group who said that she decided
alone to have an abortion. In most cases - over 90% - the women said that
husband and wife together made the decision.
Views on abortion differ by generations. About one-third of these
women said that their parents and parents-in-law had advised against the
abortion. This is hardly surprising. We can expect the older generation to
be more concerned about the maintenance of the family line and of secu-
rity in old age than the young ones; therefore, they advise against abortion
because they want more grandchildren. They may also have stronger
ethical objections against abortions than the young, and fear the health
 Le Thi Nham Tuyet et a/. 107
consequences more. We asked the women if they were somehow 'pushed'
into having an abortion. Only 5% replied affirmatively, mentioning the
mass organizations (for example, Women's Union) or friends. However,
the distinction between their own decisions and being 'pushed' is some-
times difficult to make.

The case ofT. (quoted above)

The times you went to the clinic or hospital to terminate your preg-
nancy, did you get some advice from your friends or relatives, or from
the unions?
'I got advice from my friends who spoke in favour of abortions because
there was no other way and no other solution.'

T. is a woman who is very determined and capable of carrying through

her own decisions, even without the knowledge of her husband and
parents-in-law. But her story also tells us that her choice is limited; for
her, the abortion is 'the only solution'.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS

From our exploratory study in the two communes, certain conclusions

may be drawn. On the whole, the abortion pattern among the women in
the survey seems relatively uncomplicated. Most abortions were first or
second abortions, performed for married women over 30 years of age,
with two or more children. They presumably are intending to stop child
bearing. Younger women used abortion to space births. Less than 10%
had had three or more abortions, and these women were, with one excep-
tion, above 30 years of age. The majority of abortions were performed
before the 8th week of pregnancy, and there were few indications of
severe medical complications. However, the medical or service aspects of
abortion were not part of the study.
The survey revealed a quite strong sense of discomfort and fear among
many women related to the decision to terminate the pregnancy, and expe-
riences of ill health and fatigue as a consequence of the abortion.
What complicates the picture of abortions in Thai Binh (and in Vietnam
at large) is the high and rapidly increasing rates during recent years. In one
of the two communes, the abortion rate was II 00 to I 000 births, which
was close to the average for Thai Binh in I991. During the first nine
months of 1992, the rate in Thai Binh had increased to over I700 per I 000
108 Abortions in Two Rural Communes
births. If this trend continues, there will soon be twice as many abortions
as births in Thai Binh annually, and the young women today will go
through more abortions than deliveries during their reproductive period.
Abortions, then, are no longer the back-up to contraceptive methods, as
they are supposed to be, but one of the main methods for fertility control.
The reason for the unwanted pregnancies for the women in the study is,
to a large extent, related to problems of IUD use, and to the lack of alter-
native contraceptive methods. Family planning service providers should
be responsible for putting people in the two communes in a situation in
which they have other choices, such as pills, or sterilization. There is a
very great need to improve the services and increase the variety of
methods, including methods for men. The need for counselling and careful
follow-up of contraceptive users is amply demonstrated in the study.
Inadequate services can partly explain the reasons for the unwanted
pregnancies, but not the reason for the rapid increase in abortions. It seems
that the fertility decline in Thai Binh during the 1980s has reached a
bottom mark, under which it will not go without the 'help' of extensive
use of abortions. One example would seem to be Hoang Dieu Commune.
With a rate of abortions twice as high as that in the other communes, and
much lower birth rate and proportion of women with a third child. In
Hoang Dieu, the local family planning policy and the penalties for sur-
passing the two-child norm are much stricter than in Dong Hoa, which
probably explains the difference in abortions and birth rates. We have
compared the two communes in respect to all study variables, but found
no significant differences.
A high rate of abortions is not only a very expensive means of fertility
control, it can also become a threat to women's physical and psychological
health and to social life at large. When a medical technology, which
should be a right of women, becomes 'the only solution' and causes them
considerable fear and feelings of ill health, we believe that a change of
policy is needed. Improvements in quality services must be coupled with
the recognition that abortions can not be used as a method of population
control but only as a back-up to contraceptive services.

References

Demographic and Health survey 1988. Project VIE 88-P04.

Archives materials of the Nation Committee for population and Thai Binh, Ha
Bac, Ho Chi Minh, Tien Giang, Hue city and province, 1991.
'Abortion in Developing Country'. Information from WHO.
 Le Thi Nham Tuyet et al. 109
Note

1. Health Protection Law Legal Publishing House 1989 Resolution NH by the

Central Party Committee on Policy of Population and Family Planning.
Part A.
7 Gender and the Allocation
of Time: Impact on the
Household Economy
Linda J. Yarr

What do women need to fulfil their potential and ensure their equality with
men? In essence the question is feminist: a recognition that women are
unjustly underprivileged and that active intervention and struggle are needed
to reverse the effects of centuries of discrimination. On the basis of case
studies, government policies, laws, the strategies and programmes of
women's organizations, observations in the field, and collections of data with
Vietnamese researchers, the picture emerges that on both sides of the Pacific
women are hard pressed to assert their rights under the weight of tradition
and emerging global forces. Although the United States and Vietnam stand at
opposite poles of many measures of economic well-being, comparing the
allocation of time in households gives insight into the impact of social poli-
cies, cultural values, and economic trends on gender inequality in the home
and in society. This paper uses the dimension of time, a resource allocated
between men and women in a household, to identify the impact of historical
and contemporary forces on gender inequality in Vietnam.
If feminist research methodology acknowledges and validates the sub-
jective starting point of systematic inquiry, 1 this paper's genesis lies in the
author's lament, 'Where has all the time gone? I am pedalling faster than
ever but the finish line keeps receding.' As for many women who have
assumed or been ascribed multiple roles - worker, wife, mother, daughter
of elderly parents- time has become a palpable and increasingly rare com-
modity to be haggled over, traded, negotiated or even stolen. In this
context, I cannot help but wonder, is this state of affairs merely a personal
failing, the product of disorganization and inefficiency, or the result of
societal expectations of the respective responsibilities of the household
and wider social organization, cultural norms regarding the work of male
and female household members, and economic conditions in which the
labour of men and women is rewarded differently? It is possible to identify
the society-wide influences of allocation of time within households in
Vietnam and to draw comparisons with the situation in the United States.

110
 Linda J. Yarr 111
In recent years research has demonstrated that on a world-wide basis
women labour far more than men while holding fewer assets. In 1980 the
United Nations concluded, 'Women constitute half the world's population,
perform nearly two-thirds of its work hours, receive one-tenth of the world's
income, and own less than one-hundredth of the world's property.' 2 In
specific case studies, researchers have also examined changes in women's
participation in the paid work force, domestic roles, and shifts in the interna-
tional division of labour. 3 Additionally, in referring to Vietnam and the
United States, one must gauge the consequences of the American war in
Vietnam on economic and social conditions for women in both countries.
In Vietnam women displayed their skill and courage in battle, in
demonstrations for peace, and in clandestine organization. In the United
States, political activism for civil rights and an end to the war in Vietnam
helped to propel a new wave of feminist consciousness and struggle for
women's rights in the late 1960s and 1970s. Despite these political gains,
the economic impactof the war on both countries was such that women's
economic gains were hardly commensurate with the expectations engen-
dered by their political activities.
The Vietnamese fought their wars of independence against France and
the U.S. to extricate themselves from economic and political domination.
In both wars Vietnamese women fought and shouldered extra responsibili-
ties on the home front. Their active participation won them constitutional
provisions for equal rights in all spheres as well as the political clout of
a national organization, the Vietnamese Women's Union, 11 million
members strong. They have also borne huge social, economic, and envi-
ronmental costs in the wars.
The removal of large numbers of men from the production lines to the
battle front drew women into industry and areas of responsibility they had
not occupied previously. Accordingly, Resolution No. 31 of March 8,
1967 of the Council of Ministers aimed at increasing the number of
women workers in state enterprises and services while setting out stipula-
tions to protect women's health. 4 However, in contrast to the case of the
'Rosie the Riveters' of the United States during World War II, there was
no push to return women to the domestic sphere in exchange for a 'family
wage' earned by the demobilized men. If the industrial powers in the West
could afford to grant their workers a family wage, it was because workers
in the Third World were forced to accept substandard wages.
Vietnamese women always worked to assure family income and basic
living standards: cultivating rice and other crops in the rural areas or
engaging in petty commerce in the cities. Furthermore, Vietnam faced a
lengthy succession of wars, with France, the U.S., China, and Cambodia,
112 Gender and the Allocation of Time
leaving women alone to support themselves, their children, and elderly
relatives. 5 The current demographic imbalance leaves 94 men per 100
women in urban areas and 90: 100 in the countryside. 6 According to the
1989 Census, women's economic activity rates are very high and even
higher than those of men in the age groups where males enjoy greater
access to higher levels of education. 7
The consequences of the U.S. war in Vietnam for American women
were less direct in terms of stimulating increased participation in the work
force. In its conduct of the war in Vietnam, the U.S. government shied
away from mobilizing the population for war and attempted to supply both
guns and butter: military equipment for use in Vietnam and funds for the
domestic initiatives of the Great Society anti-poverty programme. The
escalation of the war in 1965 coincided with an economy operating at
nearly full employment as a result of the 1964 tax cut. Therefore the
failure to pay for the war through bonds or taxes led to inflation and a
reduction in the real wages of American families. 8 Women entered the
work force not only to gain financial independence and fulfilment but also
to support sagging family incomes. The shifts in global investment pat-
terns and rise of the newly industrializing countries, partly as a result of
the war in Vietnam, hastened changes in the manufacturing sector of the
United States; for many of its heartland industries succumbed to foreign
competition. This process of deindustrialization led to the elimination of
many 'family wage' jobs held by men while women found work in the
expanding service sector notoriously short on wages, benefits, and full-
time status. 9 Whereas the percentage of males in the work force steadily
declined in the years 1965-1984, the percentage of employed women
increased. 10 Today, full-time homemaking occupies only about one fifth of
U.S. women; by the turn of the century, women will be the majority of the
work force and most of them will be mothers. 11
Thanks to the egalitarian ethic of the socialist state and their full partici-
pation in the fight for independence, Vietnamese women enter the work
force with legal supports and standards their American counterparts are
still struggling to achieve. Vietnamese women have enjoyed a constitu-
tional guarantee of equal rights with men since 1946. American women
saw their hopes for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment dashed
for the second time in 1982. Vietnamese law has codified the principle of
equal pay for equal work between men and women since 1947 and it was
reaffirmed in Article 24 of the 1959 Constitution. 12 Article 63 of the
current 1992 Constitution states that 'Women and men have equal rights
in all respects - in political, economic, cultural, social and family life. The
state and society are responsible for raising the political, cultural,
 Linda J. Yarr 113
scientific, technical and professional standards of women, and constantly
improving their role in society.' American women had to await the
passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to
attain similar rights. Aligning themselves with current international stand-
ards for women's rights, Vietnam is a signatory of the Convention on the
Elimination of Discrimination against Women adopted by the United
Nations General Assembly on November 7, 1967, whereas the United
States has still not signed it. 13
In Vietnam this exemplary record of progressive legislation and policies
to protect and support women can only go so far to lift the weight of tradi-
tional gender ideology. Since Vietnam's independence in 1954 and
reunification in 1975, women have made significant gains in access to edu-
cation, employment, land use, and rights within the family. Nevertheless,
women activists in Vietnam recognize the need for continued educational
programmes to change people's thinking about gender relations. The
Vietnamese Women's Union has organized a series of programmes to
raise 'gender awareness' among government officials and policy makers.
The root of the problem is the oft-repeated acknowledgement that women
face a 'double burden' of work in society and work at home. The major
policy response has been to enact protective legislation barring women
from certain occupations and to provide supports for child-bearing, such
as six months' paid maternity leave, regulations allowing women time to
nurse their babies, and family laws that prohibit divorce within a year of
the birth of a child. Many feminists would argue that protectionist legisla-
tion merely serves to ghettoize women into lower-paying occupations by
making it too expensive for firms to hire women if men can be found to do
the work.
The new economic reform policies of doi moi (renovation) have brought
these contradictions to a head. Since state enterprises have been forced to
become cost effective, women have lost their jobs in droves. Once women
are pushed into trying to make a living in the informal economy, they lose
the protection and benefits of the progressive laws made on their behalf.
Furthermore, new jobs created in the export sector, such as those in the
new export processing zone, attract foreign capital by touting low wage
levels. Describing the benefits of the Tan Thuan export processing zone
near Ho Chi Minh City, the Free China Journal of Taiwan notes,

Labor cost is another attraction of Tan Thuan. Chen Yao-tsu, of Tan

Thuan's management office, said a construction worker makes about
US$3 per day. Hiring a female worker for a textile company inside the
zone costs only US$25 to US$30 each month. 14
114 Gender and the Allocation ofTime
Equal pay for equal work laws do not solve the problem of the gender gap
in income levels if there is segregation of jobs on the basis of sex and
those jobs that attract males are better paid. The 1989 census for Vietnam
confirms a pattern of job segregation by sex:

Males were slightly more numerous in industry, particularly heavy indus-

try. In occupations relating to electricity and machine work, males
accounted for 86 per cent of employees, in metallurgy 83 per cent, in
energy 78 per cent and in construction 76 per cent. Females predominated
in less heavy occupations such as the clothing industry (77 per cent),
weaving (86 per cent) and sales and supplies, or trade (79 per cent). 15

The need for women to obtain fair compensation for their labour is all the
more critical since they are clustered in the very sectors of the economy
that are most likely to expand as Vietnam increases its engagement with
the global economy. 16
In the United States, if women were augmenting their presence in the
working world, they were not making sizeable gains in earnings relative to
men's salary levels; although the wage gap narrowed, it was because
men's salaries were declining and not because women's salaries were
risingY Increasingly, families required two wage earners to maintain a
middle-class lifestyle.
In Vietnam today equal access to jobs and education is clearly a concern
of both the state and the Women's Union. Nevertheless, certain policies
work at cross purposes and tend to diminish educational prospects for
women. The need to prove fiscal restraint to the International Monetary
Fund and the World Bank has led to the establishment of school fees at the
secondary level. Families appear to be more likely to invest in the educa-
tion of a boy than a girl. Accordingly, as Le Thi has acknowledged, 'The
number of school drop-outs, especially among girls, is on the increase.' 18
Furthermore, land use allocation based on the number of people in the
household and the family responsibility system in agriculture have made it
more lucrative for a family to use girls' labour in the household and raises
the opportunity cost in sending them to school. This tendency will only
serve to limit occupational choices for women.
Vietnam's economic renovation policies aim to stimulate economic
activity in all sectors, public and private, rural and urban. Although the
move to put state enterprises on a ·strict cost-effective footing has resulted
in lay-offs and unemployment among female employees, the state and the
Women's Union have been trying to promote private enterprise and house-
hold income-generating activities.
 Linda J. Yarr 115
Economic renovation has had a profound impact in the countryside.
There is a contradiction between the family responsibility system that allo-
cates land use on the basis of household size and family planning goals
aimed at restricting couples to one or two children and no more. The
policy creates an incentive to have more children and to keep youth, espe-
cially girls, at home to help with agricultural tasks. The need to encourage
extra income-generating activities among rural families and to promote
exportable surplus products spawned the 'household economy' pro-
gramme. The Women's Union lends start-up capital to women to create
home-based enterprises such as pig-raising, embroidery, handicrafts, and
mushroom growing. Loans are tied to adherence to family-planning goals.
Raising pigs for example, produces frozen pork for export thus earning
foreign exchange for the country and enables the family to pay school fees
for children. A visit to a participating household in Khanh Hau village in
Long An Province demonstrated that the burden of the household
economy fell primarily on the shoulders of the wife. Beaming with pride
over the birth that day of ten healthy piglets, the wife in the family
responded to my question as to what she did in a typical day. She rose
before dawn to cook food for the pigs. After the pigs were fed, she cooked
and served breakfast to her family, cleaned up, and worked in the rice
fields. She then returned to prepare lunch for the family, cleaned up, and
took a short rest. In the afternoon, she worked in the fields, returned to
clean the pig pen, prepare another meal for the pigs, and cook dinner for
the family. Her husband works in the fields and earns extra income
hauling items in a cart. The pig raising gave this family a measure of econ-
omic security, but it seems to have added an additional shift of work for
the wife. Because their domestic duties are not remunerated and only
labour that fetches a cash income counts, women's time at home is
perhaps seen as readily malleable and women are expected to increase
their work at the expense of their time for rest, training, community activi-
ties, and self-development. 19
In the urban areas, for public employees such as university professors,
economic reform has meant that their wages have not kept pace with the
cost of living and many are forced to moonlight in the private sector to
make ends meet. It is not uncommon, then, for professional women to be
juggling two jobs along with their major responsibility for household
tasks. One woman interviewed, a university professor, also teaches in a
private institution. To cope at home, she must rely on and pay for a
network of other women who assist her with purchasing food, child care
and other tasks; fortunately, there is no dearth of underemployed women
ready to take on these tasks.
116 Gender and the Allocation of Time
Vietnamese researchers recognize that Vietnamese women are deeply
affected by bearing the double burden of major responsibility for house-
hold chores as well as work outside the home. In a 1987 report Le Thi
Nham Tuyet notes that 'Investigations have shown that women still devote
too much time to household chores, on an average 3 hours 15 minutes per
day (men spend only one hour 50 minutes)' .20 Moreover, Le Thi Nham
Tuyet writes, 'In the division of labour concerning household chores
between wife and husband, the husband usually does more simple jobs,
such as buying an eye lotion or petroleum, cooking simple dishes, etc. ' 21
Other time budget surveys have confirmed the pattern of unequal division
of labour in the Vietnamese household. Chu Khac has written,

An inquiry conducted in Tan Dinh (Hanoi), a residential quarter inhab-

ited mostly by workers, public employees, and intellectuals, shows that
on an average men enjoy seven more hours of leisure per week than
women; that the latter are occupied by household duties ten more hours
per week and that they have a bigger lot of household work; that in
absolute terms both men and women enjoy too little leisure time; less
than three hours per day for men and less than two hours for women. A
similar survey in Truong Dinh, another Hanoi quarter inhabited mostly
by workers and public employees, also shows a similar disparity: on off
days, women are occupied an average of 2 hours 19 minutes more than
men by household chores. 22

If women take on more hours of household chores in addition to their paid

employment, they also have less time to devote to political, social and cul-
tural activities. Such activities are essential for making women's needs
known by public officials and fellow citizens.
In the Marxist and social feminist traditions, women can never achieve
equality in the home until they establish their equality in the public sphere
by performing socially useful labour. Consequently, socialist governments
have pointed with pride to increased levels of female labour force partici-
pation as an indication of progress toward the liberation of women.
However, studies based on women's experience in the former Soviet
Union and other socialist countries document the extent to which women
have merely added paid labour to their sizeable unpaid domestic respons-
ibilities. As a Cuban professor, wife and mother told me in 1991, 'At the
university, I am addressed as "Professor", but when I come home, I am just
the household worker'. To her is left the responsibility of tending to all the
household's needs in conditions of acute scarcity. A woman's economic
contribution to the household and to society is not sufficient to guarantee
 Linda J. Yarr 117

her equal access to time for self-development, health care, leisure, or rest.
Similarly, in the United States there has not been a significant increase in
men's contribution to household labour. Rather, women have had to cut
back on their leisure and standards of housekeeping. 23 Couples may relax
their standards of household cleanliness, but children's needs are less
easily postponed. In terms of child care, little has changed; women still
assume the lion's share of the responsibilities.
Is there evidence to confirm the sentiment among women that they
spend more time than men in the domestic activities of child care and the
numerous tasks attendant to the reproduction of everyday life? Beth Anne
Shelton's study 24 identifies a clear gender gap in time use and points to
possible sources of the differences between men and women's allocation
of time with respect to paid employment, household labour, and leisure
activities. For Shelton, time use can serve as a gauge to understand the
extent to which women's and men's gender roles within the household
have changed over time. How accurate is the media-fed perception that
there has been a change in gender roles? Has the documented increase in
women's participation in the paid work force brought about a shift in
men's participation in the unpaid labour of the household?
Shelton's results indicate a gender gap in time spent on household
labour, with women devoting 'an average of 15.1 more hours per week on
household labor than do men' .25 Moreover, in the period 1975 to 1987,
women's rates of labour-force participation increased and men's
decreased; women allocated more time to paid labour and the number of
hours men spent in paid labour was reduced. Shelton found that in the
same period, employed men did increase time devoted to housework but 'a
significant part of the convergence in women's and men's housework time
was a function of a decrease in women's housework time rather than an
increase in men's housework time' .26
Because of heightened job insecurity caused by economic restructuring
since the mid-1970s, family members have to work more hours at reduced
wages to maintain an adequate life style.
In addition to differences in the number of hours men and women con-
tribute toward the maintenance of everyday life in the household, the tradi-
tional division oflabour within the household affects men's and women's
paid labour time differently. Men's activities, such as yard work, auto
maintenance and handling financial paperwork can easily be handled on
weekends and do not interfere with time on the job. The tasks traditionally
assigned to women - cooking, child care, cleaning, and shopping - need to
be done on a daily basis, at regular times. Shelton notes, 'Women's house-
hold tasks[ ... ] are less discretionary. As such, women's household respon-
118 Gender and the Allocation ofTime
sibilities are more likely to have an impact on their paid labor, require
conscious coordination with paid labor time, and necessitate replacement
if paid labor demands are high.' 27 Recent surveys indicate that the tradi-
tional division of labour in the home has not responded to changes in
women's expanded roles in the workplace.
In another study, Arlie Hochschild applied the lens of qualitative
research to understanding gender difference in time use. Because of the
dramatic change in women's labour-force participation over the period
1950 to 1986 (in 1950 only 23 percent of married women with children
under six were working whereas by 1986 54 percent had jobs28 ), the
majority of working people today were not raised in families in which the
mother held paid employment. Hochschild sought to find out how
American families were coping with this new phenomenon. Taking time
use as her starting point, Hochschild found that 'Most women work one
shift at the office or factory and a "second shift" at home.' 29 For her study,
Hochschild used a method of blending interviews and participant observa-
tion to insert herself into the very fabric of the everyday lives of the
couples. in her sample. Beyond the numbers, Hochschild tries to convey
how women and men think and feel about assuming household chores in
addition to paid work. The detailed descriptions highlight the un~:omfort­
able compromises, unspoken resentment, angry flare-ups and deep
ambivalence that become apparent as couples who have inherited a tradi-
tional gender ideology cope with the strains of the two-job marriage.
Among the factors Hochschild finds for women accepting a greater burden
of homemaking chores are internalization of a traditional gender ideology,
reluctance on the part of women to push men too far at a time when
divorce is a feared consequence, and simple exasperation with men's
passive resistance to accepting new responsibilities. For Hochschild, ulti-
mate responsibility for change in the unequal division of housework lies
with women and their ability to confront an outdated gender ideology
within themselves and vis-a-vis men.
Mary Frances Berry, in her study of the politics of parenthood, argues
that change will not come about until child care and its attendant compro-
mises in the use of time become a responsibility shared by both fathers
and mothers and that public and corporate policies will need to change to
accommodate that shift. She writes, 'If women[ ... ] are to have an equal
opportunity for successful careers and families, both fathers and mothers
must share child care.' 30
The division of men's and women's work into separate spheres was a
result of the long process of industrialization. Despite ideological and reli-
gious claims of women being more naturally suited to domesticity, when
 Linda J. Yarr 119

family finances required it, women worked to earn a cash income.

Government policy can be instrumental in bringing about an ideological
shift through education, as well as providing the institutional and legal
supports working families need. Employers need to take note of changes
in the working population and accommodate both men's and women's
needs when they choose to become parents.
If, for the United States, the war in Vietnam contributed to economic
insecurity and declining real wages, the effects were far more acute in
Vietnam. Following years of deprivation due to war and prolonged mili-
tary engagement, environmental degradation and climatic disasters, exclu-
sion from international credit and commerce as a result of the U.S. trade
embargo, the failed economic policies patterned after the Soviet model,
and the break up of the Eastern bloc, Vietnam is attempting to set a course
for rapid economic growth. Vietnamese researchers and policy-makers
have expressed the hope that industrialization and the mechanization of
agriculture will ease women's burdens, reduce unemployment, and raise
living standards, thereby contributing to women's equality. The example
of an advanced industrialized country such as the United States indicates
that women's equality in the home and in the work place is not easily
achieved and requires continued struggles in terms of government policy,
in corporations and enterprises, as well as in the hearts of men and
women.
On both sides of the Pacific, women are facing a speed-up in their duties
and responsibilities as global market forces engender increased competi-
tion and growing income inequality. However, it is instructive to note that
the prevailing discourse on resolving the problem is different in each
country. American women are for the most part exhorted to reduce stress
by practising positive thinking, improve their organizational skills, and
negotiate with their husbands to do their part in the home. The individual-
istic culture of the United States prompts women to seek individual solu-
tions to what is regarded as a private dilemma. Organizations that seek to
establish policies relating to family policy, child care and the concerns of
working women are limited in their membership and ability to rally public
support.
The Vietnamese, on the other hand, see society and the state as having
an important role to play in providing for 'family happiness'. Vietnamese
researchers often expressed the expectation that economic development
and industrialization will promote women's welfare by providing the
labour-saving devices and commodities that substitute for or ease
women's tasks in the household. They also expect that cutbacks in state-
sponsored services such as medical clinics and day-care facilities will be
120 Gender and the Allocation of Time
reversed as the country improves its standing in the global economy. The
Vietnamese state has instated its responsibility toward promoting the
advancement of women in its Constitution and institutions such as
the Centers for Research on Women and the Women's Union that study
and coordinate policy recommendations for women's benefit.
Placing confidence in the benefits of industrialization and the privatiza-
tion of the economy may be problematic for Vietnamese women. Indeed
many American women find that increased commoditization and the
invention of labour-saving devices have in fact increased social isolation.
Lee Burns, studying the effects of time obsession in American society,
writes:

We have turned away from emotionally fulfilling activities like interac-

tion with friends that knit together the social fabric for support, because
they are non-commoditizeable aspects of life[ ... ] We would rather
interact with machines than with a natural and social environment that
resists commoditization[ ... ] In short, we prefer the commoditized and
time-efficient alternative, even when (and maybe because) it requires
an isolated detachment from the claims of others. 31

Vietnamese culture, with its strong family-based and communal traditions,

together with a socialist ideology that emphasizes collective responsibility,
should withstand the isolating effects of industrialization. It is less clear
whether Vietnamese women, any better than American women, wiii be
able to take control of their use of time on an equal basis with men so that
they may realize their full potential in the home and in the work place.

Notes

1. See Joyce McCarl Nielsen, Feminist Research Methods: Exemplary

Readings in the Social Sciences, Boulder: Westview Press, 1990, pp. 1-37.
2. Cited in Joni Seager and Ann Olson, Women in the World: An International
Atlas, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986, p. 101.
3. See for example, Lourdes Beneria and Catherine R. Stimpson (eds.),
Women, Households, and the Economy, New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1987.
4. Phung Van Due, 'Labor Legislation', in An Outline of Institutions of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing
House, 1974, p. 143.
5. According to Christine White, 'The traditional division of labor, with a
husband to guide the plow and buffalo to pull the plow and harrow, would
seem preferable to the situation in many Vietnamese rural families where
 Linda J. Yarr 121
there is no division of labor and women have to do everything: the women's
work, the men's work, and the buffalo's work.' 'Vietnam: War, Socialism,
and the Politics of Gender Relations', in Sonia Kruk, Rayna Rapp, and
Marilyn B. Young, Promissory Notes: Women in Transition to Socialism,
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989, p. 175.
6. Interview with Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, Director, Tu Du Hospital, Ho Chi
Minh City, Vietnam, January, 1993.
7. I am grateful to David Shapiro for providing tables from Vietnam's 1989
Census. Table 7 .I of the appendix to the Census shows a total economic
activity rate of 71.3 (77.5) for men, but in the age category 15-19 the
numbers are 73.5 for females versus 67.7 for men. The difference is espe-
cially acute in the rural areas.
8. I have written about this process in 'The Impact of the Vietnam War on the
International Political Economy', paper presented to the Annual Meeting of
the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago, April, 1990. Also see Robert
Warren Stevens, Vain Hopes, Grim Realities: The Economic Consequences
of the Vietnam War, New York: New Viewpoints, 1976, p. 23.
9. Sarah Kuhn and Larry Bluestone, 'Economic Restructuring and the Female
Labor Market: The Impact of Industrial Change on Women', in Beneria and
Stimpson, p. 29-30.
10. George Sternlieb and Carole W. Baker, 'Placing Deindustrialization in
Perspective', in Beneria and Stimpson, Table 4.11, p. 100.
11. Mary Frances Berry, The Politics of Parenthood: Child Care, Women's
Rights, and the Myth of the Good Mother, New York: Viking, 1993, p. 8.
12. Phung Van Due, pp. 134, 139.
I 3. United Nations Office at Vienna, Centre for Social Development and
Humanitarian Affairs, Compendium of International Conventions
Concerning the Status of Women, New York: United Nations, 1988, p. 114.
14. Rachel F. Lee, 'ROC develops Vietnam's export processing zone', The Free
China Journal, January 15, 1993.
15. 1989 Census of Vietnam, p. 67.
16. The State Planning Committee's Report on the Economy of Vietnam of
December, 1990, notes 'Differential growth rates have resulted in changes
in the composition of industrial output. In 1980, the light industry sector
accounted for just over 62 per cent of total gross industrial production,
while by 1989 it was 71 per cent', p. 121.
17. Maggie Mahar, 'The Truth About Women's Pay', Working Woman, April,
1993, p. 52.
18. Le Thi, 'Jobs, Income Generation and Poverty Alleviation for Women in
Vietnam: Fundamental Orientations', VietNam Social Sciences, 3, 1990,
p. 38.
19. On the implications of the failure to assign value to women's domestic labour,
see Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics, New
York: Harper Collins, 1988; and on the 'housewifization' of production on the
global level, see Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale:
Women in the International Division of Labour, London: Zed Books, 1986.
20. Le Thi Nham Tuyet, 'In the New Family', Vietnamese Women in the
Eighties, Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1989, p. 27.
21. Ibid., p. 27.
122 Gender and the Allocation of Time
22. Chu Khac, 'On the Formation of a New Socialist Way of Life in Our
Country: Some Reflection', Viet Nam Social Sciences, II, 3-4, 1987,
pp. 78-79.
23. See Stefi Weisburd, 'Sleep Starved', Redbook, September, 1992, p. 128;
Molly O'Neil, 'Drop the Mop, Bless the Mess: The Decline of
Housekeeping', The New York Times, April II, 1993; and Debra Kent, 'Sex
and Housework', Working Mother, September, 1992, p. 20.
24. Beth Anne Shelton, Women, Men and Time: Gender Differences in Paid
Work, Housework, and Leisure, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1992.
25. Ibid., p. 99.
26. Ibid., p. 100.
27. Ibid., p. 147.
28. Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift, New York: Avon, 1990, p. 2.
29. Ibid., p. 4.
30. Berry, p. 42.
31. Lee Burns, Busy Bodies: Why Our Time-Obsessed Society Keeps Us
Running in Place, New York: W. W. Norton, 1993, p. 336.
8 Women's Employment,
Education, Fertility, and
Family Planning in
Vietnam: An Economic
Perspective*
David Shapiro

I. INTRODUCTION

Vietnam is presently in the midst of a sharp decline in fertility, with the

Total Fertility Rate (TFR) having declined from more than six children
per woman to below four over the course of the past 20 years or so. This
decline in large part reflects the high priority that the government of
Vietnam has given to reducing fertility and slowing population growth
since North and South Vietnam were reunified in 1975. As Allman et al.
have noted, 'This decline[ ... ] is evidence that the demographic transition
is clearly under way in Vietnam.' 1
Despite the progress made in reducing fertility, population growth is
still fairly rapid and there is considerable concern about the potential
adverse consequences for the Vietnamese economy of continued high fer-
tility and rapid population growth. According to results from the 1989
Census, Vietnam has a crude birth rate of 30 per thousand, a crude death
rate of 8 per thousand, and consequently an annual rate of natural increase
of 2.2 percent. 2 At this rate, the 1989 population of more than 64 million
would grow to exceed 80 million by the year 2000. 3 Such growth would
result in increased population pressure on the land, and undoubtedly
would further exacerbate existing problems of high population density in
the key food-producing areas of the country (the Red River Delta in the
north and the Mekong River Delta in the south). 4
The active promotion of family planning by the government of
Vietnam, which goes back nearly 30 years, has been supplemented more
recently by an explicit policy aimed at establishing a norm of two children
for most of the population. 5 At the same time, there have been significant

123
124 Women's Employment, Education, Fertility, and Family Planning
changes in economic policy in Vietnam over the past five years or so. The
government's policy of increased economic liberalization ('renovation',
or 'doi moi' in Vietnamese) has already contributed to sharp increases in
agricultural production and economic exchange with other countries, and
promises to bring continued changes in the future. Some observers have
expressed concern that the lesser degree of governmental control associ-
ated with 'doi moi' may inadvertently contribute to a weakening of
Vietnam's ability to maintain and pursue its accomplishments in the area
of family planning and fertility decline.
This paper examines fertility and family planning in Vietnam, with par-
ticular emphasis on the roles of women's education and employment. The
next section briefly describes an economic perspective on fertility and
family planning, and then examines the implications of this perspective
and reviews evidence regarding linkages between women's schooling and
employment on the one hand and fertility and family planning on the
other. Section III examines available data for Vietnam regarding fertility,
family planning, and women's education and employment. The conclud-
ing section of the paper looks at prospects for further declines in fertility,
particularly in light of the economic changes likely to occur in the coming
years.

II. AN ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYZING FERTILITY

AND FAMILY PLANNING

The conceptual framework presented here is that of Easterlin. 6 Easterlin's

initial objective was very ambitious: he sought to provide a conceptual
framework flexible enough to be relevant to a wide range of circum-
stances, past and present, and one which could be used to study not only
contemporary fertility in the United States but also the demographic tran-
sition and premodern fertility behaviour. 7 More recently, the Easterlin
model has been used to study fertility behaviour in Colombia, India, Sri
Lanka, and Taiwan. 8 This paper applies the framework to Vietnam.
In brief, the Easterlin model emphasizes three broad categories through
which the 'basic determinants' of fertility operate and which influence, in
turn, the 'proximate determinants' of fertility. These three categories are
the demand for children (the number of surviving children parents would
want if fertility regulation were costless); the supply of children (the
number of surviving children parents would have if they did not deliber-
ately limit fertility); and the costs (subjective and objective) of fertility
regulation. 9
 David Shapiro 125
The 'basic determinants' of fertility behaviour include underlying socio-
economic conditions, or what Easterlin and Crimmins describe as 'mod-
ernization variables' such as education, urbanization, and modern sector
employment, as well as cultural factors such as ethnicity and religion, and
other determinants such as genetic factors. 10 These basic determinants
influence fertility through their impact on the demand for children, the
supply of children, and/or the costs of fertility regulation.
The Easterlin model has a strong economic orientation, but it is
designed to be compatible with approaches to understanding fertility from
other disciplines. In particular, it has served as the point of departure for a
National Academy of Sciences panel focusing on the determinants of fer-
tility in developing countries, 11 and it can be readily integrated with litera-
ture focused on women's status and fertility. 12 The Easterlin framework
has also been used by Cochrane 13 in her analysis of the relationship
between fertility and education. Consider first the implications of the
Easterlin model with respect to the influence of women's education on
fertility.
Acquisition of schooling results in changes to an individual, in that
schooling provides (or may provide) literacy, job skills, enhanced produc-
tivity in nonmarket activities (e.g., child care), new values, and new infor-
mation. These changes have outcomes which influence the opportunities
open to an individual, the attitudes and information possessed by the indi-
vidual, and the individual's behaviour, and these outcomes are likely to
lead to changes in fertility. Figure 8.1 14 shows the changes and outcomes
directly associated with an individual's acquisition of education.
In the context of the Easterlin approach to fertility, there are several
factors that influence the potential supply of children, including (among

Figure 8.1 Multiple effects of individual education

Uteracy ~ Access to information

Broader perspective

.Skills ~Non-market efficiency

Individual
education ~Market opportunities

Certificates Status

Socialization
~Attitudes
Behaviour patterns
126 Women's Employment, Education, Fertility, and Family Planning
others) the probability of marriage, wife's age at marriage, health, duration
of breastfeeding, taboos on sexual activity, and infant and child mortality.
Each of these factors, in turn, is likely to be influenced by a woman's edu-
cational attainment. Studies reviewed by Cochrane 15 as well as other
research findings 16 indicate that greater amounts of schooling are generally
associated with a lower likelihood of marriage, higher age at first marriage
and at first birth, better health, shorter duration of breastfeeding, greater
likelihood of abandoning traditional taboos on sexual activity, and lower
infant and child mortality .17 With respect to desired family size (number of
children demanded), attitudes regarding ideal family size, perceived
benefits of children, perceived costs of children, and the prospective
ability to pay for children are all relevant considerations that are likely to
be influenced by a woman's schooling. Previous research suggests that
greater educational attainment of women is associated with smaller ideal
family size, smaller perceived benefits of children and greater perceived
costs, and a greater ability to afford children. 18 The first two of these
effects will contribute to lower fertility, while the last implies higher fertil-
ity. More broadly, it has been argued that higher levels of women's
schooling are associated with a stronger demand for child 'quality' (in par-
ticular, with greater demand for higher schooling for offspring) and hence,
other things equal, lower demand for quantity of children.
Clearly, some of the effects of women's education on the supply of and
demand for children will contribute to lower fertility while others will
contribute to higher fertility. Overall, however, the fertility-reducing
effects tend to dominate the fertility-enhancing effects. Examination of
data from a large number of countries shows that higher levels of female
schooling are generally associated with lower levels of fertility .19
At the same time, it should be noted that the relationship between fertil-
ity and education varies across different regions in the developing world.
For example, in Asia and Latin America women with exposure to primary
schooling typically have distinctly lower fertility than those who have
never been to school, while in sub-Saharan Africa fertility is sometimes
highest among women with exposure to primary school. 20 Only at the sec-
ondary school level in sub-Saharan Africa does the inverse relationship
between education and fertility emerge clearly. 21 Within the Easterlin
framework, these different relationships between schooling and fertility,
which also vary somewhat across countries within a region, reflect the dif-
fering effects of schooling on the demand for and/or supply of children,
operating through the proximate determinants of fertility. 22
The motivation for fertility control exists when the potential supply of
children exceeds the number demanded. To the extent that mother's
 David Shapiro 127

schooling contributes to lower infant and child mortality and shorter dura-
tions of breastfeeding, supply is increased, and the influence of schooling
on reducing the number of children demanded further enhances the likeli-
hood of supply exceeding demand. Hence, the motivation for using contra-
ception will be greater as women's schooling is increased.
In this situation, use of contraception is not automatic- it will depend on
the perceived costs (psychological as well as monetary) of contraception. In
particular, attitudes toward birth control, knowledge of birth control, and
communication between husband and wife on these issues are relevant in
this context. Professor Le Thi has noted that in Vietnam, some husbands
strongly oppose family planning, and that this opposition is often linked to
a preference for sons. At the same time, she also points out that 'the propor-
tion of families in which husband and wife discuss common problems is on
the rise- chiefly in families of intellectuals and city families' .23
Consistent with this latter observation, previous research has shown that
greater education typically results in more favourable attitudes toward
birth control, greater knowledge of birth control, and more husband-wife
communication regarding fertility regulation. More directly, contraceptive
use is typically strongly positively related to women's educational attain-
ment. Hence, increased education is expected to have an unambiguously
negative effect on fertility via those factors influencing fertility regulation.
It is apparent that there are numerous mechanisms through which edu-
cation may influence fertility, operating through the proximate determ-
inants of fertility such as age at marriage, contraception, and
breastfeeding. In addition, there has been considerable attention in the lit-
erature to the relationship between women's employment and fertility.
Among economists, it is often argued that employed women bear a higher
opportunity cost of childbearing as compared to women who are not
employed, and there is substantial evidence of an inverse association
between women's employment and fertility in industrialized countries. 24
More fundamentally, women with higher earning potential in the labour
market confront a higher opportunity cost of childbearing and of not being
in the labour market more generally. Consequently, these women would
be expected to have a lower number of children demanded and a higher
likelihood of being employed, other things equal. Since women with
higher levels of education typically have greater earning power in the
labour market, this labour market link is one means through which
women's schooling affects fertility.
While evidence of an inverse association between women's work and
fertility is quite strong among industrialized countries, the evidence is
much more mixed for countries in the developing world. 25 In part, this
128 Women's Employment, Education, Fertility, and Family Planning
mixed evidence appears to result from the failure of some researchers to
take into consideration differences in the composition of employment.
Agriculture plays a prominent role in women's work in developing coun-
tries, and frequently women's agricultural work can be combined with
child care (e.g., often a woman will do work in the fields with a child on
her back or close by). This opportunity for joint production (carrying out
two distinct activities simultaneously) serves effectively to substantially
lower the opportunity cost of childbearing. Children are not competing
with employment for the woman's time to anywhere near the same degree
as in a modern industrial setting. This lower opportunity cost of children,
as well as lower direct costs for food and housing especially, have been
cited as reasons why fertility is typically higher in rural areas than in urban
areas.
Even apart from agriculture, it must be recognized that women's
employment in developing countries may take on different forms, with
quite differing implications for fertility behaviour. The distinction between
modern (formal) sector economic activity and informal sector work is
especially relevant in this regard. Women engaged in informal sector
activity (e.g., street vendors, those engaged in production at home for
sale), like women in agriculture, are also able to combine child care with
employment quite readily. Only among women employed in the modern
sector of an economy does the presumed conflict between work and fertil-
ity embedded in the opportunity cost argument emerge.
From this perspective, then, the expectation of an inverse link between
work and fertility is strongest when the work in question is in the modern
sector of an economy, while for informal sector and agricultural work such
an inverse association may not be evident. These arguments are supported
by a recent study in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on urban women, in
which it was found that childbearing was significantly lower for women
employed in the modern sector as compared to nonemployed women,
other things equal, while there were no significant differences between
nonemployed women and those working in the informal sector. 26
Differences by employment status confirming the desirability of differenti-
ating between the formal and informal sectors were evident as well with
respect to contraceptive practice and the incidence of abortion. 27

III. FERTILITY AND FAMILY PLANNING IN VIETNAM

This section considers data on fertility and family planning in Vietnam,

with particular emphasis on women's education and employment activity.
 David Shapiro 129
Data are principally from two sources: the Vietnam Demographic and
Health Survey (VNDHS) carried out in 1988, and the Population Census
done in 1989. 28
Figure 8.2 shows trends in the Total Fertility Rate (TFR), for all of
Vietnam for the period from 1969-89 and separately for the north and
south of Vietnam for most of the period. 29 As noted at the outset of the
paper, these data indicate that Vietnam's TFR has declined from in excess
of six to below four in a span of roughly 20 years. This reduction in the
TFR is similar in magnitude to the decline in Taiwan's TFR that took
place during the 1950s and 1960s.

Figure 8.2 Total fertility rates 1969-89

Total Fertility Rate

7.---------------------------------------------.

3~~'------~'----~'----~'----~'----~~~~
69-74 74-79 83-87 86-87 87-88 88-89

Years

- - - Vietnam --+-- N. Vietnam - S. Vietnam

Source: Allman et al., 'Fertility and Family Planning in Vietnam', Table 1, p. 310.
130 Women's Employment, Education, Fertility, and Family Planning
In addition to documenting the national trend in the TFR, Figure 8.2
also shows that fertility was distinctly higher in South Vietnam than in
North Vietnam in the late 1960s, but the more rapid decline in the TFR in
the south up through the mid-1980s has resulted in fertility now being
higher in the north. The lower initial TFR in the north is not surprising, in
that North Vietnam had promoted family planning since 1963, and only
after reunification in 1975 were these efforts extended to the entire
country. However, as Allman et al. have noted, the more rapid decline in
the TFR in the south following reunification was 'unexpected, especially
because levels of education are higher and the family planning program is
much more developed in the North' .30
Consider now the key elements of the Easterlin model and the prox-
imate determinants of fertility, and how they are related to women's edu-
cational attainment and employment status in Vietnam. Partial evidence on
the demand for children is provided by the VNDHS data indicating the
percentage of married women who want no more children, according to
educational attainment and the woman's current (as of the survey) number
of living children. These data are shown in Figure 8.3. It is evident that by
and large, the greater the number of (living) children a woman has the
more likely she is to say she wants no more children. Beginning with three
children, more than half of the women in each education group indicate
they want no more childrenY At the same time, it is also apparent that
given the number of children (beyond one child), increases in women's
educational attainment are generally associated with increasing percent-
ages of women who want no more children. Hence, women's education
appears indeed to be linked to a lower demand for numbers of children.
This point is demonstrated more directly by responses to a question
asked of ever-married women concerning the preferred number of chil-
dren. On average, illiterate women indicated a desire for 4.2 children,
compared to 3.9 for women without formal schooling who could read and
write, 3.2 for women with a primary school education, and 2.6 for women
with secondary schooling or higher. While these figures may in part reflect
rationalizations of actual fertility behaviour for older women, limiting the
analysis to women married in the five years preceding the survey reveals a
similar pattern (albeit somewhat less pronounced) of greater education
being associated with a lower demand for children. 32
There are also differences in demand for children by women's employ-
ment status. The VNDHS reports three 'Profession' categories: agricul-
ture; other productive sectors; and nonproductive sectors. While the
distribution of respondents across these three categories is not given, it
would appear that agriculture occupies perhaps two thirds or more of the
 Figure 8.3 Percentage of married women who want no more children, by education and by number of living children, 1988

Percentage Who Want No More Children

100%r---~----------------------------------------------------------------------

80% 1- ------ --

60% --------

40% - - - - --- - - -- - -- - -

20% ---

Q% I W///Hff4-

0 2 3 4+

Number of Living Children

llliterate ~ Literate c.:J Primary - Secondary+

Source: Republic of Vietnam, Vietnam Demographic and Health Survey, 1988, Table 5.3, p. 49 .....
~
132 Women's Employment, Education, Fertility, and Family Planning
women, while 'other productive sectors' account for at least ten percent of
the sample and roughly twenty percent are in the category of 'nonproduc-
tive sectors' .33 In general, women in agriculture appear to have a distinctly
higher demand for children than other women. Thus, for example, given
the number of living children a lower percentage of women in agriculture
as compared to the other two groups wants no more children. Similarly,
the average number of children desired is 3.4 among the ever-married
women in agriculture, compared to 2.95 for those in 'other productive
sectors' and 3.0 for those in 'nonproductive sectors' .34
With respect to the supply of children, two key aspects are duration of
breastfeeding and infant and child mortality. Breastfeeding in Vietnam is
fairly long, estimated to average 14.5 months. However, other than
slightly shorter breastfeeding durations for women with at least a sec-
ondary school education (13.4 months) and those not in agriculture
(13.6-13.7 months), there is no evidence of a link between schooling or
employment on the one hand and breastfeeding on the other. 35
While there is only limited variability in breastfeeding behaviour, there
are clear differences in infant and child mortality by mother's schooling
and employment status. Figure 8.4 shows infant and child mortality rates
by mother's educational attainment. Infant mortality, which is quite low
largely as a reflection of a well-organized health care delivery system in
Vietnam, nonetheless declines steadily as mother's education increases.
Better-educated mothers are clearly more effective in avoiding mortality
of their infants. Among young children aged 1-4, by contrast, the only
differential by mother's education that emerges is for those whose mothers
have at least secondary schooling. Part of the difference in infant mortality
appears to be related to the type of prenatal care that women receive.
While 60 percent of women with at least a secondary education receive
prenatal care from a physician, the corresponding percentages for women
with primary schooling, those who can read and write, and illiterate
women are 52, 36, and 16, respectively. 36
There are also differences in infant and child mortality by mother's
employment status. In brief, children of women classified as being in
'oth~r productive sectors' have distinctly lower infant and child mortality
than those whose mothers are in agriculture or in 'nonproductive
sectors' _37 These differences may be a reflection of higher income levels
for women employed in 'other productive sectors'. Of course, this differ-
ential by employment status may be linked as well to mother's education:
it would be largely accounted for if higher levels of education are required
for entry into jobs in 'other productive sectors'. To determine whether or
not the differential by employment status is simply reflecting an education
 Figure 8.4 Infant and child mortality estimates, 1978-88, by mother's education

Deaths per 1000

70~----------------------------------------------------

60f--- - ,

50f--- -l

40t-- - - i

30f--- - i

20f--- --j

lOt-- -i

0'-----'
Infant (lqO) Child {4ql) Under 5 {5q0)
Monality

Illiterate - Literate c::J Primary - Secondary+

Source: Republic of Vietnam, Vietnam Demographic and Health Survey, 1988, Table 6.2, p.57 w
w
-
134 Women's Employment, Education, Fertility, and Family Planning
effect would require multivariate analyses of the VNDHS data, with con-
trols for educational attainment and employment status jointly.
Finally, we may consider differences in contraceptive behaviour by
women's schooling. Within the context of the Easterlin framework, the
lower numbers of children demanded and higher supply of children associa-
ted with higher levels of women's schooling should lead to a higher
motivation to control fertility and hence greater contraceptive use among
better-educated women. 38 Figure 8.5, which shows current contraceptive
use in Vietnam among married women aged 15-49 in 1988 according to
women's schooling, overall and by method for the three most widely used
methods, documents that this is indeed the case. 39 While fewer than
30 percent of illiterate married women were practising contraception, the
figure rises to more than 45 percent for those who can read and write,
55 percent for those with primary schooling, and nearly 64 percent for
those with secondary schooling. 40

IV. PROSPECTS FOR CONTINUED DECLINE IN FERTILITY

The reduction in fertility that has taken place over the past 20 years or so is
significant, and is undoubtedly linked to the increases in women's schooling
that have taken place over the years. Figure 8.6 shows 1989 Census data on
women's schooling, and it documents the sharp reduction over the past
20-30 years in the proportion of women with no schooling and the corre-
sponding increase in the proportion of women who have gone beyond
primary school. At the same time, it is evident from the figure that among the
women aged 20-34 there is no indication of much change in educational
attainment in going from the older to younger women. This stability in
schooling levels suggests that, in the absence of any major push to increase
women's access to secondary and higher schooling, it is unlikely that there
will be continued fertility decline resulting from further changes in women's
schooling.
However, even with the current schooling distribution of women it
appears that there are significant possibilities for continued fertility decline.
When women in the VNDHS were asked about their desired number of
children, the overall responses of those who had been married for five years
or less gave an average of 2.6 children. The fact that this figure is well
below the current TFR indicates that there is a substantial unmet need for
effective family planning. As Allman et al. note: 'there is still considerable
scope for improving and expanding contraceptive services, since many
women who do not want another birth are not practicing contraception, and
recourse to pregnancy termination is frequent' .41
 Figure 8.5 Current contraceptive use among married women aged 15-49, by education and method used, 1988

Percentage

~%~------------------------

~%r---------------------------------------------------------------

20% ~---=

0%
IUD Rhythm Withdrawal Any Method

Method Used

llliterate - Literate c:J Primary M Secondary+

Source: Republic of Vietnam, Vietnam Demographic and Health Survey, 1988, Table 4.7, p.42
w
lll
-
 ( J.J
Figure 8.6 Educational attainment of women aged 20-49, by age group, 1989 -
0\

Percentage
80%.---------------------------------------- ------------------------------.

60% 1- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

40% 1-------------------------

0%
No schooling Primary Secondary+
Education group
~ 25-29 D 30-34 [Z] 35-39
- 20-24
r::::::1
t;_;_;_;_;_;j 40-44 D 45-49

Source: 1989 Census data, reported in Vietnam Demographic and Health Survey, 1988, Table B.5, p. 70.
 David Shapiro 137
Planned improvements in the quality of service delivery and the com-
mitment the government of Vietnam has made to shift to a 'cafeteria
approach' in provision of family planning services (i.e., making a much
wider variety of modern contraceptives available to Vietnamese women
rather than relying principally on one method, the IUD) both hold out a
very real prospect of increasing contraceptive prevalence and reducing fer-
tility .42 In this regard, it is worth noting that doctors who are heads of hos-
pitals in Vietnam (Dr Ngoc Phuong at Tu Du Hospital for Women and
Children in Ho Chi Minh City and Dr Duong Thi Cuong at the Institute for
the Protection of Mothers and Newborns in Hanoi) identified the increased
availability of different contraceptives, including the Norplant implant and
injectables as well as condoms and sterilization. The contraceptives are
being provided in part by the United Nations Fund for Population
Activities (UNFPA) and by the Population Council.
With respect to women's employment status, it should be noted that at
present the vast majority of women (like men) work in agriculture.
According to the 1989 Census 73 percent of employed women work in
agriculture, and 8 percent of employed women are in each of three other
categories: professional occupations, industrial occupations, and sales and
supplies occupations. 43 It seems likely that with the opening up of the
Vietnamese economy these percentages are likely to change, with a reduc-
tion in the importance of agriculture and an increase in the proportion of
women working in occupations where they are likely to have greater status
and autonomy.
Since Vietnam adopted its 'renovation' policy in 1986, there has been a
dramatic increase in exports, with the dollar value of exports in 1991
being more than five times the level prevailing in 1986 and 1987.44 Over
the past five years, 40 countries have made directinvestments in Vietnam,
with a total registered capital of more than $5 billion. Foreign investment
in 1992 was more than double that of the previous year. Taking all
foreign investments together, the principal areas of concentration are
industry (36 percent), oil (23 percent), hotels and tourism (18 percent),
and services ( 11 percent, including banking and finance as well as post
and telecommunications). 45
These economic changes will undoubtedly increase non-agricultural
employment opportunities for women. Given that fertility preferences of
women in agriculture tend to be higher than those of other women, this
may ultimately lead to further reductions in fertility. More importantly, to
the extent that the economic transformation that has begun in Vietnam is
translated into increased women's access to secondary and higher educa-
tion, there will ultimately be significant effects on fertility behaviour.
138 Women's Employment, Education, Fertility, and Family Planning
Allman et at., in considering the possible effects on fertility of
Vietnam's new economic policies, have noted that 'One can argue that
economic development will lead to further modernization and the type of
social change that has supported demographic transitions throughout the
region. This possibility seems to be the most likely scenario. However,
some local observers are afraid that relaxation of government control -
especially the dismantling of co-operatives, which are fast disappearing -
will mean that parents will be motivated to have more children so that
they can help work the land and produce more crops' .46
From the perspective of the Easterlin framework, changes in the number
of children demanded can come about through changes in the net cost of
children to their parents. Indeed, Vietnam's current two-child policy
explicitly recognizes that changes in the cost of children should influence
fertility behaviour, in that it stipulates various economic incentives and
disincentives aimed at encouraging couples to have no more than two chil-
dren. For example, Article 6 ('Policies and regulations encouraging popu-
lation work and family planning') of the fertility policy includes the
following:

Families that have more than the allowed number of children (which
includes the children they already have) must pay a housing or land rent
calculated at a high price for the extra space they request.
Henceforth, families with three children or more will not be permitted
to move into the urban centers of municipalities, cities and industrial
zones.
Families that have more than the stipulated number of children must
contribute social support funds, which include funds for education and
health care and an increased contribution of socially beneficial labor[ ... ]
The state shall adopt regulations offering incentives to encourage
persons to cease child bearing by means of vasectomies and tubal
ligations. 47

Incentives and sanctions seeking to promote compliance with thetwo-

child policy are evident in the workplace as well. Nguyen Thi Hoa
describes policies at the Thanh Cong Textile Company in Ho Chi Minh
City providing compensation equivalent to 200 kg of rice for sterilized
women, while women giving birth to a third child must forgo raises and
promotions for a period of three years. 48
In this same vein, as farming becomes increasingly 'privatized', the
system by which land is allocated to individual households may influence
fertility behaviour. More specifically, if parents with more children receive
 David Shapiro 139
more land in order to support their larger families, such a policy would
tend to have a pronatalist effect. Peter Xenos, writing about the very
densely populated Red River Delta in the north, notes that land is allo-
cated roughly on a per capita basis, so that when a couple has an addi-
tional child they are assigned additional hnd for farming. At the same
time, though, he points out that since 1989 couples pay a direct cost for
their childbearing in the form of an assessment (the cash equivalent of
200 kg of rice) for any birth after the second one or sooner than five years
after the first birth. He also describes the introduction of additional charges
to high-fertility families for health care and other social benefits, as pro-
vided for in the fertility policy. 49
To sum up, then, despite the concerns that the opening up of the
Vietnamese economy and society may result in higher fertility, this
outcome seems unlikely. Strong public policy seeking to limit fertility is
present in both rural and urban areas. As noted above, past increases in
women's education as well as active family planning efforts have been
instrumental in bringing fertility down over the past 20 years, and neither
of these factors is likely to be reversed. On the contrary, if the government
can achieve its objectives to improve family planning service delivery and
broaden the range of modern contraceptives available to Vietnamese
women, it seems plausible to suggest that the decline in fertility will con-
tinue. If, in addition, more rapid economic and social development and
modernization takes place, including increasing proportions of women
gaining access to post-primary schooling and modern sector employment,
this would likely further accelerate the fertility decline.

Notes
* This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Seminar on 'Family and the
Condition of Women in Society: Vietnam-U.S. Perspectives' held in Ho Chi Minh
City, January 1993. Financial support for participation in the seminar from an
Andrew Mellon Foundation grant to the Population Research Institute at the
Pennsylvania State University is gratefully acknowledged. Responsibility for the
contents of this chapter rests solely with the author.

I. James Allman, Vu Qui Nhan, Nguyen Minh Thang, Pham Bich San, and Vu
Duy Man, 'Fertility and Family Planning in Vietnam', Studies in Family
Planning, 1991, pp. 309-10.
2. Republic of Vietnam, Detailed Analysis of Sample Results: Vietnam
Population Census 1989, Hanoi: General Statistics Office, Republic of
Vietnam, 1991.
140 Women's Employment, Education, Fertility, and Family Planning
3. Even allowing for net emigration, which kept the growth rate at 2.1 percent
per year (below the rate of natural increase) between the 1979 and 1989
Censuses, population in the year 2000 would still exceed 80 million.
4. Gavin W. Jones, 'Population Trends and Policies in Vietnam', Population
and Development Review, 1982, p. 783-810; Peter Xenos, 'Population
Growth, Environmental Pressure and Population Policy in the Red River
Delta of Vietnam', paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population
Association of America, Cincinnati, OH, 1993.
5. 'Vietnam's New Fertility Policy', Population and Development Review,
1989, pp. 169-72.
6. Richard A. Easterlin, 'An Economic Framework for Fertility Analysis',
Studies in Family Planning, 1975, pp. 54-63; Richard A. Easterlin, 'The
Economics and Sociology of Fertility: A Synthesis', in Charles Tilly (ed.},
Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1978, pp. 57-133. For a concise, updated version of the
model, see Richard A. Easterlin and Eileen M. Crimmins, The Fertility
Revolution: A Supply-Demand Analysis, Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1985.
7. Easterlin, 1975.
8. Easterlin and Crimmins, 1985.
9. Ibid., pp. 14-18.
10. Easterlin and Crimmins, 1985, p. 13.
11. See Rodolfo A. Bulatao and Ronald D. Lee (eds.), with Paula E. Hollerbach
and John Bongaarts, Determinants of Fertility in Developing Countries: A
Summary of Knowledge, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1983,
Ch. 1.
12. Karen Oppenheim Mason, The Status of Women: A Review of Its
Relationships to Fertility and Mortality, 1984, Ann Arbor: Population
Studies Center, University of Michigan; Mary M. Kritz, Douglas T. Gurak,
and Bolaji Fapohunda, 'Sociocultural and Economic Determinants of
Women's Status and Fertility Among the Yoruba', Population and
Development Program, Cornell University, paper presented at the Annual
Meeting of the Population Association of America, Denver, CO, 1992.
13. Susan H. Cochrane, Fertility and Education: What Do We Really Know?,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
14. Taken from ibid., p. 29.
15. Ibid.
16. For example, see Oleko Tambashe and David Shapiro, Employment,
Education, and Fertility Behavior: Evidence from Kinshasa, Kinshasa:
Departement de Demographie, Universite de Kinshasa, 1991; United
Nations, Education and Fertility: Selected Findings from the World Fertility
Survey Data, New York: Population Division, United Nations, 1986.
17. The effects of women's schooling on infant and child mortality may be
seen, from the perspective of the 'New Home Economics' and household
production functions, as reflecting greater efficiency in non-market produc-
tion. In this regard, see Robert Michael, 'Education in Non-market
Production', Journal of Political Economy, 1973, p. 306-27. As compared
to women without schooling, those with increasing amounts of education
are more likely to have access to information about hygiene and availability
 David Shapiro 141
of health care services, and they may also have different attitudes (e.g., be
less fatalistic) that will contribute to reduced mortality.
18. Cochrane.
19. See Cochrane; United Nations, 1986; United Nations: Fertility Behaviour in
the Context of Development: Evidence from the World Fertility Survey, New
York: Population Studies No. 100, Department of International Economic
and Social Affairs, United Nations, 1987.
20. United Nations, 1987, Table 112, pp. 224-25.
21. For example, see Ron J. Lesthaeghe (ed.), Reproduction and Social
Organization in Sub-Saharan Africa, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989; Tambashe and Shapiro.
22. The institutional and cultural setting will clearly be relevant in this context.
For example, the quality and accessibility of a nation's health care system
will influence the size of educational differences in infant and child mortal-
ity and hence in the supply of children; similarly, the prevalence of child
labour markets and opportunities for schooling of children will influence
educational differences in the number of children demanded.
23. Le Thi, 'Women, Marriage, Family and Sex Equality', paper presented at
the Seminar on Family and the Condition of Women in Society, Ho Chi
Minh City, 1993, pp. 11-12.
24. Theodore W. Schultz, (ed.), Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children,
and Human Capital, A Conference Report of the National Bureau of
Economic Research, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.
25. For example, see Guy Standing, 'Women's work activity and fertility', in
R. A. Bulatao et al. (eds.), p. 416-38; Cynthia B. Lloyd, 'The Contribution
of the World Fertility Surveys to an Understanding of the Relationship
between Women's Work and Fertility', Studies in Family Planning, 1991,
pp. 144-61.
26. Tambashe and Shapiro.
27. Women working in the modern sector were most likely to be practising con-
traception, followed by women in the informal sector and then by nonem-
ployed women (Tambashe and Shapiro). The incidence of abortion was
significantly higher for women employed in the modern sector than for
other women, ceteris paribus. In the African setting studied, marriage (or
entry into a first union) typically preceded labour market entry, so employ-
ment was not a significant determinant of age at marriage. There were no
significant differences by employment status in breastfeeding behaviour, but
it should be noted that legislation provides women employed in the modern
sector with generous maternity leave and time off for purposes of
breastfeeding.
28. For descriptions of these data collection efforts as well as more detailed
results, see Republic of Vietnam, Demographic and Health Survey 1988,
Hanoi: National Committee for Population and Family Planning, Republic
of Vietnam, 1990, and Republic of Vietnam, 1991, op. cit., respectively. In
addition, Allman et al., provided helpful information regarding trends in
Vietnam's Total Fertility Rate.
29. As noted in the figure, these data are from Allman et al.. The report on the
Census (Republic of Vietnam, 1991) also gives estimates of the TFR over
various spans, based on data from the 1979 and 1989 Censuses. In part
142 Women's Employment, Education, Fertility, and Family Planning
because of difficulties with the 1979 Census, the data from Allman et al.
(relying on a number of different sources) are used here. More importantly,
however, it should be noted that regardless of the source(s) used, the data
clearly document a sharp drop in the TFR in Vietnam beginning in the late
1960s.
30. Allman et al., p. 310.
31. There are four education categories reported in the VNDHS data: illiterate;
can read and write; primary; and secondary or higher. The second category,
according to Allman et al., Table 4, 'contains people who did not attend
formal school, but who probably learned to read and write during one of the
government's literacy campaigns'. Primary schooling includes women who
completed anywhere from one to nine years of school, and this is the largest
group in the sample of ever-married women aged 15-49, representing
57.6 percent of the weighted number of sample cases. Another 15.4 percent
of the sample consisted of women with secondary schooling or higher,
while 6.4 percent were illiterate and the remaining 20.6 percent were
identified as those who could read and write. See Republic of Vietnam,
1990, Table 1.3, p. 16.
32. Republic of Vietnam, 1990, Table 5.6, p. 52.
33. The VNDHS questionnaire has a single question on the woman's occupa-
tion, with 13 possible codes. There is no explanation of how the 12 codes
other than 'agriculture and forestry' are allocated between productive and
nonproductive sectors, although it appears that 'housewives' are included in
the category of nonproductive sectors. Since the Census results show econ-
omic activity rates for women aged 20-49 that are typically 80 percent or
higher (Republic of Vietnam, 1991, Figure 7.2, p. 65), the category of
'housewives' would appear to be a relatively small one.
34. Republic of Vietnam, 1990, Table 5.6, p. 52.
35. Ibid., Table 2.1 0, p. 26.
36. Ibid., Table 6.5, p. 59.
37. For the period from 1978-88, the VNDHS reports infant mortality of 26 per
thousand for women employed in 'other productive sectors' compared to
35-37 per thousand for other women. Child mortality (ages 1-4) is 7 per
thousand for the former group, and 10-12 per thousand for all others. Ibid.,
Table 6.2, p. 57.
38. Cf., David Shapiro and Oleko Tambashe, 'Women's employment, educa-
tion, and contraceptive behaviour in Kinshasa', paper presented at the
International Union for the Scientific Study of Population Seminar on the
Course of Fertility Transition in sub-Saharan Africa, Harare, Zimbabwe,
1991.
39. The IUD is the dominant form of contraception in Vietnam, reported in the
VNDHS as being used by over 60 percent of contracepting married women.
Rhythm and withdrawal together account for nearly another 30 percent of
contraceptive users. The only other method reported as being used by more
than one percent of married women is female sterilization: not quite three
percent of the married women had been sterilized (and with no pattern
vis-a-vis women's schooling).
40. The report on the VNDHS did not indicate patterns of contraceptive use
according to women's employment status. Hence, this aspect can not be
 David Shapiro 143
addressed in this paper. Three other proximate determinants were mentioned
earlier but have not been discussed vis-a-vis fertility behaviour because no
data are available concerning variation in these variables by education or
employment status. The proximate determinants in question are age at
marriage, menstrual regulation, and induced abortion.
The median age at marriage for women aged 45-49 was under 20; for
succeeding cohorts the median has been consistently in excess of 21
(Republic of Vietnam, 1990, Table 2.5, p. 22). This increase in the median
age at marriage is broadly consistent with the increases that have taken
place in women's schooling (see Section V). At present, marriage prior to
age 20 is uncommon, with fewer than 5 percent of women under 20 being
ever-married, and nearly 48 percent of women aged 20-24 are never-
married. Overall, only 60 percent of women of reproductive age were
currently married in 1988 (Ibid., Table 2.1, p. 18).
According to the Vietnam Demographic and Health Survey, as of 1988
nearly four percent of ever-married women aged 15-49 had terminated a
pregnancy through abortion, with another three percent terminating a preg-
nancy by menstrual regulation. These procedures are most common among
women over age 30, having been utilized by 8-9 percent of women aged
30-44 (Ibid., Table 4.5, p. 40).
41. Allman etal., p. 315.
42. See ibid; Henry P. David, 'Vietnam: Population Paradox', Population
Today, 1991, p. 5; Republic of Vietnam, 1990.
43. Republic of Vietnam, 1991, Table 7.3, p. 66.
44. Tran Hoang Kim, Economy of Vietnam: Reviews and Statistics, Hanoi:
Statistical Publishing House, 1992, Table 84, p. 184.
45. 'Cooperation', Saigon Times, No. 67, January 14-20, 1993, p. 4; 'New and
Bright Prospects for Vietnam's National Economy', Vietnam Business 3(1),
January 1-15, 1993, p. 14.
46. Allman et al., p. 315.
47. Population and Development Review, p. 171.
48. Nguyen Thi Hoa, 'Female Workers at Thanh Cong Textile Company in the
Renovation Process', paper presented at the Seminar on Family and the
Condition of Women in Society, Ho Chi Minh City, 1993, pp. 9-10.
49. Xenos, pp. 26-27.
9 Industrialization and
Economic Development:
The Costs to Women
Kathleen Barry

Between its reunification in 1975 and renovation beginning in 1986 when

Vietnam opened to a free market economy, the socialist government actu-
ally succeeded in reducing prostitution from its all-time, wartime high
estimated at 500,000 at the close of the Vietnam War to 10,000 nationwide
prior to 1986. 1 From 1975 to 1985 some prostitution, particularly in Ho
Chi Minh City (former Saigon) and on the nearby coast, persisted, mostly
for visiting businessmen and diplomats. Nevertheless, by closing market
exchange which provides leisure cash income and by adopting prohibi-
tionist law and opening 're-education centres' for prostitutes, Vietnam
reversed the trend of its neighbouring Asian countries such as Thailand
and the Philippines, where prostitution, under economic development
through tourism, became a fact of their industrialization.
Since opening to a market economy with 'doi moi', prostitution has
dramatically increased, accelerating in direct relationship to economic
expansion especially with its emphasis on tourism. According to
Professor Le Thi Quy, from 10,000 women in prostitution in Ho Chi
Minh City in 1986 the figure has risen to 50,000 and nationally to 100,000
by 1993. 2 With industrialization and acceleration of economic develop-
ment, local prostitution is being systemized into sex industries and
Vietnam is considered as the next sex tourism market in Asia. Trafficking
in Vietnamese women to Thailand, Cambodia and China was well under
way by 1991. In 1993 it was reported that truckloads of Vietnamese
women and girls were being taken into Cambodia to serve the U.N.
peacekeeping forces there, indicating highly developed networks for
organized trafficking.
The government of Vietnam has identified prostitution as one of the top
ten priority concerns. In Janmrry 1993, by government order, Vietnam intro-
duced far-reaching programmes to control prostitution and AIDS. 3 In its
present (early 1990s) stage of economic development with its commitment

144
 Kathleen Barry 145
to protect women from prostitution, Vietnam still has the potential to
control prostitution and prevent the widespread reduction of women to
sexual exploitation that has occurred in other newly industrializing coun-
tries (NICs). However, as prostitution is an economic exchange, with
decentralization of the economy government control over prostitution will
diminish. As most nation-states have ignored prostitution when it prolifer-
ated in the early phases of export oriented industrialization, globally, there
are neither models nor resources that states are willing to commit in aid to
Vietnam for effective control of sex industrialization.
Poverty does not cause prostitution. If it did, much larger numbers of
men would turn to it for income. It is a gendered form of sexual exploita-
tion, a form of violence against women that, in fact, perpetuates sex dis-
crimination by marginalizing women from the labour force, and misogyny
through pornography. Prostitution is a leisure industry which flourishes
amidst massive poverty by exploiting it and genderizing it. The pattern
established in other Asian countries is evident in early stages of industrial-
ization in Vietnam. Sex industries are being set up by foreigners and in the
first phases of development, they mostly serve foreign customers on sex
tours or business trips. When indigenous men gain the first access to
spendable income, they are more likely than women to turn their income
to leisure pursuits. Although prostitution has been considered by social
scientists as a consequence (unintended) of rapid industrialization, today,
globally, prostitution has become an arm of industrialization, bringing
foreign exchange to the country and to families through daughters' prosti-
tution. In such circumstances, economic development is at the cost of
women's lives and well-being, especially with the threat of AIDS.
To justify the large scale deployment of women into prostitution-sex
industries, the ideology of inevitability has frequently been invoked as
an explanation of prostitution which is framed as 'the oldest profession',
or analyzed as the unavoidable consequences of industrialization, or nor-
malized by treating it as a profession and calling it 'sex work'.
Inevitability is the mask of patriarchal hegemony. In Vietnam traditional
values that shape the culture, particularly the belief in fate and filial
piety that shapes familial relationships, produce conditions that can be
exploited by sex industries to expand prostitution markets. In addition,
as sex industries move into Vietnam from post-industrial countries of
Europe as well as the U.S., Japan and Australia where prostitution is
normalized and widespread dissemination of pornography is established
as a cultural fact, they develop with the stamp of these Western sexist
approaches to prostitution.
146 Industrialization and Economic Development
STAGES OF PROSTITUTION

Prostitution develops indigenously and through foreign imposition and both

forces result in colonization of women's bodies. In the Prostitution of
Sexuality4 I have identified four stages in the development of sex indus-
tries: 1) trafficking in women predominates in feudal, pre-industrial, pri-
marily rural societies; 2) military prostitution involves massive procuring
of women to service men in wars that in the late twentieth century are
increasingly fought in underdeveloped countries; 3) sex industrialization
develops from military prostitution (as in the Philippines and Korea) and/or
accompanies accelerated economic development and the shift from domes-
tic to export oriented production; and 4) normalization of prostitution char-
acterizes sex industries in post industrial nation-states with widespread
pornography that makes exploitative sexuality a publicly accepted condi-
tion. These stages are evident in sex industrialization of Vietnam today.

1. Family Feudalism and Trafficking in Women

The Tale of Kieu, by Nguyen Du (1766-1820) is an important early nine-

teenth-century 3254-verse story of a young Vietnamese who is sold into
an arranged marriage, forced into prostitution, and ultimately saved and
redeemed; it is considered 'the supreme masterwork of Vietnamese litera-
ture' ,5 and the 'cultural Bible and window to the soul of the Vietnamese
people' .6 Over the last century, the story of Kieu's subjection to exploita-
tion and abuse, has become an allegory for Vietnamese subjection by the
Chinese, the French and the United States to the extent that 'to the
Vietnamese, regardless of age, gender, geography or ideology, Kieu is
the heart and mind of their nation, the mirror of their society, past
and present'. 7 Huynh Sanh Thong, 'the most faithful translator' of The
Tale of Kieu, writes:

In the last third of the twentieth century, Vietnam was once again forced
to 'go through a play of ebb and flow/ and watch such things as make
you sick at heart'. Thoughtful Vietnamese cannot help recognizing in
their country the image of a karma-cursed woman: Kieu. Between 1965
and 1975, the Washington crusade for a world safe from Soviet Russia
and Red China tore asunder the warp and woof of society in South
Vietnam and bred prostitution, sexual and otherwise, on a vast scale. 8

Today, the sense of urgency in Vietnam to confront, control and 'eradi-

cate' prostitution is deeply connected to the cultural awareness of the
 Kathleen Barry 147
country's oppression and subjugation. In a certain sense, the ability to
control prostitution will be reflected then in the ability to take women's
oppression as seriously as national oppression, to understand 'Kieu' as
woman as well as she is understood as Vietnam.
Kieu was piety and purity at once. Talented, intelligent, creative and
beautiful, she was 'A paragon of grace for womanhood', who pledged her
love to a young man. As soon as she was betrothed, she faced family mis-
fortune - a gang of thugs and robbers attacked her father and threatened
his life if he did not pay them ransom. Kieu responded, 'Hands off- I'll
sell myself and Father I'll redeem' (line 605). Kieu's destiny was fate
(menh): 'When evil strikes, you bow to circumstance' (line 600), com-
bined with obligations of filial piety: having to 'weigh and choose between
your love and filial duty', she agreed to an arranged marriage for a sum
that ransomed her father. To her father's protests she answered in consola-
tion, 'What is she worth, a stripling of a girl's worth/who's not repaid one
whit daughter's debts?' (line 669-670).
Kieu's experience reflects the still present traditional Vietnam where
family relationships are framed in filial piety (hieu) which involves not
only obedience to parents but respect and honour to elders. 'Children were
made to feel keenly that they owed parents a moral debt (on) so immense
as to be unpayable. A child was supposed to try to please his or her parents
all the time and in every way, to increase their comfort, to accede to all
their wishes, to fulfil their aspirations, to lighten their burden of work and
of worry'. 'You were, simply by being alive, in debt to your family'.
Ancestor worship carried this debt and filial piety on to past generations.
In the extended family, a wife's loyalty was to her husband's parents,
especially her mother-in-law and her primary duty was to provide male
descendants. 9
Selling herself into marriage, Kieu ransomed her father and fulfilled
her moral debt. But the arranged marriage turned out to be forced prosti-
tution which she stalled at first with an attempted suicide, but inevitabily
outside family and marriage she found that there is little escaping prosti-
tution for women in traditional society. Eventually 'rescued' from prosti-
tution, it was then her fate to be taken as concubine. Over time she sought
refuge in a marriage that became abusive and then tried to live away from
marriage, concubinage and prostitution as a lowly Buddhist nun, much
like a beggar woman. Through it all she never gave in, she never accepted
what she had become and so her spiritual chastity was preserved. With
chastity intact through abuse, when fate turned in her favour she was able
to confront her abusers and ultimately to be reunited not only with her
family but with her first love. Ultimately Kieu was rescued by Tu Hai, a
148 Industrialization and Economic Development
folk hero who with Kieu represent how 'the hopes and dreams of the
downtrodden, prostitute and rebel complement each other'. 10 Tu Hai' s
respect and wealth allowed her to take revenge against those who had
wronged her and gave reward to those who comforted and protected her
during her exile from her own family, proving that she had sustained her
goodness. Kieu is returned to her family and eventually reunited with him
to whom she originally promised herself. Having preserved her purity of
heart while being reviled and abused, she is able to be accepted back into
her family to be married.
From the beginning Kieu's 'marriage', arranged to save her father, put
her outside the family, at the mercy of the elements of the world.
Dislocated from her family of origin, Kieu was cast to her fate, unpro-
tected by the patriarchal household. In feudalism women are in families as
wives and daughters or they are outside the family as prostitutes. Outside
the control of the paterfamilias, pimps, traffickers and customers form the
triad of control that replaces that of husband and father.
The Tale of Kieu is the story of what women's studies researchers in
Vietnam today call 'one-sided chastity', a product of 'family feudalism',
that invokes women's loyalty and fidelity to one man while men are con-
sidered to be, by nature, polygamous. 11 Whether or not the state is shaped
by feudal arrangements between lords and serfs, women in families are
the serfs of family feudalism. Feudalism leaves no place in society for
women outside traditional marriage. The feudal family is the structural
force that produces prostitution in pre-industrial society, an extra-familial
polygamy for customers, who in buying women reflect the other side of
one-sided chastity. In family feudalism, when women are not contained
within the privatized family they are cast out with the other homeless,
roaming bands of men, robbers, and thieves.
In 'Kieu' the inevitability of prostitution is treated as a matter of fate-
either one is fated to be a prostitute and assumed to be a naturally fallen
women, or one is pure and honourable but forced into prostitution by the
fates, a series of unforseen circumstances beyond one's control. From the
separation of women into categories of wives and prostitutes, fate marks
one's prostitution as either forced upon one who is meant to be a wife or
free for one who is fallen by nature. In the Philippines the expression in
the sex industries is 'Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere.'
Fate locks women into categories of either wife or whore in traditional
society. Upon the misogynist distinctions that promote 'free' prostitution
(as distinguished from 'forced') as a personal and market choice, sex
industries are built, promoted and ultimately normalized.
 Kathleen Barry 149
2. Military Prostitution- Vietnam War

The Vietnam War reduced over 500,000 Vietnamese women to prostitu-

tion to service the U.S. military and the military of the Republican South
under the U.S. As the war escalated, Vietnamese women became synony-
mous with 'prostitute' for American military who already had labelled
their enemy as 'gooks', an objectification that facilitates killing and torture
during war. In describing the bar-girls of Vietnam during the war there,
Jameison presents a picture that is replicated wherever there has been
massive U.S. military presence in Asia (such as in the Philippines and
Korea):

The streets in downtown Saigon, and those near U.S. housing com-
pounds and military bases in Cholon and scattered around the outskirts
of the city, were thickly lined with bars. These bars catered almost
exclusively to American males, and at any given time each bar would
usually have on hand from five to twenty hostesses to make small talk
with the customers and push drinks. There were similar clusters of bars
in Bien Hoa, Vung Tau, Nha Trang, and Danang, and they sprang up on
a smaller scale wherever significant numbers of Americans were to be
found. 12

Most women in prostitution for militaries were women who were war
widows, were abandoned by husbands, or were rape victims. Le Ly
Hayslip is one who because of being raped 'despaired of a proper mar-
riage' . 13 Prostitutes were women outside the family unit. In wartime, the
condition of being a feudal vagabond outside the protection of the paterfa-
milias was heightened by the dislocation produced by war.
Le Ly Hayslip was a young peasant girl in Central Vietnam when the
fighting between North and South, between the U.S. and Ho Chi Minh's
forces, began to escalate in 1965. In her autobiography she framed her
experiences of rape and prostitution in the archetype of Kieu, invoking the
feudal distinction between 'free' and 'forced' prostitution. Hayslip was
strongly committed to filial piety, the bond with her father strengthened by
the fact that she was her father's favourite and the youngest child in the
family. Having been raped by both North and South Vietnamese men, she
was considered spoiled for marriage but she also considered herself as
pure (chaste) as Kieu did. In her story she was different from her sisters,
who appeared to go into prostitution wiiiingly. With massive prostituting
of Vietnamese women during the war, Le Ly Hayslip consistently had to
150 Industrialization and Economic Development
fight off attempts to reduce her to prostitution while she was a street
peddler who sold goods for income to support herself and her son. She
saw her sisters enter prostitution and take on American 'boyfriends', and
often had to sleep in the adjoining room while they were entertaining
them. In her memoirs Hayslip explains how she eventually agreed to pros-
titute herself one or two times. She had been hanging around a base trying
to sell goods from her bag when an American MP approached her on
behalf of two Gis who wanted her for a 'boom-boom before they go back
to the States'. She pointed in the direction of the bars outside the base. But
the MP had picked her to satisfy the two Gis he claimed l;lad not had a
woman since they had been in 'Nam'. She protested. 'Le Ly good girl!'
She says that he offered her $20 then $100 and then $400 for the Gls who
had paid him in advance. As she was not a prostitute, her value was higher
because she was less likely to have VD. She reasoned:

I stared at the case the way a thirsty prisoner stares at water. Four hundred
dollars would support my mother, me and Hung for over a year- a year I
could use finding a better job and making connections or, as a last resort,
greasing palms for a paid escape. And to make it, I wouldn't even have to
work up a sweat or risk going to jail or getting blown up by a mine or
blown away in an ambush. Just lie down and let these two American boys
be men. What could they do to me that hadn't been done already? Maybe
it was time some men paid me back for what other men had taken - 14

Le Ly Hayslip's account is an example of how women cling to the dis-

tinction between 'forced' and 'free' prostitution, between 'good' and 'bad'
women. These distinctions are lodged in the feudal inevitability of prosti-
tution. Seeing that some women were not forced into being prostitutes,
she uncritically reasoned 'For myself, I never minded the flesh peddling as
long as the women were of age, did it voluntarily and understood the risks
they were taking. And, of course, I could hardly fault the Gis for acting
like men.' 15
Le Ly saw the slave traffic differently, 'these girls weren't prostitutes
but young women, some not even in puberty - who came into the city on
buses to escape the war in the countryside. Like me, these girls were peas-
ants, ignorant of anything but life on the farm, who had been sent by rela-
tives to find a safer, better life in the city.' From an assumption that some
women are inclined to be prostitutes by nature, she described the others,
the ones who were forced. They were met at the buses by pimps and
madams who promised the girls jobs doing domestic work and then sold
them to wealthy customers or turned them over to bars. 16
 Kathleen Barry 151
Prostitution had been mobilized for the war, primarily by the Americans
for the U.S. military. In calculating the costs of war, the 500,000 prostituted
women are rarely counted, remaining invisible as victims. Eliminating
prostitution and returning women to their families was one of the postwar
commitments of the reunified government of Vietnam. 'Schools to
Rehabilitate Women's Dignity', were established to train women in a trade
as well as to provide them with political lectures and cultural activities.
A similar prostitution build-up for the U.S. military took place in the
Philippines and Thailand during the Vietnam war. While prostitution dra-
matically decreased in Vietnam, it was industrialized in nearby countries
and the hundreds of thousands of prostitute women expanded to over one
million in Thailand alone by the mid 1980s and by mid 1990s has been
estimated at two million there.

3. Sex Industrialization and Economic Development

With sex industrialization in Asia, that accelerated in the 1970s, prostitu-

tion was redefined as 'men buying women's bodies' by Japanese femi-
nists, who, according to Yayori Matsui, a Japanese journalist, have
changed the Japanese character for prostitution to give it its material des-
ignation. The demand of foreign businessmen for prostitution frequently
accelerates the sex industrialization in developing economies. Rapidly
men from within the country become customers in the new prostitution
market, which expands dramatically.
A 1993 study, 'The Risk of AIDS in Vietnam', found that in both Hanoi
and Ho Chi Minh City the sex industries are still small businesses but that
large enterprises are developing and some brothels function as interna-
tional businessesY And the study indicates that by the early 1990s, only
four years after prostitution began to increase in Vietnam, the customers
are increasingly local Vietnamese men. Sampling 'men representative of
demographic categories found in or near places where commercial sex
workers are found, that is, a cross section of adult men in these two cities',
the study concluded that 'All Asian men in the study had higher rates of
multiple partners than non-Asians. Among Asians, it appears from our
survey that more Vietnamese men than Asian foreigners have multiple
partners (54% compared to 35%) but that among those men, the Asian for-
eigners report a slightly higher average number of partners in two weeks
(4.17 compared to 3.72 for Vietnamese men).' 18
The study found that classes of prostitute women could be differentiated
by those who were at the lowest level and provided sex only and higher
income women who provided sex with a service such as entertainment or
152 Industrialization and Economic Development
hostessing. But, following from traditional, fated morality, men distin-
guish women according to wives, lovers and prostitutes. As one man said
'Those are three completely different kinds of people. I think there is
husband and wife relationship between me and my wife, love with my
lovers, but fun with prostitutes. With the latter, we pay for fun, for all the
love-making games that we prefer. There is responsibility for our wives
and with our lovers'. Another said 'I think it's quite different to sleep with
my wife and with prostitutes. With prostitutes, it's like eating the cake we
have paid for. So we can do whatever we like, provided that we are
satisfied. But with the wife, we must give happiness.' 19 The normalization
of prostitution, reflected in the Vietnamese men's attitudes toward the sex
industry, is a continuation of male polygamy or 'one-sided chastity', with
or without marriage.
Sex industrialization accompanies economic development - in Asia
now as well as in the U.S. and other Western countries at the end of the
nineteenth century. 20 Marginalizing women from the developing labour
force, it also buys women off from wages that in the first stages of indus-
trialization do not satisfy basic human needs for food, shelter and care of
children. Prostitution and sex industries provide strong cash incentives.
Cash, particularly in the form of foreign exchange, often has more value
than goods at this stage of development. Ways of getting cash become a
priority and lead to increased acquisition of goods. Under conditions of
severe sexual discrimination, women's immediate access to cash is
limited. The pattern of sex industries in other world regions is to buy off
women's labour activity by providing higher economic incentives for
prostitution than sex-discriminatory wages in the industrial sector provide.
Newly industrializing economies that have relied on export processing
zones to accelerate the economy typically offer women workers below
standard wages. Many women migrating alone or with their children from
rural areas are unable to adequately support themselves from their wages
that are below those of men in the newly industrializing economies. In
1989 Rutnin reported the wage structure in Thailand that made it possible
for the sex industry to buy off poor women. The monthly wage of a
factory worker on an 8-12 hour day ranged from $40 to $80, while a
massage-parlour prostitute working comparable hours earned $200 to
$320 per month. At a lower level of unskilled employment, a domestic
servant working 12 to 18 hours per day could expect to earn $12 to $20
per month while a third-class prostitute working comparable hours would
earn $40 to $80 per month. 21
The sex industries having moved in from the West, as underground econ-
omic systems of multinational conglomerates, have offered diversified
 Kathleen Barry 153
prostitution outlets, from street and brothel prostitution for local men to
sex tourism for male tourists - men on military leave, businessmen and
men on vacation. Once massive prostitution industries have taken over the
economy and colonized women in them, the increased income men earn
from their favoured status and economic access in the developing
economy enables them to buy prostitution sex. After years of industrial-
ized sex in Thailand that was promoted by sex tourism from abroad, the
larger proportion of customers now are local Thai men, and prostitution
has became normalized with plans to legalize it.

4. Normalization of Prostitution

In the two decades since 1970, the most dramatic change in prostitution
has been its normalization and widespread diffusion throughout the world.
In the U.S., Europe and Australia, sex industry sponsored groups of
women promoting prostitution form what has been identified as a 'pro-
prostitution lobby'. With International Whores Congresses in Amsterdam
and with recent legislation that promotes prostitution not only as a form of
work but as a fact of 'women's self-determination', the Netherlands has
taken the lead for the pro-prostitution lobby.
In societies with nuclear family structures, increasing participation of
women in the paid labour force with a high incidence of female underem-
ployment and unemployment, prostitution is an underground economic
system or an informal labour economy that eases the strain that full inte-
gration of women into the public, formal labour sector would require in its
absence. In the Third World, as market relations are increasingly becom-
ing the model for personal relationships and interactions, the social con-
struction of sex is being reconstructed and normalized as labour. This
leads to legalization of prostitution in countries such as Thailand. In turn,
this reformulation serves to normalize the disjoining of sex from human
experience promoting its acceptance as a separable market commodity.
This Western trend has been rapidly integrated into newly industrializing
economies with the effect of suppressing women's participation in the
legitimate labour force.

CONCLUSION

Prostitution and sex industries have been made integral to economic devel-
opment. While egalitarian family law promoted modernization even
before economic development, it has contradicted traditional family values
154 Industrialization and Economic Development
that promote the devaluation of females. Vietnam in its 1946 Constitution,
Article 46 and subsequent revisions of 1959 and 1986, made considerable
legal progress in confronting marital feudalism. Legally, polygamous and
arranged marriages are forbidden (although still practised in some areas).
However, suppressing prostitution and mandating marital equality have
not undermined the power relations that produce women's subordination.
Free mate selection eases the control over women in marriage but being
free yet in dependence does not lift the weight of feudalism. In these con-
ditions, monogamy, rather than controlling male sexual behaviour,
intensifies men's polygamous pursuit of prostitution.
Prostitution is not a marginal condition of women, unrelated to either
the economy or the family. To fully address the exploitation of women in
prostitution requires programmatic efforts to realize women's equality in
the family, society, and the economy, including the right to live free of
sexual exploitation. That is the aim of a new international treaty being pro-
posed to the United Nations, which defines prostitution as a form of sexual
exploitation and therefore a condition of male domination. Recognizing
that it is a right of all human beings to be free of sexual exploitation, the
convention defines it as,

a practice by which person(s) achieve sexual gratification or financial

gain or advancement through the abuse of a person's sexuality by abro-
gating that person's human right to dignity, equality, autonomy, and
physical and mental well-being. 22

By treating prostitution as one form of sexual exploitation which also

includes rape, sexual harassment, incest abuse and pornography, the
responsibility for prostitution is placed on the customer, the one who buys
sex on the market, and on pimps, brothel owners and sex industrialists,
who market women's bodies, and on the state to guarantee women access
to gainful and dignified labour.
However, controlling prostitution by arresting and punishing customers
is not sufficient to relieve women of the social and economic conditions
that produce this one-way market, the other side of 'one-sided chastity'.
Remnants of family feudalism and its impact on women's economic
inequality must be addressed.
Therefore states also must be concerned with the following: 23

I. Strict controls to prevent trafficking in women, sex tourism from

foreign tourists and businessmen and mail-order bride industries.
 Kathleen Barry 155
2. Integrating women into the full advantages of economic development,
with equal wages and equal access to employment in all industries.
3. Confronting family feudalism and the sexual exploitation of women
and children in the home.
4. Programmes to support women leaving prostitution and to retrain
them to dignified labour, affording them a decent standard of living.
5. Programmes to support women's personal (emotional and psychologi-
cal) devastation from systematic sexual exploitation, connecting prior
(often forgotten) sexual abuse with prostitution.
6. Criminalizing and seriously punishing customers of prostitutes
whether foreign or national as well as criminalizing and punishing
pimps, brothel owners, pornography distributors.

Vietnam is in an advantageous position to protect women from the

industrialization of sexual exploitation. It has already made considerable
progress in identifying the programmes and putting into place the laws
which will realize many of these proposals. The ethical commitment of the
state rejects prostitution, something, by contrast, that has become toler-
ated in many Westernized Asian countries. The political and cultural her-
itage of fighting oppression can, if turned to fighting sex industrialists,
provide a new base for women's equality. The model of Kieu, a traditional
source of inspiration also, conveys false distinctions between free and
forced prostitution, feudal concepts which can, as the state economy
becomes increasingly decentralized, lead to the legitimization of prostitu-
tion that is not forced. However, in Vietnam the base is established for
confronting sexual exploitation in the home and in the marketplace. Yet,
as the market economy develops independent of the state, so will feminist
and women's movements have to develop autonomously to sustain the cri-
tique of exploitation in prostitution already launched in Vietnam.

Notes

I. While all socialist governments prohibit prostitution, none have succeeded

in eliminating it, which suggests not its inevitability but rather that there is
no patriarchal government that will effectively control men's access to
buying women.
2. Le Thi Quy, 'Social Policy on Prevention and Restriction of Prostitution in
Vietnam', Paper presented at the conference, 'Women Empowering
Women', Coalition Against Trafficking in Women- Asia, Manilla, April,
1993.
156 Industrialization and Economic Development
3. Le Thi Quy, 'Social Policy on Prevention and Restriction of Prostitution in
Vietnam', Paper delivered at the conference, 'Women Empowering
Women', Manilla, April,l993.
4. Kathleen Barry, Prostitution of Sexuality, New York University Press, 1995.
5. Nguyen Du, The Tale of Kieu, translated by Huynh Sanh Thong, New
Haven: Yale University Press, Introduction, p. xx.
6. Insight Guides: Vietnam, editor, Helen West, Singapore: Hofer Press,l992,
p. 134.
7. Ibid., p. 134.
8. Nguyen Du, Introduction, p. xxxix.
9. Neil Jameison, Understanding Vietnam, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993, pp. 17, 22, 25-27.
10. Nguyen Du, Introduction, p. xxxviii.
11. Actually, the idea that a woman could be wronged but remain pure, as
Nguyen Du represented Kieu, was an advance over the assumption that any
woman who was sexually used outside marriage was responsible for it and
created intense reaction for over a century because of the 'revisionist'
approach to chastity.
12. Jameison, p. 333.
13. Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, New York: Doubleday,
1989, p. 224.
14. Hayslip, p. 259.
15. Hayslip, p. 226.
16. Hayslip, p. 224.
17. Barbara Franklin, 'The Risk of AIDS in Vietnam', CARE International in
Vietnam, Monograph, No. 1, 1993, p. 4, note 3.
18. Ibid., p. 36.
19. Ibid., pp. 36-7.
20. Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the
Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920, New York: Norton, 1992, p. 287.
21. Mojdara Mattani Rutnin, 'Prostitution and the Economic Empowerment of
Women in Thailand: A Case Study of Alternatives in Chien Mai Village in
Northern Thailand', Paper Presented at the AWID Conference, Washington,
D.C.,l989.
22. See 'Convention Against Sexual Exploitation', in Barry, Prostitution of
Sexuality, 1995.
23. Barry, 1995.
Part III
Urbanization and Women's
Work
10 The Vietnamese Woman in
Vietnam's Process of
Change
Bui Thi Kim Quy

Since the middle of the 1980s, with the beginning of Vietnam's transfor-
mation from a centralized, subsidized economy to a market economy, the
status of Vietnamese women has undergone important change and
progress. In the twentieth century, especially after the victory of the 1945
August Revolution, the people were liberated and women experienced
many changes. Indeed, the first Constitution of the Democratic Republic
of Vietnam upholds equality between the two sexes. The law on Marriage
and Family, promulgated in 1960, abolished polygamy - a traditional
custom in Asia, including Vietnam, which had subjected the lot of women
to the trammels of feudal, patriarchal families.
In feudal and in modern times the lot of women portrayed through
history and through characters in traditional stories show us that:
-Women, even when they were intelligent and gifted, could only take
the examination [PhD equivalent and the entry to high governmental and
social position] by pretending that they were boys. If they were discov-
ered, they would be expelled from home immediately if they did not plead
guilty to lese-majesty (disobeying the royal laws).
- However outstanding they might be in scientific work, they could
never be ranked as academicians. [At present in Vietnam, all academic
disciplines are referred to as sciences.]
- Even when they were of the noble class, women could be offered in
exchange for the stability of the community or to expand the territory of
the feudal court (for example, Queen Tran Huyen Tran was given in
marriage to the king of Champa in exchange for 0 and Ri administrative
divisions).
- Polygamy was practised both among the general population and in
the royal palace. The latter served as a place of detention for innumerable
women who were selected from all regions of the country to serve the
king.

159
160 The Vietnamese Women in Vietnam's Process of Change
When women have not been considered 'birth machines', women have
been regarded as persons looking after their husbands, or more affection-
ately, as persons beautiful to look at. That is, a wife's work was not
respected based upon her contributions to her family and society.
However, we all know that in the past Vietnamese women made great
contributions and sacrifices to the fatherland and their families. They were
'the interior ministers', holding the house-keys in their hands and strictly
managing the family's finances. They have been mothers who 'gave birth
to heroes'. In times of war as well as in times of peace, they sedulously
devoted themselves to making money while simultaneously making all
sorts of sacrifices. They were the people who kept the peace in the rear so
that the front was free from worries. But they also knew 'how to fight, as
women know how to fight when invaders come'. From their days as young
lasses to the time when they became elderly people, almost all of them had
little enjoyment or rest.
In the twentieth century, in two wars of resistance against imperialists,
lasting three decades, Vietnamese women were present everywhere, both in
spheres of production and armed struggle. They defended family traditions
and the national cultural character. They were richly worthy of the golden
appellation that many received: 'undauntedly heroic, good and loyal, wholly
capable'. But perennial disadvantages bedevilled their lives, not only under
conditions of war but also after peace was restored. They have had fewer
opportunities to foster their potentialities than have men. Social and family
responsibilities constitute a heavy burden on their shoulders. They lack the
time to increase any of their capacities; of particular importance, women's
cultural education [in re: current affairs, the arts, etc.] and professional train-
ing and skills have been stunted. It is precisely due to this state of affairs that
although women are entering an era of change when conditions of freedom,
initiative and creativeness are being expanded for everyone, women feel
unprepared and unable to meet the new demands that society is now posing.
In the scope of this article, for the purpose of analysis, we limit our-
selves to just one aspect of this problem. This, in our opinion, is the most
fundamental aspect: while employment is the first and determining factor,
women are also citizens and mothers (the first teachers of humanity).

THE PRESENT EFFECTS OF THE CHANGE TO A MARKET

ECONOMY

It is common knowledge that industrialization is the sine qua non process

humanity must traverse in order to obtain high productivity, plentiful
 Bui Thi Kim Quy 161
commodities and a market economy; these provide incentives which will
raise the quality of life. Nevertheless, contradictions inevitably arise in the
process of achieving the objective of building a progressive, happy and
affluent society. This mechanism cannot help but cause injustices, the
foremost one concerning the status of women. In part this is because
women for ages have lacked the needed conditions to foster their creative
potential. Then there is the common business practice which only con-
cerns itself with productivity before it addresses women's equal right to
perform social labour.
In addition with the change to market mechanisms, the recent struggle
for survival and development has led factories, enterprises, and govern-
ment offices, even those headed by women, not to take into consideration
the needs of women: in pregnancy they must be given leave at child-birth,
time to nourish their children, leave when they are sick, etc. These needs
result in women having difficulties in finding work, in the numbers of
those listed as 'redundant', etc.
Moreover in the present, a feudal trend of 'respect for men, scorn for
women' is showing signs of being restored. In assigning work, priority is
given to young men who are military people leaving the armed forces, or
to those who, owing to changes in the situation in Eastern European coun-
tries and in the former Soviet Union, in Iraq, etc., return from services of
co-operation with those countries. The consequence of this viewpoint is
the concept that jobs should be created for men before creating them for
women. The reason given for this preference is very simple: women
already have work in the home - that is, they are sent back to their place in
the kitchen, with their children, and they must be content with taking care
of their men.
In a sociological survey of women school teachers and workers in the
textile industry in Ho Chi Minh City, we have gleaned invaluable data:
only 3.1% of them want to stay at home to look after their children and
husbands, even when the incomes received by their husbands are more
than adequate for the whole families. Up to 86.7% believe that even if
married, women should take part in social and cultural activities. They
attach equal importance to career and family.
What is noteworthy here is that survey results bring out the aspiration
for equality between the two sexes. This means that women require
employment, some kind of work to increase family budgets and to raise
simultaneously their social status, thus diminishing their psychology of
timidity and resignation of their rights within the family.
Thus, women seek independence as they go to work to contribute to
their families' earnings. Their endeavours to create employment for them-
162 The Vietnamese Women in Vietnam's Process of Change
selves occur in two ways: the unskilled who have a low level of culture
either join the contingent of small traders who peddle goods on the road-
ways and pavements of cities, or they become prostitutes. Small merchants
are already in great numbers occupying streets and street pavements, and
thus causing disorder in urban areas. The younger and foolhardy ones
become prostitutes, making prostitution and AIDS dangerous for the
whole society. This latter choice can lead to the loss of a woman's human
dignity and even of her life (i.e. from AIDS).
This represents a very urgent danger for Ho Chi Minh City. Of a total of
200,000 unemployed people, there are two-thirds who are women, and
each year women also account for the majority of persons (80,000) reach-
ing working age who are not employed.
In a society that is shifting from a centralized command economy to a
market mechanism, furthermore in a city where there are many gathering-
spots for the dissipation of pent-up energy and for mimicking one another
in following new fashions, the need for increasing one's income easily
leads some women to become prostitutes. The primary corrective in order
to effectively prevent AIDS is to create good paying jobs for women
workers. This is a question of pressing need and, moreover, a humanitar-
ian issue that needs to be addressed. The problem has economic
significance (to increase individual and family income as well as products
for society), and involves the women's personalities and their right to
perform creative labour. Moreover, a solution would raise their propor-
tional contributions to the family and society.

TODAY'S WOMEN WORKERS

Nowadays the perception of women as merely the 'lady of the home' or

the ancient conception that they should 'think much of sons but little of
daughters' are unfounded due to social developments and economic
needs, as well as the requirement of equality between men and women
deemed by the civilized norms of our epoch. Society has had to recognize
that 'women are not only a factor for development but also the target of
development' based on their two functions: reproduction and social
production.
Indeed, according to John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene 1 in the past
two decades, women have increasingly moved into decision-making posi-
tions at work. At present women in business are producing radical changes
in their work. There is a high representation of women among the interna-
tional workers. Women are holding higher and higher positions of control
and management, as the most talented prepare to become top leaders.
 Bui Thi Kim Quy 163
From 1972 to 1990 the ratio of women physicians increased twofold, the
ratio of woman lawyers and architects fivefold.
Given these trends, it is no surprise that a movement in response to the
imperative call for 'creating jobs, increasing income and reducing the
poverty of women' was sought in Asian and Pacific countries in recent
years. This was considered to be a practical call meant to address women's
positions and roles in every field of activity as well as in each family.
As in other Asian and Pacific countries, in Vietnam many women are in
the work force. The number of women of working age in 1985 made up
49.8% of the total; in 1990 51.77% and in the year 2000 it is expected to
increase to 56.56%. In the material production sector, female labourers
make up 51.9% of the total work force. And in the non-material produc-
tion sector, the ratio is 53.9%. Women make up 49% of the total of people
working in the State sector.
In Vietnam 80% of the population live in the countryside. Women
account for 51.7% of the work force in rural areas; nearly all of them are,
however, assigned to hard jobs with low remuneration. In the division of
labour, according to the groups of trades, 72.8% of women work in agri-
culture, forestry, and fishery; most of them do arduous manual labour.
Therefore they can hardly apply scientific and technical knowledge
because of their low level of education.
It is easy to understand that every economic achievement in recent
years, especially in the production of rice for consumption and export or in
light industry and handicraft, there were a lot of women labourers toiling
in cities and the countryside.
According to the statistical data in 1988, women working in scientific
and technological studies made up 37.3%, a percentage which Vietnamese
women before the 1945 revolution could not have dreamt of.
This is clearly borne out if we examine what the women have in fact
achieved up to the present time. However, compared to men, the number
of women who have achieved high educational attainment and positions is
markedly lower: 2

University graduates: 263,700 women; 439,600 men

Assistant professors: 740 women; 6,614 men
Full professors: 143 women; 3,259 men
With doctorate candidate degrees: 717 women in a total of 6,921
And with doctorate degrees: 23 women in a total of 393

As regards to the quality of women's work in comparison with that of

men, in the same sphere, the investigation data in Ho Chi Minh City in
December 1990 revealed the following:
164 The Vietnamese Women in Vietnam's Process of Change
-The quality of women's work was higher than men: 14.5%
- The quality was equal to that of men: 56.0%
-The quality was lower than that of men: 16.9%
(Of the total number of 2,025 questionnaires, 87.7% responded.)
In respect to abiding by the regulations of work discipline:
-Women's discipline was better than men's: 22.8%
-The same as men's: 59.3%
-Less than men's: 5.1%
(with an 87.2% response rate)

In recent years, the economy has given all women higher income; but
because of their need to work long hours every day, they could not yet
think of sparing some time for the fostering of knowledge, let alone for
enjoyment or rest. (It should be added that Vietnamese women are not
used to the lives of the unmarried - although there are at present a good
number over the age of 25 who have not yet married, because of their wish
to place their career above everything else.)

FUTURE NEEDS

FIRST - CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT: It is therefore not without reason

that we call for the need to have a right standpoint as regards the method
of employment for the benefit of women labourers. This is an urgent
problem that is moral and humanitarian as well as economic. The econ-
omic meaning of women's employment is that it will increase family
incomes and commodities for society and it ensures for women their per-
sonality and right to work with creativeness, and in so doing raises their
status to a level equivalent to their contributions to family and society.
It is possible to say that the new understanding of women's role in con-
tributing to social development in both work force labour and household
labour has been elevated a step further. But it will be insufficient if those
who form the strategy do not pay attention to creating conditions for
women to bring their fundamental qualities and aptitudes into play. First of
all, women should be given top priority when it comes to the task of raising
the people's cultural (educational) standards and special importance should
be attached to women in the countryside and mountainous areas.
Women are not only a factor in development (with their great contribu-
tions to society) but also an object of development (as the people standing
at the bottom of society, subject to layers of exploitation from both heav-
enly authority and the authority of men). In this sense, liberating women is
 Bui Thi Kim Quy 165
tantamount to liberating society as a whole and to creating conditions for
the equality between the two sexes which is the manifestation of a
civilized society.
However, in the development of the market economy with its contract
system (under application in the countryside) and the growth of the house-
hold economy, it seems that hardships suffered by women have multiplied.
Based on existing tradition in Asia, Vietnamese women have been
expected to accept drudgery at work, unmindful of enjoyment and rest,
not caring to devote time to improve their knowledge. For today, this is
manifested when women are expected to be ready to perform what was
hitherto reserved for men, such as replacing buffaloes for pulling ploughs
and spraying insecticides in the fields as well as nourishing their babies
once they come home after work on the fields ....
SECOND- FAMILIES: We must try to find the reasons why the propor-
tion of broken homes leading to separations and divorces is increasing.
People often blame this on women: 'delinquent sons and daughters, it is
the fault of mothers; delinquent grandchildren, it is the fault of grand-
mothers'. They maintain that if women have to go out to work, which is
counter to 'their sacred innate mission [to care for their families]', it is
because the salaries of men are too low.
THIRD - WOMEN AND MEN: Not only do objective requirements create
for women the necessity to improve their general education and expert
knowledge, which give inspiration and high efficiency to their work.
Improving women's education also contributes directly to transforming
the relationship between husbands and wives: from submission of just one
side to that of mutual respect and admiration. This serves as a basis for the
democratic spirit of discussion and collective decision with regard to
affairs of the entire existence of the family: expenditures, family planning,
education and care of children, which are attributes which confer solidity
to family happiness.
In addition to their sacred domestic role, women nowadays are engaged
in activities which produce for society more goods and services. In the
work process, they can transform themselves by raising their status, while
transforming men at the same time. The latter must be concerned with
domestic responsibilities just as the women are themselves concerned with
their career outside their homes.
This is not perceived by women alone; it is also realized, though gradu-
ally, by men as well. And they have (more or less of their own free will)
adopted the tendency of 'correcting' their old conceptions by sharing with
their life companions chores in the home, thus providing opportunities for
their wives to advance their cultural and professional levels.
166 The Vietnamese Women in Vietnam's Process of Change
Of course, together women and men need to acquire necessary knowl-
edge to raise the quality of life for every member of the entire family.
There are things which are necessary for women's advancement, but that
cannot be acquired by women who, however much in love with their hus-
bands they are, have scant access to scientific information, books, and
newspapers and little social intercourse (as is expected of women working
in an office or enterprise). These needs leave women prone to feeling infe-
rior to men, to be uncommunicative as the result of overwork at home,
and to have a low level of education which adversely influences family
happiness.
FoURTH - EQUALITY: At present, organizations which develop eco-
nomic and social policies, and laws and policies concerning families and
women are fully conscious of the importance of the role of women. What
however imposes itself as first priority is equality between the two sexes,
which should be founded on a just appraisal of the contributions made by
women from both functions of work, and on efforts to create conditions to
achieve their aspiration for creative freedom in their work, the common
trend of women in the present age.
Naturally, this work will not be completed in a short time. But if we
affirm that the foundation of development is to develop the capability of
each individual then the training and re-training will greatly assist women,
who make up half of mankind, to enter the 21st century with luggage quite
different from that of today.

Notes

I. Ten New Directions of the 1990s, Megatrends 2000, New York: William
Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990.
2. From the paper presented by Dr Chu Nha, Professor of the Ministry of
Technology and Environment, at the Conference on Women Intellectual's
Role in the Renovation of Vietnam, held in Hanoi in September 1993.
11 Female Workers at Thanh
Cong Textile Company in
the Renovation Process
Nguyen Thi Hoa

The reform of the economic management structure in Vietnam has

changed from a planned centralized and subsidized economy to a multi-
element economy following a controlled market mechanism. It has been
implemented step-by-step from the time Resolution 6 was promulgated by
the Central Committee of the Vietnam Communist Party, session 6
(September 1979). This reform programme has brought to the Vietnamese
economy a new breath of life and helped release a great deal of production
energy which was latent in factories, companies, state-owned and non-
state enterprises. In Ho Chi Minh City, at the end of 1978 and the begin-
ning of 1979, a number of enterprises appeared that operated well, solving
their problems, and making the most of their strengths to stabilize and
develop production. Examples include Con Dao Fishing Enterprise,
Southern Detergent Company, Thanh Cong Textile Factory, Tobacco
Union Enterprise II, etc. These businesses primarily were the starting point
of the economic reform process in Vietnam. This paper focuses on the re-
novation process of Thanh Cong Textile Factory, 1 and on the role of
female workers in production and business activities, their working condi-
tions, and their training during the renovation process of the factory.
Thanh Cong Textile Factory was established in August 1976 at the site
of a private textile factory that was taken over by the state after the libera-
tion [1975-editor]. The factory has two main production lines: weaving
and dyeing, with an output from the weaving branch from 3 to 5 million
metres of fabric a year, and complete dyeing from 8 to 10 million
metres/year. The main products of the factory are high-grade synthetic
fibres, such as deluxe Oxford fabrics, Hysofly, Silk, Tropical. The equip-
ment at Thanh Cong Textile Factory was manufactured in Japan, the
United States, and West Germany during the 1970s and was quite modem
and automated. The complete lines of raw materials, chemicals and dyes,
and spare parts were imported from capitalist countries.

167
168 Female Workers at Thanh Cong Textile Company
After having been taken over and becoming a state-owned enterprise,
the factory belonged to the Vietnam Central Union of Textile Factories.
The Thanh Cong Factory had more than 500 workers with fixed assets
amounting to $1.5 million. The staff workers of the factory mostly came
from working-class families of peasants who originated in the provinces of
Hoc Mon, Ba Diem, Tan Phu. The percentage of Vietnamese workers of
Chinese origin was small. Mechanical employees received training from
many different sources; some came from the North, others were graduates
from capitalist countries, and the remaining were trained during the old
regime. The managerial staff of Thanh Cong Textile Company was small
and compact. The Board of Directors comprised two members: a male
director overseeing general operation, and a female vice director in charge
of workers' living conditions, in addition to being the designated secretary
to the Party at the factory.
During the first few years the goal of Thanh Cong Textile Factory was
to 'recover and develop production'. 2 The factory was organized following
the general subsidy structure. Concretely, every year the state gave the
factory a production quota, supplied it with raw materials and equipment,
prescribed the products to be manufactured, and fixed the selling price and
retail outlets.

ROLE OF FEMALE WORKERS IN PRODUCTION AND BUSINESS

ACTIVITIES AND RENOVATION PROCESS

Female workers in production at Thanh Cong Company make up 85% of

the factory's labour force. 3 Before the sewing division was added (1988),
female workers were concentrated mainly in the weaving division. They
were divided into production teams each consisting of 20 persons. Each
female worker operated on the average from two to four weaving
machines (depending on the kind of fabrics). The average output was from
14 to 18 metres per machine/shift.
During the first period (July to December 1976), most female workers
worked half-heartedly, many paying no attention to output, quality of
work, or other matters in the factory. There were many explanations for
their indifference. Some were burdened with the stigma of having been
with the old regime, knowing only of today and not bothering about
tomorrow. But, more importantly, the lack of commitment to their jobs
resulted from a pay-by-the-day system which had the effect of indiscrimi-
nately equalizing the production output of both industrious and non-
industrious workers who all got the same wage.
 Nguyen Thi Hoa 169
To solve this problem, the factory's management board was bold
enough to assign management positions - from the workshop manager
down - to a number of cadres and staff. And they provided flexible fringe
benefits in the form of awards for productivity, for high quality of work,
etc. As a result, many workers completely changed their ways. Many con-
scientious workers voluntarily came to work early to personally check the
condition of equipment handed over to them by the previous shift. During
work periods, they always stood by their machine to avoid technical mis-
takes and to guard against delays due to a malfunction of their machines.
They responded warmly to contests of skills in operation and in upgrading
the quality and outputs of products.
After being taken over, the factory encountered many problems,
because all raw materials, chemicals, colour dyes and spare parts were
imported from capitalist countries, and it had no foreign currency to
import equipment or spare parts. By the end of 1977 the machines started
to break down, and chemicals and colour dyes gradually ran out. The
weaving machines and the modem dyeing machines did not have parts for
repair. The most modem high pressure dyeing machine of the Vietnamese
textile industry had to stop its operation because of the lack of specialized
roller bearings.
Wanting to stimulate further initiative among the cadres and staff, the
factory's leaders initiated a movement for innovative ideas to improve
techniques in the entire factory in order to solve these problems. During
this contest movement (attempts by different groups of workers to
compete against each other to produce the best products in the shortest
time), alongside the repair and recovery of weaving, dyeing, and starching
machines by male workers, the female workers did their best to improve
their operational skills in their specialized field. Miss Le Minh Nguyen, a
chemical engineer of the dyeing division, and co-workers initiated the use
of formic acid which was available in the country to replace Natum, a
chemical that had to be imported from the U.S. to soften polyester fabrics,
thus saving foreign currency for the state. Female workers positively con-
tributed to the completion of the factory's plan and increased the output of
finished fabric goods from 3,848,000 metres/year in 1977 to 4,217,000
metres in 1978, a threshold increase/year compared to the factory's
highest output before 1975 (the highest output before the liberation was
I ,278,000 metres/year).
In 1979, because of a depression of general economic conditions,4 Thanh
Cong Textile Factory received only one third of the amount of raw material,
compared to 1978. Without enough production materials, the workers had to
be laid off, receiving only 70% of their normal wage. Equipment not put to
170 Female Workers at Thanh Cong Textile Company
full use broke down and rusted. There were no replacement parts. More and
more highly trained and skilled workers left their jobs each day. 5 Negative
phenomena continued to occur and the factory was on the brink of closing
down. If the factory continued to sit there waiting for the state's support,
production would keep on decreasing, workers would be without work, the
state budget would suffer, and the factory would not be able to keep its tech-
nical and scientific cadres and highly skilled workers.
1979 was also the year the factory was entrusted with the task of
weaving satin fabrics for export. This product had never been woven there
so conditions for its production were almost nil. The factory had to transfer
half of its machines to weave satin fabrics, thus problems were added to
problems. During the trial stage of shifting the production from a narrow
size to a wider size, 2000 metres of test fabrics were shredded beyond
recovery. The failure was perplexing to female workers of the weaving
division and the leaders of Thanh Cong Textile Factory. But if the factory
did not make products for export it would receive very few materials for
production, and workers would not have enough jobs and their lives would
not be stable. The experience of the test assisted in the reorganization of
appropriate methods of production. In the second test, the quantity of grade
A fabrics reached 30%. Gradually, by knowing how to draw from experi-
ences, in addition to the direction of technical staffs, female workers of the
weaving division were able to master the production of satin.
During the first six months of 1979, production surpassed the quota by
20% and the percentage of grade A fabrics increased to 82.6%. The ministry
of Foreign Trade awarded the factory 22,000VND (Vietnamese Dong; 1978
prices). During this period, the factory's leaders established youth groups
and teams in the weaving division and organized volunteer youth groups to
work at the machines servicing exports. To encourage fast operation at the
machines, the factory's leaders also decided to pay wages by piece work for
the weaving workers. At the same time, they began applying a flexible
award system to reward output, quality, and for surpassing the prescribed
quota. They provided to workers more of the necessary consumption goods
than the 10 essential products that generally were supplied. The payment of
wages by piece and by work resulted in their working harder.
At Thanh Cong Textile Company right now, an unprecedented competi-
tion movement has happened, output has increased three to four times
compared to previous years. More and more female workers have received
titles of 'competition warrior', 'excellent worker', and 'good worker'.
Some have completed their annual work two or three months before the
due date. Thanks to the improvement and modernization of equipment,
Thanh Cong Textile Company has completed the quota assigned by the
 Nguyen Thi Hoa 171
State before the deadline and has used the remaining time to perform addi-
tional work, such as subcontracting the starching of many thousand tons of
fibres, and dyeing millions of metres of fabrics. These provided jobs and
increasing income for the workers and staff.
With those major accomplishments, Thanh Cong Textile Company has
been acknowledged by the Ministry of Light Industry as the first flag of
the textile industry of the southern provinces, as a model company, and the
best enterprise of Ho Chi Minh City's textile industry. At the same time,
the divisional party of Thanh Cong also received a reward flag as a strong
and clean division. So, from the end of 1978 to the beginning of 1979,
besides the regulated production plan assigned by the State, Thanh Cong
has, by itself, completed additional works, based on market relations, with
negotiated prices and an independent financial account.
However, by established characteristics of the factory, in order to stabi-
lize and develop production in the long run, Thanh Cong needed foreign
currency to import materials and parts. At the same time, it needed to take
the initiative in production and business transactions and, most import-
antly, it needed to be free from the binding policies and regulations of a
subsidized bureaucratic management structure.
From the reality of overcoming problems to stabilize and carry on pro-
duction and having learned the new way of doing business, the factory
board of directors discussed the matter with the collective workers and
staff and decided to construct a policy of Self-Balanced Production and
Recovery of Hard Currency. Previously, the state had provided the
company with all production materials. However, because the state
reduced the supply to one-third of previous amounts, the company needed
other ways to provide the materials needed for production. A new strategy
was needed. With the new policies, the company itself would sell its goods
to gain foreign currency. In turn, it would use those funds for production
materials. The company would keep its profits. This new policy received
the approval of some leaders of the Central Committee, other leaders up
the channel, the City's Party and the People's Committee of the City,
which favoured renovation. They created favourable conditions for the
factory to experiment in its new work. Because of the support of these
people, the company was able to bypass red tape to implement its self-
management strategy. For example, at that point, no factory was allowed
to handle foreign currency directly, but had to go through the Import and
Export Office. Thanh Cong Factory was spared this roundabout way and
could borrow and use foreign currency easily.
Many other people had doubts about the aggressive factory policy, and
changes obstructed the implementation of the new production-business
172 Female Workers at Thanh Cong Textile Company
policy by issuing regulations and policies that were outdated and origi-
nated from the subsidized bureaucratic management structure. But believ-
ing in the collective workers who were industrious, aggressive, and full of
initiative, and believing in the skills of female workers of the weaving
division, Thanh Cong decided to test the new production and business
policy.
Starting from the traditional export products that were popular, Thanh
Cong first joined with Saigon Tourist Company to sell 6000 metres of
deluxe Oxford fabrics and collected $82,000 in U.S. dollars and 53,000
VND (price of 1978). Once it had foreign currency, the factory imported
the essential materials and chemicals through a number of export-import
companies of the city.
Recognizing that with exports in place the factory could help to settle
the matter of foreign currency, Thanh Cong suggested to higher authorities
that it be permitted to borrow $180,000 in U.S. dollars from the Foreign
Trade Bank to import materials to balance production.
The good results harvested from the two production experiments had
brought a lively atmosphere to production activities in the whole factory
and, at the same time, convinced more higher-levelleaders of Thanh Cong
Factory. Thus, beginning the fourth quarter of 1980, Thanh Cong Textile
Factory officially undertook the implementation of the policy of Self-
Balanced Production and Recovery of Hard Currency. With the approval
in hand, Thanh Cong again borrowed from the Foreign Trade Bank
$1,700,000 in U.S. dollars to acquire the quantity of materials and chemi-
cals needed for production in 1981.
At that time the party and the State had advocated the change of the
economic policy (Resolution 6 by the Central Committee of the Party and
Resolution 26 by the Political Bureau; after that, Resolution 9 and 10 by
the Party Council of Ho Chi Minh City). The State Council also had pro-
mulgated decisions 25 and 26 establishing a threefold strategy: wages by
work, by piece, and by reward in state-owned enterprises. This was a con-
crete step to liberate economic enterprises from the ties of the subsidized
bureaucratic management structure and to create favourable conditions for
them to carry out the policy of business management pursuant to the
socialist cost-accounting system.
With its courage to bear difficulties and hardship to pioneer a new way
of doing business, Thanh Cong Textile Factory has been recognized as the
model of production enterprise, and emulated by the city and the whole
country. That is the most valuable prize for the leaders and workers of the
whole company.
 Nguyen Thi Hoa 173
By 1981, with the newly promulgated right to take the initiative in pro-
duction, Thanh Cong had developed the conditions necessary to carry out
the self-balanced production policy. The factory had imported parts to
standardize its production Jines, mobilized up to 95% to 97% of output,
increased average output from 14 to 18 metres/shift/machine (1978) to 25
to 30 metres/shift/machine, and grade A fabrics from 80% to 96%. During
the third quarter of 1981, the factory paid back in full to the Foreign Trade
Bank the money loaned previously (capital and interests) and still had an
excess of $1,300,000 in U.S. currency.
From 1982 the factory operated with its self-generated capital and with
one set quota: the production output. The list of goods, models, and struc-
tures was left to the factory to decide. The result was that the capital in
foreign currency steadily increased with time. The totals in U.S. dollars
ranged from $1,300,000 in 1981,$2,500,000 in 1982,$7,000,000 in 1990,
$12,000,000 in 1991, and $13,000,000 in 1992.6
Each year the factory uses 10% to 15% of its profits for investment in
production. Up to now, after the big investment stages valued at about
$14,000,000 in U.S. currency (7 million for importation of modern equip-
ment and 7 million for the increase of the equipment output), the factory
has standardized, modernized and completed its production Jines. With the
establishment of the garment factory in 1988, Thanh Cong Factory has
added 1000 more workers to its workforce. The female workers have
made decisive contributions to upgrade the quality of pullover shirts well-
known both inside and outside the country.
Without the golden hands of female workers who weave millions of
metres of beautiful fabrics of high quality for export and increase the
output ten times more than before, the renovation process of Thanh Cong
Company still would face many problems. It is they who have woven
the victory and they are the pride of Thanh Cong in its renovation
programme.
In the management sector, women have also made important contribu-
tions. In 1976 the factory had only one woman cadre doing management
work (Miss Nguyen Thi Dong); now, after 16 years of operation, Thanh
Cong has 28 women doing it (occupying 60% of total). Regardless of their
function, or their sector, these women do their best. There are many good
managers like Miss Nguyen Thi Dong, Miss Le Minh Nguyet, Miss Huynh
Thi Hoa, Miss Phan Thi Phoung, etc. In the present market mechanism7 with
its fierce competition among enterprises, that women survive well in impor-
tant managing posts is not a matter of structure as before; they hold these
functions because of their real ability and proven specialized skills.
174 Female Workers at Thanh Cong Textile Company
A representative of good management workers among the collective of
female workers of Thanh Cong was Miss Nguyen Thi Dong, vice director
and concurrently Secretary of the Party at the factory. In 1991, for devel-
opment reasons, the factory was permitted by the ministry to become a
company, and Miss Dong has become one of the three general directors of
Thanh Cong Textile Company. Her approach calls for the establishment of
a strong foundation at the factory comprising the party, the government
and public organizations, and also a sincere trust in the public, 'a trust
embedded in blood and bones', and preferably shown by specific action.
In reality, her use of staff and her assignment of work according to ability
and specialty regardless of social background has contributed much to the
peace of mind for company cadres, staff and workers. She has convinced
leaders of the company to give managing jobs to good workers, as well as
to the intellectuals of the old regime who knew well the production techc
nology in order to bring into play their strength.
Up to the present, the many persons who were trained by her have
become key managing cadres of the company. That was the case of
comrade Nguyen Van Tri, a company former skilled worker. From the
time he joined Thanh Cong, he has shown industriousness in his work,
management ability, knowledge in the design of new products, and ability
to repair broken machines. Moreover, he himself is a good person. So, the
leaders of the factory gave him the job of workshop manager of the
weaving division; and at present, he is vice general director in charge of
the weaving division of Thanh Cong Company.
The case of comrade Nguyen Phuoc Dai, a former chemical engineer at
the dye workshop of the old factory who is now a vice general director in
charge of the dye division, or the cases of comrade Nguyen Van Sua and
comrade Phan Thi Phu are similar. Together with their male colleagues,
the female workers performing leading work at Thanh Cong Company
have contributed to the establishment of a group of good cadres and staff
that has initially got in touch with the domestic and world markets. They
are aggressive, innovative, know how to make the most of the new man-
agement structure, and have constructed many suitable projects for pro-
duction and business.

WORKING CONDITIONS

During the first period after taking over the factory, the weaving division
had only 40 out of 146 machines placed in an air-conditioned room. The
remaining were arranged in workshops nearby which were hot and noisy,
 Nguyen Thi Hoa 175
much over permitted levels. At present, after three big investment stages,
the floor space of the company has been expanded to more than five times
that of 1975 (39,000 m2). The production workshops also were expanded
and modernized, and complied with industrial sanitary requirements. The
air-conditioned system at the weaving, dyeing, and garment-making
sectors has been gradually perfected. Only the newly built weaving section
with 60 machines has not yet been air-conditioned, but the rooms are high
and spacious and well ventilated. Through control at the weaving work-
shops, the temperatures recorded are from 25 degrees to 28 degrees
Celsius and the noise level is from 85 to 90 decibels, standards that are
acceptable for a weaving factory. At these workshops, the company has
equipped modem filtered water vases of high quality, guaranteeing fresh
water for workers during each workshift. The bathrooms are improved,
upgraded with some newly built latrines and bathrooms, to help workers to
have comfortable rest during breaks.
Compared to before 1975, the labour safety conditions have clearly
been improved. Before, each worker at the weaving division received
only two short-sleeved shirts; now each year, each worker is supplied
with two complete outfits with gloves, hats, and glasses, depending on the
specialty. The workers of the company live mainly at Hoc Mon, Ba
Diem, Binh Chanh, Binh Hung Hoa and Tan Phu districts, so the
company has four shuttle buses serving workers' travel to and from work.
Workers not living in these areas are providedadditions to their wages to
buy gasoline. The mess hall and the medical station also have been
upgraded, modernized and expanded. The mess hall is completely
equipped with ceiling fans, tables, and chairs, plates and food of good
quality. Each dining table has a vase of flowers to ease the tension. The
luncheon between shifts has been changed often. At the period of climb-
ing prices, money allocated to foods has been regulated in accordance
with market price and the quality of workers' lunch. Before, lunch was
only to satisfy hunger, but from 1988 till now, the mess hall has really
been the place for workers to recoup strength. The meals vary from
stewed beef, fried fish, fried chicken, to duck boiled with bamboo shoots.
Since July 1992 the mess hall has provided vegetarian lunch for those
who have a need for it. Each meal provides the 1200 calories required
and the quantity is plentiful. After the meal, each person receives a
banana and a glass of soya milk for dessert.
At the medical station, compared to the 80s, the work has been reorgan-
ized and arranged scientifically and suitably for the use of medicines and
to conduct health checks of all cadres and staff. The station is equipped
with an air-conditioner, a washing machine, and a drying machine. Each
176 Female Workers at Thanh Cong Textile Company
year, the company provides to the station about 100 million VND, not
counting expenses for sickness caused by work and for insurance, to buy
medicine and to upgrade the beds and equipment.
Each cadre and staff of the company receives health examinations regu-
larly. Each year at regular periods, female workers receive health and
gynaecology checks. The company encourages them to limit their off-
spring by giving sterilized women workers 100% of work wage fringe
benefits for medicine, and a compensation equivalent to 200 kg of rice;
75% of work wage and lesser rewards for those on leave at child birth
who adhere to the official family planning scheme; 100% of work wage
for those who have an IUD. That is why Thanh Cong does not have the
phenomenon of women giving birth and going back to work before the
required six month rest. On the other hand, any female worker who viol-
ates regulations on family planning will be fined. For example, after
giving birth to a third child, the violator will be cut off from rewards for
three years, and demoted for 36 months.
Old-age workers with weak health can be transferred to an indirect
work section, if requested, or to the mess hall. For those who have retired,
lost health, or stopped working, besides the general benefits that they
deserve, Thanh Cong also gives them separate fringe benefits depending
on the work they have contributed. Every year, the company regularly
undertakes the increase of wages and gives tests of skills for all workers.
When children of company cadres and staff reach the age to enter kinder-
garten or primary school, they are supplied with 10 kg of good rice each
month. The young ones get priority to train and take jobs in the company.
In the cultural and spiritual aspects, Thanh Cong uses the welfare fund to
organize classes, specialized courses, and a hospital. Each year, the
company regularly organizes entertainment and travel trips to Nha Trang,
Da Lat and Vung Tau for its workers.
The company's efforts to upgrade the working conditions, pay attention
to the worker's life, and effectively implement the social policies have
directly affected the result of production output. From 1980 to the present,
the output of finished fabrics has increased quickly and constantly. The
average production speed increases annually from 10% to 12%, and
payment to the national budget has increased more than 30 times, etc.

CONDITIONS FOR LEARNING AND SENSE OF STRIVING

FORWARD

During the current period of technology development, the matter of cadres

and staff having education to get in touch with modern technology holds
 Nguyen Thi Hoa 177
great importance in the upgrading of quality and increasing output. So, for
many years, Thanh Cong has operated a school in the company to help
workers get higher education. As well, the company offers specialized
courses and sends workers to management colleges or university. Besides
the state's policies concerning technical specialists, Thanh Cong also has a
system of allowances for personnel, technical and scientific staff, cadres
with high specialization, and high grade workers. During the recent
recruitment of workers, one of the conditions for acceptance is that the
applicant must have at least a secondary level certificate.
Thanh Cong's cadres and staff strive forward and are eager to learn.
Among the female workers, many, after graduating from high school,
attend college and become good managing cadres of the company. Thanh
Cong also helps its women to take care of their families and children with
concrete allowance policies. It organizes regular seminars and talks about
love, happiness of the family, and how to scientifically raise one's children.
At the company, the interests and duties have been clearly defined.
Workers can carry out their work peacefully when their families are happy,
they have a stable income, and a chance to broaden their knowledge.
The experience of Thanh Cong is that every matter originates from the
common interest of the country and of the workers at the factories. So,
from being on the brink of closing down, Thanh Cong Textile Company
has achieved great success in production, business and export-import. It
has paid the national budget 16 million dong in 1978, and that increased to
7 billion in 1991 and is forecast to be 10 billion in 1992. The output of
finished fabrics increased from 4.2 million metres in 1978 up to 21 million
metres in 1991. In 1992 Thanh Cong' s output of finished fabrics reached
23 million metres, higher than the predictions by 2 million metres. Thanh
Cong's fabrics, as well as garments, are preferred by customers inside and
outside the country. The markets of Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, and South
Korea have been accustomed to Thanh Cong' s ·products, even though
products sold at these markets are still few. In the future, with its facilities
and efforts, Thanh Cong will surely have more opportunities to do busi-
ness with Europe, China, and South-East Asian customers.
The reality at Thanh Cong is that production has been developed, the
workers' lives have stabilized, and wages have increased from 10% to
15% every year (not counting sliding price and inflation). 8 Still, that does
not mean that Thanh Cong does not have any problems or negative
aspects. The main issue, however, is ·that the factory is expanding. For
example, Thanh Cong has recruited some 1200 more workers, thus
increasing the total of the labor force from 1000 workers in 1988 to 2300
workers beginning in 1992 and is forecast to employ 3000 workers by the
end of 1992. From 1979 to the present, Thanh Cong has always been the
 178 Female Workers at Thanh Cong Textile Company
leading enterprise located in the city. With the current 200 billion dong
capital ($20 million in U.S. currency), Thanh Cong forecasts a second
factory going into production in 1995. It is projected that it give an annual
output of 20 million metres of fabrics with a $20 million (U.S. currency)
capital equal to or surpassing the present Thanh Cong factory.
With these great successes, Thanh Cong Textile Company has been
honoured with five various medals from the Party and the state, among
which were an award for Comrade General Director Dinh Cong Hung and
an award for Comrade Vice General Director and secretary of the Party at
the company Nguyen Thi Dong. In May 1992 Thanh Cong Textile
Company was awarded by the state the valuable name of HEROIC UNIT.
Clearly, the forward movement of Thanh Cong is proper to the develop-
ment law, defining clearly the basic concept of the renovation programme
initiated by the Party and the state in recent years. The success of Thanh
Cong - in which figured the contribution of 85% female workers - has
shown that the new development process is proper to the times and also is
the first step of moving Vietnam industry into the world market.

Notes

I. In 1991 the factory became Thanh Cong Textile Company.

2. Resolution, Central Committee of the Party 24th (session III) September 1975.
3. From the end of 1991 Thanh Cong has recruited male workers to operate the
weaving machines, decreasing the percentage of female workers down to a
bit more than 70%.
4. From 1977 prices at markets climbed fast. In 1978 the increase was 15.3%
compared to 1977; in 1979, the increase was 30.9% compared to 1978, and
in 1981 the increase was 40% compared to 1980. Real wages of workers
clearly decreased and were only 113 the wages of 1976. Value of industrial
GOP of central enterprises located in the City's premises decreased from 1.3
billion in 1978 down to 946.7 million dong in 1979; in 1980 it was only 760
million dong. Source: Nguyen Van Linh, 10 Years of Ho Chi Minh City, Ha
Noi: Su That (Truth) publishing house, 1985.
5. During the two years 1979 and 1980, there were 50 workers who quit their
jobs. Annual report of the Party session 1976-1980 of Thanh Cong Textile
Company.
6. Source: Annual report on production-business activities of Thanh Cong
Company from 1981 to 1992.
7. Resolution 03 of the Central Committee of the Party session 6 ( 1988) on the
renovation of economics management structure. Decision 50 and Decision
217 by the Council of Ministers (November 1987) on the renovation of State-
owned enterprises' activities: production according to market mechanism.
8. From the annual reports by the Thanh Cong Textile Company.
12 Homeless and
Street-Women in Poverty
in the Informal Economic
Sector in Hanoi
Le Thi Quy

INTRODUCTION

In late 1986 the Vietnamese state issued a number of policies of renova-

tiJn setting in motion a land-mark change in the nature of socio-economic
development. However, the country has not yet come out of its prolonged
socio-economic crisis. A number of questions remain to be solved in addi-
tion to newly arising ones. One of the most critical questions confronting
Vietnam at present is the question of employment.
Vietnam now has about 3.7 million to 4 million jobless people, living
chiefly in cities and industrial zones, and the number of semi-unemployed
labourers in agricultural production is 6 million. That makes a total of 10
million labourers who are not fully employed at the moment, accounting
for 25% of the whole labour force of Vietnam. To help them, the State has
promulgated a number of policies to generate jobs, while changes have
been made to allow the creation of a growing number of non-state and
informal economic sectors.
In Vietnam the informal economic sector took shape long ago together
with the formation of the urban areas. However, recognition of it as an
economic sector in its own right has been accepted only recently. The
existence of this economic sector helps generate more jobs for the urban
population which increases the personnel of the administrative offices, fac-
tories and business establishments owned by the state, collectives and
private citizens. The activities in the informal economic sector vary greatly
and range from itinerant traders, street vendors, small traders in markets,
cyclo drivers, baby-sitters, typists, matchmakers, dish washers, porters, to
photographers in parks. Although they can sometimes be quite lucrative,
generally speaking, they are simple, mobile jobs which require little or no
capital, and which are subject to little or no taxes. Small as the income

179
180 Homeless and Street-Women in Poverty in Hanoi
may be, these jobs can sustain whole families. Production cost outlays and
service charges in this sector are generally low, which suit the standard of
living of customers. It can be said that this production, business and
service sector mostly comprises poor people.
The composition of the informal economic sector is very diversified.
Workers include the retired and government employees, redundant work-
force from state-owned enterprises and offices who are pensioned off as a
result of the policy to restructure the production and the labour force. They
also include guest workers returning from the former Soviet Union,
eastern European countries and Middle-Eastern countries, demobilized but
still waiting to land a job (they number nearly one million annually). They
also include young rural folks coming to the towns following crop failures,
natural disasters or other mishaps. Women account for the largest number
of workers in the sector. According to incomplete statistics, of the
1,297,900 people in the informal economic sector in 1988, 826,000 were
women. 1 Women are engaged mostly in trading, handicrafts, restaurant
services, hair dressing, linen washing, baby sitting or other petty jobs.
Women numbered 166,000 among the total of 237,300 street vendors in
1989, and 42,000 among 59,300 waiters and waitresses. The number of
those working in this sector has increased markedly recently.
For reason of space, we cannot describe all spheres of activity nor the
role of women in the informal economic sector but confine ourselves to
those women in exceptionally difficult situations (especially homeless and
street-women in Hanoi).

HOMELESS AND STREET-WOMEN: A SECTION OF THE

INFORMAL ECONOMIC SECTOR IN HANOI

Exodus of Rural Women to Hanoi

The exodus from the countryside to Hanoi is not a new phenomenon but it
has increased alarmingly in recent years. From 1981 to 1990 the number
of homeless people picked up by the police was 22,868, including 10,349
women, or nearly 45 percent. The exodus varied from year to year. From
1988 to 1990 the number totalled 6277 including 3874 women. In the last
two years homeless people accounted for about 30 percent of the total
recorded in the past ten years.
Most of the homeless women in Hanoi came from cities or provinces in
the North, a number from Central and South Vietnam, and none are of the
ethnic minorities. Women born in Hanoi or suburban areas make up a
 Le Thi Quy 181
large proportion (over 25 percent), followed by those coming from Ha
Nam Ninh, Hai Hung, Ha Son Binh and Thanh Hoa provinces. Homeless
people in Hanoi belong to all age groups: from newborns to 80 years old.
People of working age (18 to 45 years old) make up the largest propor-
tion. They came to Hanoi alone or with their relatives or neighbours.
Itinerants are divided into two kinds: professional and temporary.
Professional itinerants are those who have lived in the streets for a long
time and no longer want to return to their native villages. The temporary
itinerants come to Hanoi several times a year mostly during the pre-
harvest days or following floods and storms, crop failures, or the slack
season and would return home when they need to. They consider coming
to Hanoi to be a sideline job to increase their incomes. Their number is
never constant, but they pose a complex social problem for the capital
city.
In a recent social survey (Le Thi Quy, 1992) that we conducted by ran-
domly distributing questionnaires to 376 beggars and interviewing nearly
60 itinerants doing a variety of jobs in Hanoi (women accounted for more
than 45 percent of the interviewed), we found that 64.2 percent of women
itinerants were professional beggars, while 72.2 percent of the rest came to
Hanoi because of hardships in their native villages or unemployment. A
field trip to Thanh Hoa province, one of the provinces with a large migrant
population, showed that migration resulted mainly from insurmountable
difficulties in daily life and the decrease in agricultural production. This
densely populated province does not offer enough land to till and very few
sideline occupations. Carpets made in Quang Xuong district used to be
exported to East European countries but they can no longer be exported.
Animal husbandry has become stagnant due to inadequate investment.
Fisheries have also dwindled due to lack of funds. The majority of the
population in the province live in stark poverty. Up to 60-70 percent of
the inhabitants in Quang Thai commune have gone to Hanoi to seek a
living one way or another.
Family disputes and unhappy marriages have also forced many women
in rural areas to move to Hanoi (27 percent of the number of permanent
women itinerants and 8 percent of seasonal women migrants), most of
them in the 16-50 age bracket (53.5 percent). A number of women went to
Hanoi attracted by the glamorous life there, or enticed by friends. Others
went because of loneliness, diseases or religious motives. Almost all of the
latter category ended up begging in Hanoi because they believe they are
descendants of a tutelary genie who was a beggar himself. This belief can
be best seen among the population in Chau Giang district, Hai Hung
province, and Quang Xuong district, Thanh Hoa province.
182 Homeless and Street-Women in Poverty in Hanoi
Life and Activities of Homeless Migrant Women

In Hanoi, homeless women are regarded as the lowest rung in the social
ladder. To survive, they have to accept any jobs. In the informal economic
sector they form the most variable workforce and the lowest paid segment
of the urban population. To increase their income 53.6 percent of beggars
in Hanoi are also collecting re-usable waste in the garbage dumps. The
number of people working as hired labour makes up of 63.1 percent and
small traders, 7.1 percent, of the homeless in Hanoi. Worthy of particular
note is that 4.5 percent of the interviewed itinerant women are prostitutes
and 7.1 percent are pickpockets.
Itinerants, men and women alike, live in groups, each in a specific place
and have their own rules. They never trespass on the 'operational area' of
another group. Each group has its own head who takes into his or her
hands the responsibility to resolve disputes and organize relief to those in
special hardship. This can be seen most clearly among the groups of hired
labourers and prostitutes.
Hired workers each earn from 2,000-10,000 VND (20 cents to $1.00)
per day. At times, some may get 20,000-30,000 VND ($2-$3). Prostitutes
find customers by themselves or with the help of owners of tea shops,
cafeterias or beer shops. Some prostitutes are owners of tea shops and
sellers of fruits in public places, who would readily respond to the call of a
customer. Some prostitutes are married women. Their husbands would
take them to the rendezvous with their customers and would come to take
them home at the agreed time. Their family bonds are very loose. When
marriages break up, in most cases, the wives take upon themselves the
responsibility of bringing up their child or children.
A number of women itinerants buy and sell re-usable waste materials
going from one street to another with a pair of baskets hung to a shoulder
pole. A number of others go picking up still usable items in garbage
dumps. They live mostly in 0 Cho Dua ward. Their incomes are very
unstable.
Children account for a large number of itinerants. Among 9340 chil-
dren taken along with their itinerant parents, 1793 are under 10 years old,
of whom 400 live in 0 Cho Dua ward. Their main occupations are forag-
ing among garbage dumps, acting as pimps for prostitutes, dishwashing,
newspaper distributing, begging, etc. Many of them become pickpockets
and engage in other criminal activities and have been taken into custody
several times by the police. Not a small number of them have been
brutally maltreated at the hands of elder people acting as their adoptive
parents or guardians.
 Le Thi Quy 183
A very few itinerants are lucky enough to live with their relatives who
have their homes in the town. But most homeless women live on the
streets, market places, railway and bus stations, parks or under porches.
They spread mats, make tents, cook their meals, eat and bathe right on
these places and dry their clothes on trees and benches along streets or in
parks. They go to 'work' during daytime and come back to their shelters at
night. They lead such a life day-in day-out and month-in-month-out for
years. Not a few even give birth to their babies or die in such places.
Of the women interviewed, 33.4 percent said that they are occasionally
short of food. 2.8 percent replied that they had no food for several months
in a year. 63 percent said they had a reasonably stable life. 71.5 percent of
the interviewees said they had no-one to look to when falling sick. Only
9.1 percent could afford to see a doctor. 11.1 percent said they could not
predict or plan anything and were consigning themselves to fate.
While the homeless have made some small contributions to the informal
economic sector, they may cause big problems to social order and secu-
rity. Social evils like prostitution, gambling, theft and robbery are mostly
committed by this segment of the city population. Moreover, their unhy-
gienic way of life has caused diseases to proliferate, such as skin diseases,
diarrhoea and VD, the latter affecting 60 percent of women itinerants.
Another matter of concern is the uncontrollable birth rate among the
homeless. Due to their low educational level, cultural standard and the
lack of contraceptive methods, legal and illegal couples have as many chil-
dren as they wish in disregard of the Government programme on family
planning. Some men live with several wives at a time and have more than
10 children. In one particular case, one man has as many as 20 children.
They carry their babies with them when going to beg and when their chil-
dren grow up, they let their children go begging too. Those dirty and
sickly children without schooling grow up like wild weeds without the
least care from their parents.

PROPOSALS AND PROJECTION

Vietnam is embarking on the market economy under state management and

readjustment. Competition among organizations and individuals in produc-
tion and business will certainly increase social problems including the dif-
ferentiation between rich and poor and the relative number of poor people
will certainly continue to grow. They cannot afford a decent life or develop
their household economy without positive social assistance. The number of
homeless women will increase rapidly if no adequate solution is worked out.
184 Homeless and Street- Women in Poverty in Hanoi
In the past, Hanoi has conducted several surveys on this question and
taken measures to check the flow of migrants into Hanoi. The Hanoi
Security Force has picked up and classified nearly 1000 migrants. A
number of them have been concentrated for security purposes, but the
majority were helped to return to their home villages or sent to charity
homes. A number of prostitutes were sent to re-education centres where
they were taught culture and crafts. The city has found jobs for a number
of itinerants, and provided them with living space and loans for production
activities. A number of newly founded homes for the elderly, the sick, the
handicapped and orphans are operating effectively. In addition, the city
authorities have called for humanitarian aid from charity organizations and
individuals inside and outside the country. These are the first measures
toward solving the problem, but the results so far have been very modest.
Therefore, the problem of itinerants, including women, should attract more
attention from the State and the entire society. Comprehensive integrated
policies should be issued by the central and local governments, in urban as
well as rural areas. Homeless women should be given more attention
because they are the most underprivileged. Unstable jobs and a homeless
life badly affect the mothers and younger generation.
Solving the problem of women in exceptionally difficult situations in
the informal economic sector takes much time, money and joint efforts.
Therefore, exchanges of experiences in this field between Vietnam and
other countries are very important and necessary. This will help us find the
most suitable measures to solve the problem in a way that could ensure
both economic benefits and humanitarian interests.

Notes

Data for this chapter are drawn from the following sources:

Data on Vietnamese women, Information and Scientific Research on Women mag-

azine and Statistics Bureau Publishing House, 1975-1989; material from statistical
office, 1990-1994; material from Ministry of Labour, Invalid and Social Welfare;
data from the Centre for Family and Women Studies, Institute of Sociology of the
National centre of Social Science and Humanities; Le Thi Quy, Sociological
Survey of Homeless Migrant Women in Hanoi, 1992.
13 Female Labour and
Objectives of the
Economic Development in
Ho Chi Minh City
Hoang Thi Khanh

Ho Chi Minh City is the greatest economic, commercial and business

centre in Vietnam. Until the late 1980s, the rate of development of the
total annual social production was 5.6% on average, gross national income
was 4.7%, which was 1.5 times the national development rate. In 1993 Ho
Chi Minh City industry accounted for 69% of gross social production
(commerce, business, import-export and tourism). It has become an econ-
omic power with a widened perspective of development. Up to 1990, com-
pared to the whole country, the city, though possessing 0.6% of the land
area, has produced 32% of total industrial value, 32% of commercial
returns, 17.5% of construction works, 35% of commodities stocks and
passenger quantity, and so on. Average annual incomes per person
equalled US$470, which were 2.5 times higher than the national level.
In the strategy of city development, the objective is to increase the rate
of annual incomes over the next years by 10%. The city will become an
industrial, financial, banking, commercial, business, import-export,
scientific and cultural centre, as well as a hub for international relations. 1
In the near future a large economic zone will emerge with Ho Chi Minh
City its centre; including Bien Hoa Industrial Zone, Vung Tau City and
Thu Dau Mot municipality. This will constitute an economic key site of
the southern part of the country, as well as of the whole country, a hub and
gate which will link Vietnam with other countries.
Evidently, from the standpoint of the city's development, one of the key
determinants will be the labour force, including working women.
According to population census results (April 1, 1989), in Ho Chi Minh
City there were 3,943,556 persons, among whom working people totalled
2,298,411, of which female labour represented 53.7% (1,233,442 persons).
The larger percentage of female labourers was partly due to the conse-
quences of the previous thirty years of war. However, the number of

185
186 Female Labour and Objectives of Economic Development
people of working age does not coincide completely with the rate of par-
ticipation in economic activities, because a portion of them have not taken
part, either for a long time or temporarily, in the economic activities.
These include high school and university students, housewives, disabled
people, and those not in need of work. So, through the population census,
there were only about 47% of working people who worked in various
fields of the national economy.
As for labour distribution, due to the economic renovation and the open-
door foreign relations policy, the female labour force has experienced
significant changes in the developing market economy. In the non-material
sector, female labour increased by 3%. This was a matter of labour dis-
placement of city business by promoting loans, social insurances and other
financial incentives. In 1989 the rate of female labour in the commercial
field rose to 32% (while in agriculture, the rate came down to 9%). Female
labour played a dominant role in the industrial field at the rate of 38%,
especially in garment manufacturing, cereals and food production.
Previously the textile industry has occupied a more important position
than these above-mentioned industrial branches because of technological
renovation and modernization and with hard competition with imported
commodities; now it has reduced its number of employees. In contrast, the
garment manufacturers have been drawing the attention of foreign
investors, the market for garments is growing, and the female labour
employment rate is higher. Besides, the rate of women involved in intellec-
tual occupations is increasing as they become engaged in the economic and
social positions previously closed to them.

FEMALE LABOUR STATUS IN HO CHI MINH CITY

In the market economy, Ho Chi Minh City has attracted a lot of female
labour to serve economic development. Previously, in the system of subsi-
dization, the matter of labour productivity, quality and efficiency were not
given enough attention, but now these standards have been recognized and
respected. The workers have to be trained with competent qualifications
for each kind of work.
The forms of employment of female labour in the market economy in
recent years can be summarized as follows:
For the government-run organizations, during the years of subsidiza-
tion, the labour force has been recruited, increasingly each year, for the
state sector. Recently, due to the economic changes, the production and
labour organizations have to be restructured in the enterprises which have
 Hoang Thi Khanh 187
been granted financial and economic autonomy and accounting of their
own. Among the total of 522 state enterprises, 372 producing units of the
city have to deal with 30,000 persons unemployed, among them 12,500
females. Recently, the reorganization of the labour force in the manufac-
turing units has made, once again, the female labour surplus higher. In the
state enterprises only 30% made profits from their production, while the
remaining were on the verge of bankruptcy. In this circumstance female
labour became the first victim of the labour surplus.
For non-governmental economic units, the climax of the employment of
female labour in this sector occurred during 1985-1987. Cooperatives,
private groups and small proprietors invested their capital and did their
business in various industries that employed female labour, such as gar-
ments, embroidery, knitting, drawn thread work, rattan or bamboo or
palm. But they experienced a lack of knowledge concerning new markets
and there were also abrupt changes among West European customers
(markets of East Europe and Russia nearly disappeared). The non-
governmental units have had to work especially hard to recover their
strength and to develop themselves in a variety of ways before economic
prosperity returned to them.
For the association-run units, that is, organizations such as the City's
Women's Union, initiates programmes of employment for women.
Through this kind of organization, women's employment develops in the
following areas.
The making of household economy: Capital has been invested in creat~
ing jobs such as commercial services, rearing pigs and milk cows, mush-
room growing, baking and so on. According to available data, the average
capital invested was VND200,000 per person. The Women's Union took
charge of the markets and sources of commodities. The household enter-
prise plays a role as satellite, which produces various commodities of
handicraft or small industry like garments, embroidery, rattan or bamboo
ware and artistical works. The capital is partly used to buy materials and
tools used for professional training and supplied free of charge to poor
women. The payments, in fact, will be covered by the Union with the
assistance of charitable, social organizations. The Women's Union and
other funding organizations are city-based units which have supplied not
only funds, but also looked for markets and organized the system of
selling products.
The employment offemale labour in newly acquired services: In recent
years many services have arisen and developed with the pace of growth of
the market economy: housekeepers, child care, and other liberal workers,
basket-carrying mobile petty retailers, lottery-ticket sellers and beauti-
188 Female Labour and Objectives of Economic Development
cians. In each occupation, the requirement for improved qualifications has
increased. Those people who have gained specialized education or
assumed various activities in society need to have help in cooking, child
care, house cleaning, clothes washing, and so on. These specialties will
require more female labour, especially from the unskilled or under-
educated women.
The employment of female labour in foreign invested enterprises:
Activities in garments, hotels, restaurants, precious stones processing, and
others, are attracting female labour. Foreign companies have recruited
labour among women who were single, ready to work everywhere and all
the time, having mastered foreign languages, particularly English or
Chinese, being professionally qualified, well-cultivated and even of
beautiful appearance.
Expansion of the market economy has been followed by negative
aspects like the rapid increase in prostitution in recent years. The Ho Chi
Minh City Criminal Police Bureau's data have revealed that in 1985 there
was 10,000 prostitutes, now the number has increased to 50,000, and
among them, 30% come from other provinces. This number excludes
those women who are working as so-called attendants in girl embracing
pubs, dancing rooms, massage shops, barbering girls' shops, and so on.
The result of a survey made in a working women's school has shown that
most of these people have to work reluctantly as 'blossom selling girls',
because of being unemployed, getting very low earnings, or failure in
family life. A number of these women, after being re-educated in a center,
have gone back to their former practices, because it was not easy for them
to find jobs, or the job they had did not pay enough for their living.
In general, in the past the city has employed, in various forms, the
female labour force, contributing to the social economic development. But
the remaining problems are how women can be employed in kinds of work
suitable to their health and expectations and how their labour
qualifications can be enhanced and their lives improved.

MEASURES TO BE TAKEN FOR THE WOMEN TO SERVE THE

PURPOSE OF ECONOMY DEVELOPMENT

The first issue is the salary paid to female labour working in the state
organizations. Today the wages of the intellectuals who are working in the
state system are low, compared to those of female labour working in the
enterprises. Allowances and other benefits, if any, are rather insignificant
for their life's demands. These are female officials that serve in the field of
 Hoang Thi Khanh 189
health and education, making efforts to improve their own capacity and
that of the future generations. In the fields of culture and arts, they are
maintaining good practices and customs for the sake of renovation. While
working, learning and studying scientifically, a number of female doctors,
candidate doctors, professors, and assistant professors have contributed
increasingly to the general development of the city and the country as well.
The second issue is professional training programmes that are needed to
teach specialized skills to workers. These are requirements of the enter-
prises and also expectations of female labour. But nobody can be trained
for professional qualifications without a certain level of culture (educa-
tion) and that requires paying for the necessary expenses. And since
working people, especially female labour, are expecting to be trained on
credit, the City's Trade Union attempted to lend, at low interest rates, an
amount of money to the students, covering all charges needed for training
programmes. After being trained satisfactorily, and getting a job, the bor-
rowing worker is then obliged to pay back the loans (with interest) to the
City's Trade Union and at the same time contribute one part of his or her
salary to the credit funds to assist the training of succeeding workers. But
because of the purely voluntary character of the City's Trade Union it can
not extend the aid to as many persons as are in need. So it has to call for
aid from humanitarian, social, domestic and foreign organizations.
In addition, positive measures must be taken to promote the employ-
ment of women, to help them earn better incomes for their families, in
areas such as sewing, embroidering, knitting, petty commerce and handi-
crafts. Recently the City People's Committee has launched a movement
against hunger and poverty, which has attracted much attention from
social organizations and mass organizations. It has helped to settle the
employment of those persons who need jobs by granting them loans at
low interest.
Furthermore, we need to open 'a bank for the poor' under the pattern
of Grameen Bank of Bangladesh which has been established with the
State investments and capital contributions by humanitarian associations,
and individuals at home and abroad. The City's Trade Union has organ-
ized a similar model, but on a smaller scale, which is called 'Capital Aid
Fund'. It will be a humanitarian and social gesture if a 'Bank for the
Poor' is established in such a commercial and industrial as Ho Chi Minh
City.
A number of female workers, though well qualified and healthy, could
not get appropriate jobs because of lack of information about available
jobs. To increase the utilization of capacities for socio-economic develop-
ment in the city, the establishment of a centre for job information is a
190 Female Labour and Objectives of Economic Development
necessity. This centre will be invested in by the City's People Committee
and will be partly assisted by some of the world's humanitarian and social
organizations.
The employment of female labour for economic development also
means creating stable, appropriate jobs. It depends very much on policies
concerning labour and wages, pregnancy, prohibition of female labour
employment in harmful activities, and capital aid and tax exemption.
Many of these policies have been made, but need to be reviewed in the
light of the new conditions in a market economy.
Vietnamese women constitute half of the population contributing con-
siderably to economic development. They are recognized for their tradi-
tion of 'being clever in national matters, capable in family affairs'. This is
an orderly, self-respected, suffering and steadfast labour force. In rural
areas particularly, female labour is occupying a very important role. The
creation of jobs not only aims at economic development, but sexual equal-
ity as well. This is a necessary condition for family happiness and elimina-
tion of social evils, especially prostitution. In Vietnam the foundation of
society is the family, and if one wants to develop society and economy in
the city, it is necessary for the leaders and concerned bodies to make
appropriate policies concerning female labour. Women's position in the
family and society, if strengthened, can contribute to helping them carry
out their responsibilities towards future generations and to transfer to them
the culture and educational traditions of the country.

Note

I. See 'Some problems raised to orientate the solution of female labor employ-
ment', Department of Labor, Employment. Department of Labor, Invalids
and Social Affairs. Ho Chi Minh City, 1991. Mimeographed, p. 36.
14 The Vietnamese Woman in
Scientific Creation and
Technological
Transference
Hoang Thi Lich

WOMEN IN THE TECHNO-SCIENTIFIC FIELD

According to the data published by the General Department of Statistics in

1991, women constituted more than half of the labour force in 8 of 19
branches of labour. They were: education and training, light industry,
public health, trade, finance-credit, state insurance, agriculture and food
industry, post and telegraphy. Women also made up 30-40 percent of the
workforce in other branches such as construction, air communication,
culture, literature and arts, irrigation, heavy industry, diplomacy, railway,
communication and transport, and energy. In recent years, by virtue of
techno-scientific development and progress, a rather large number of
women are working in service branches (e.g., computer service, informat-
ics, production and business). In Vietnam as a whole 'women working in
techno-scientific field' include those doing scientific study or experiments
in research institutes, teachers in universities and colleges, and people
working in research and testing units of production or business manage-
ment institutions. They number 290,130 in the techno-scientific branches,
which is 37.3 percent of total number of 776,775.
Women scientists and technicians are doing research and experiments,
specializing in the fields of natural science, technique, technology, public
health service, agriculture, social and human sciences.
Although they constitute only 37.3 percent of the total workforce in
scientific branches, they constitute a large percentage of medical science,
social and human sciences workers. According to many people, the reason
is that women generally have the innate character, sentiment, endurance
and skilfulness suitable for work in these sciences.

191
192 The Vietnamese Women in Scientific Creation
Table 14.1 Women scientists and technicians as a ratio

Ordinal Number Fields of Study Total Female Ratio % total

1 Natural science 130,498 4,642 3.56
2 Engineering and
Technology 151,472 46,420 30.6
3 Medical Science 72,240 42,649 60
4 Agricultural Science 48,937 11,609 23.7
5 Social and Human
Sciences 373,628 184,114 49.2
Total 776,775 290,130 37.3

Source: Selected Indicators on Women Status in VN ( 1975-1989), Statistical

Publishing House VN, 10-1990, p. 84.

PROBLEMS FACED BY WOMEN IN THIS FIELD

Female scientists are often passionate scientific researchers; they accept and
overcome every trial and obstacle to pursue their specialties, and if they are
entrusted with important responsibility and managerial position, they try
their best and are creative. However, while the above data and observations
somewhat indicate the women's role in the sciences, nevertheless a question
must be posed: do women manage research institutes or assume responsibil-
ity as deans of faculties or heads of faculty disciplines in universities?
Further, what decisive voice do they have in research projects?
In Vietnam there is a very small percentage of the population that have
a high level of education (from college or university level upwards).
Under the French colonialist domination, 97 percent of Vietnamese
women were illiterate. The women who were lucky enough to have some
educational opportunity ended it after their secondary education. Those
women who graduated from universities during French colonialism could
be counted on our fingers and there was only one doctor (Ph.D. equiva-
lent). In the new regime, after the August Revolution (1945), especially
since the restoration of peace in North Vietnam (1954), the state's policy
of compulsory education and exemption from school fees at all levels
including the university has created favourable conditions for many
women who were dedicated to educating themselves in the sciences. We
should cite a few data from the general population census in April 1989:

a) The literate population in the whole country in 1989 was 40,366,000

persons (88 percent of the total population) of which 20,512,000
persons were women (84 percent of the total women). The total
 Hoang Thi Lich 193
number of illiterate people is 5,620,000 persons of which women
account for 70.6 percent.
b) Following is the level of education and professional qualifications of
the population by occupations and sex in 1989 (percentage of the total
population aged 15 years and above). See Table 14.2.

In addition, we introduce data on the percentage of women enrolled in

universities and colleges in some past years. See Table 14.3.
For a long time, the percentage of the female students enlisted into col-
leges and universities has been 41%, over 14 thousand, each year. This is
the source of the contingent of female intellectuals now working in all
branches of science, economy and culture of the society. It should be
noticed that until 1988 training at college and university was still subsi-
dized by the state. But for scientists this is only the departure for them to
step onto the thorny road of science.
Normally the effect of the scientific activities of men is in direct ratio to
their scientific ability and their level of knowledge. After a number of
working years in research institutions or colleges, the woman who has
capability is usually trained further at a higher level than men: candidate
doctor and doctor. The number of women who reached university and post
university levels increased rather rapidly in recent years. Surveys of cadres
at the level of doctoral candidate and upwards have revealed that 98
percent of them have been trained in the domestic and foreign regular
system of education.

Table 14.2 Levels of education in 1989

Occupational Level Male Female Both sexes

Unskilled labour 88.1 93.3 90.9
Skilled labour:
with certification 3.7 0.19 2.2
without certification 2.6 1.2 1.9
Middle technicians 3.1 3.3 3.2
College and university graduates 2.5 1.9 2.2

Table 14.3 Female enrolment in universities

1982-1983 1985-1986 1987-1988

Total Female % Total Female % Total Female %
33,443 14,354 41 33,813 14,076 41 33,646 14,035 42
194 The Vietnamese Women in Scientific Creation
Table 14.4 Women in higher education

Level Total Quantity of women Percent

1- Professor 601 24 4
- Associate Professor 2801 119 4.25
-Doctor 393 23 5.85
- Candidate Doctor 7083 1380 19.5
2- University-College 695,778 263,700 37.9
3- Vocational middle level 1,177,991 662,031 56.2
4- Technical worker 597,441 215,079 36

Source: Draft document of the 7th Women's National Congress.

The women who have been trained at the post-university level and
obtained the titles of professor and associate professor are still scarce. In
comparison with men, their number is small both in absolute quantity and
in percent because Vietnam has been heavily influenced by the feudal ide-
ology of high preference for the male, while the female was considered
less important. That's why special importance has not been attached to the
training and employment of women. Moreover, after many years of pro-
longed war, the Vietnamese economy has been so backward and poor that
the investment in teaching and scientific research is still at a very low
level. Furthermore, the women themselves have not been liberated from
household chores. Few women have been able to concentrate a good deal
of their time on scientific study. Nevertheless, more than ever, Vietnamese
women can realize fully the benefits of the democratic and equal environ-
ment of the society in which they are living. As pointed out in the paper
delivered at the 7th Congress ofthe Vietnam Women's Union held in May
1992 in Hanoi by Professor Dang Thanh Le: 'Through one thousand years
under the feudal system there was only one woman doctor (Ph.D. equiva-
lent, in comparison with 2,874 men) and even in 100 years under the
French colonial rule only a single woman doctor graduated. Formerly
women had almost no position in education, in university, as well as in
doctoral examinations.'

WOMEN'S ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE TECHNO-SCIENTIFIC FIELD

The number of women managing scientific institutions, directing the

scientific research of domestic projects, or projects financed by foreign
countries, has made considerable progress. During a period of 5 years
 Hoang Thi Lich 195
(1986-1990) 14 women were conferred certificates of merit by the
Council of Ministers and the State Commission of Science and
Technology after the completion of their research projects. In many of the
projects directed by women, women have shown their creativeness and
fulfilled outstandingly the work with which they were entrusted. During
the period 1987-1991 the Vietnam General Federation of Labour
bestowed certificates of creative labour on 449 women (6.01 percent of
the total bestowed). In 1991 alone there were 33 women who received
certificates for creative labour.
From 1985 up to 1993 Vietnamese women scientists and technicians
have also been encouraged in their studies and applications of the research
result through selection to receive the Kovalevskaya award. Fourteen
women have received the award for their notable accomplishments in
studying sciences and technology, practical applications of science, and
their active contributions to the Vietnamese women's movement. The
achievements of the female scientists have proved that Vietnamese women
can have remarkable dedication to science if they are coached and their
work facilitated, bringing their talents into play.

WOMEN'S DUTIES

Yet women have not only professional careers but also responsibility for
household chores. In Vietnam the woman has two duties: productive
labour and family labour. Her first duty, which is at the same time her
'natural function', is to act as a wife and mother. The birth, suckling,
taking care of and bringing up children are a sacred mission of every
woman; the female scientist is no exception. For a woman the family has a
very important role. To attend to the husband and children, to build a cozy
home, and to create a harmonious and happy family is the source of the
life and the emotional mainstay of the woman. For a woman scientist,
dealing with the difficulties and complexities of study and creation, the
encouragement and inspiration of the husband and children are always
motive number one compared to her scientific achievement. Nevertheless,
the birth and rearing of children have effects on the progress of the
woman. Particularly nowadays, the woman has to spend a lot of time
buying and processing food for her family and children while her salary is
limited. Because household technology is not available yet, every job in
the house such as washing clothes, tidying up, mopping the floor, cleaning
the dishes, are all done by hand. Therefore, each success a woman has in
science costs her a good deal more labour than it would for a man, usually
196 The Vietnamese Women in Scientific Creation
from two to three times as much. The reason is that the woman must
shoulder these household chores which involve innumerable different and
trifling things. Moreover, the woman has to work in a society which is
much influenced by a traditional social ideology.
Nevertheless, today many female scientists have undertaken both
science management and production management. First of all they them-
selves must be good scientists. Only then can they perform their respons-
ibility well. In addition, in offices where there are men colleagues, the
woman manager still has to overcome the sexual biases which have
existed for a long time in Vietnamese psychology.
In a conversation with Mrs Nguyen Thi Bau after she received the
Kovalevskaya reward, I asked: 'What reason would you give for your
success?' She answered: 'In addition to the support of the family and the
office, and my ardour for science, my endeavour to win victory each day is
no less important.' Diligence and immersion in work has created this
woman's ability.

RECOMMENDATIONS

What we have presented above are matters of subjective exertions on the

part of the woman scientist. The state and various ranks of management
must know and recognize women's contributions in the area of science so
that their present needs can be addressed. Only on this basis can women be
helped to bring their capabilities into full play and dedicate themselves
more to science. This is especially important when we are living in a
period of the threshold to the 21st century, the century of science and
intelligence.
The state must pay attention to the development offemale scientists and
ensure gender equality.
First, it is necessary to create a real equality in science. The tendency
toward thinking much of the male and little of the female leading to
gender-based prejudgments is still heavy in the scientific circles and
among high-ranking scientific managers. Through the data given by the
State Commission of Science and Technology, we know that during ten
years ( 1986-1995) no female scientist has been entrusted with the chair-
manship of any of the State Scientific Programmes. The number of women
who have acted as chairmen of state-level research projects was only 15
among over 300 chairmen of projects (less than 5 percent of the total).
At many research institutions although women have the scientific
qualifications, they still encounter difficulty in being elected into various
 Hoang Thi Lich 197
levels of scientific management. If any of them is elected, it is often to the
associate position, not the chief one.
Second, the state must have a plan concerning the training of women
scientists. In women's work, if supervisor capacity is discovered, it is
necessary to foster their knowledge and let them have intensive and
regular training before they are involved and busy with the birth and
bringing up of their babies. Appropriate training is extremely necessary
because only through training and assignment appropriate to specialities
can we help scientists assert themselves on the job. Periodically, there
should be short-term classes to help them grasp new knowledge which
will serve their profession.
Third, the state should provide expenses for the purchase of books,
magazines and other materials. It is necessary to create conditions so that
women scientists have the opportunity to exchange scientific experiences
with scientists the world over. The state should consider such exchanges
to be occasions which nurture women's knowledge and practical
experiences.
The state should have a salary system which guarantees the livelihood
of scientists. Women scientists do not have the time or energy needed to
increase their income through additional incomes. Therefore, the guaran-
tee of their livelihood based on salary is a very urgent need for them. The
state should reserve an appropriate portion of the budget for the sciences
in which one part would be used for research and experimentation and
another to support scientists including female ones by publishing their
scientific works. The need to have people to take care of the children of
women scientists is pressing, especially at their birth age. Women scien-
tists desire to re-establish a system of creches and kindergartens with
expenditures granted by the state. In general, women scientists want to
have a lot of fast food at a reasonable price so that they can give much
more time to their scientific study. Technicians must understand the labour
of women, must value and perceive the significance of their work, in order
to take technical measures to support women in their work and life. The
woman should be examined from two angles: as the creative scientist and
as the person who uses the results of techno-scientific attainments in
everyday life.

ADDITIONAL MATTERS

Mass organizations such as the Union of Techno-scientific Associations,

the Vietnam Women's Union, etc., are going to set up a fund named 'the
198 The Vietnamese Women in Scientific Creation
centre for supporting scientific women faculty'. It will aid good but poor
female students with scholarships, finance the publication of the research
of women scientists who have economic difficulties and award prizes for
the best scientific work of women. The Centre will call for financial
support from international organizations and sponsorship from the Union
of Techno-scientific Associations.
It is also necessary to organize a club for women scientists. It will be a
place to exchange their experiences in scientific research and manage-
ment; at the same time, it will be a place where they can expound on their
innermost feelings and aspirations.
Scientific labour is a kind of specific labour. Scientific expertise
requires an investment in and fostering by the society as well as the
serious attempt on the part of the individual scientist. To have a large
group of women scientists, it is necessary to have a correct viewpoint con-
cerning the training and employment of women scientists, and a pro-
gramme which includes many socio-economic measures which implement
the above recommendations.
15 On the Problem of Health
Protection for Female
Labourers
Ha Thi Phuong Tien

In Vietnam, women have noticeably taken part in productive work,

fighting and dedicating their energy and talent to the construction and
safeguarding of the motherland. In the difficult conditions of our country,
now more than ever, women suffer much hardship from exhausting work
and their health has worsened considerably. But labour protection for
women has not been given sufficient attention. However, health care and
protection for female labourers is the responsibility not only of the public
health service and of the society, but also of the woman herself who must
become an agent actively engaged in providing health care for herself and
her children. In this chapter I wish to deal with these two aspects of the
problem of women and health.

I. WOMEN- JOBS AND HEALTH

In recent years, by virtue of the imbalance of the population structure,

there has been a higher proportion of female than of male labour in agri-
culture, silviculture, fishery and education. Female labourers have met
with many difficulties as they have been assigned relatively light work
conforming to their physical strength. That work is accompanied by a low
level of wages, making the female labourer's income insufficient to meet
her needs. Hard and exhausting or dangerous work is usually paid higher
wages. Under the influence of the law of pay equity, high wages have
become a factor stimulating female labourers, especially those women
who have a low level of education, to voluntarily accept hard and danger-
ous work.
In Vietnam nowadays, a great part of the work is done manually, chiefly
by muscle power. In disadvantageous working conditions, noise and vibra-
tion are increasing, interior climatic standards are violated (temperature,
humidity, etc.), work undertaken by women has become much harder. With

199
200 On the Problem of Health Protection for FemDle Labourers
the technological processes, the worker still encounters many difficulties
inside factories. The linkage between branches of labour has not yet been
formed in the populated areas; therefore, at present, women are bound to
one kind of occupation for their whole life, including jobs under difficult or
toxic conditions.
For workers in the state-owned economic sectors, handicraft co-opera-
tives and a number of other branches such as coal exploitation, chemistry,
dressmaking, textile, and embroidery, the hygienic workina standards are
not met; many workshops are narrow, lacking in air, light, labour protec-
tion tools, chairs ... ; this has not created a comfortable setting for the
workers. Moreover, the intensity of production in a number of factories
and cooperatives, has had nefarious consequences for women: their health
is impaired as occupational diseases increase. The number of accidents is
high in comparison to that in other countries the world over because they
have to follow the shifts and seasons without rest periods. However, in
these sectors of production, after working hours, the time of rest is defined
more clearly and frequently. The women's perception is that in these
sectors of production they benefit from the broader contact with the cul-
tural environment. In addition, there are government policies regulating
work for birth and childbearing, helping the women to better carry out
their responsibilities.
The women's labour in the silvicultural and agricultural sectors makes
up 72.9 percent in the total female labour of the whole country. Their
work is chiefly carried out in the open air, directly exposed to sunshine,
rain, dew and wind. In developing the household economy, the woman
usually shoulders the hardest stages of labour, especially in the single
woman's families, and in families of war invalids and martyrs. The survey
data in a number of areas in the North and South of our country have
confirmed that the time and physical strength of women in agricultural
labour are overloaded. The time of working with cultivated and bumt-over
land is often 9-10 hours a day, in peak season it is 12 hours a day.
Besides, women also undertake household chores, from stock breeding,
husking and pounding paddy to carrying water, washing clothes, and
taking care of the children. The statistics of sociological investigations
carried out recently by the Center for Women Studies have revealed the
degree of participation of women in some stages of cultivation as follows:

• The stage of planting: 82 ..5 percent of the persons interviewed say that
the women do much more than the men, only 9 percent say that the
husband and wife do the same amount of work and 8 ..5 percent say
that the husbands do more than their wives.
 Ha Thi Phuong Tien 201
• The stage of care: SS percent of the persons interviewed say that the
wives do more than their husbands; 3S.l percent say that husbands
and wives do the same amount of work and 11.3 percent say that the
husbands do more than their wives, etc.

Accordins to the calculations of the Institute of Labour Medicine and

Labour Protection, many stages in asncultural work (such as pullins the
improved handcart, thn:shins paddy, etc.) demand the degree of enerJY
consumption of physical strenJth aHI'espOIIdins to many stages of heavy
work in industry. Moreover, the enersy consumed in soins to and from the
rice-fields and in work at home has not been included; this consumption is
about 730-1100 kealia day. The entire enersy consumption including that
for rice-field work, is all in all over 2000 WI for the lightest work.
Even at the time of health decline such as the period of menstruation,
pregnancy, and nursins, the women in both reaions of our country have no
opportunity for needed rest (75-80 percent of pregnant women have to
work as usual until the time of birth; 30 percent of women have to work in
the rice-fields in the first month after birth). It is a cause of concern that
many women have to do the sprinklina and mixing of insecticides. In
many cases, they are poisoned by insecticide due to the lack of protection
and of knowledge in using it. We can see the ratio of woman labourers
who suffer from labour accidents in the co-operatives in Nam Ninh dis-
trict, to realize clearly how urgent the situation with respect to worker pro-
tection is in the countryside (see the table in the Appendix).
For women in the silvicultural sector, working conditions are still harsh
and disadvantageous (the workina place is far, the way is steep, trans-
portation and movement are difficult). The women in the silvicultural
farms have to undergo a stage of exploitation during the crop season when
they have to live in the sheds with insufficient sanitation; their living con-
ditions are not guaranteed.
Apart from the above conditions, owing to the economic difficulty in
our country, nutrition is not guaranteed, 60 percent of the pregnant women
suffer from anaemia, a cause of childhood malnutrition.
Some features of the above situation characterize the existing picture of the
physical strength and welt-being of Vietnamese woman. We can say that:

-In the age groups: 18-2S and 26-40 women's physical strength indica-
tors are relatively uniform and excellent. But from 40 years old
onwards, their physical strength declines noticeably. First of all, there is
a worrisome decline in body weight, the circumference of thoracic cage
and the thickness of the fat layer under the skin.
202 On the Problem of Health Protection for Female Labourers
- The common ratio of disease is 2.5 diseases per person. If we take the
age group into account, the ratio of diseases increases according to the
age.

For women in the countryside alone, 80 percent of diseases have been

caused by the lack of sanitary conditions, especially water sanitation.
There is a high rate of gynaecological diseases in the areas where jute and
sedge are planted; asthenia, trachoma goitre, malaria, skin diseases are
common in the countryside and the mountainous areas of our country. The
results of surveys in Thai Binh, Hai Phong, Lam Dong, Hau Giang, Ha
San Binh and Ha Tuyen have revealed:

Table 15.1 Disease among female labourers, by age group

16-25 years old 25-40 years old 41-45 years old

Internal diseases 25-35% 36.07% 44.65%
Gynecological disease 28.44% 57.42% 60.01%
Neurological disease 13.52% 27.52% 46.97%
Ophthalmological disease 49.41% 41.13% 77.23%
Teeth, jaw, face disease 33.87% 42.8% 59.44%
Ear, nose, throat disease 33.80% 32.75% 16.47%
Skin diseases 11.75% 11.72% 13.88%

Data from the group of researchers on biomedical labor 1987-1990.

According to the health classification of the medical bases, the first age
group comprises only one-fourth women, the second and third groups are
nearly equal. This is the average of all age groups but by single age
groups, the third group increases considerably after 40. The ratio of dis-
eases varies between trades and localities in the whole country. The
above-mentioned facts show that health protection for women is a pressing
problem.

II. WOMEN AND HEALTH PROTECTION

Women, in their capacity as an extremely important productive force and

reproducers of labour, are the number one objective of social develop-
ment programmes. At the same time, a woman is a subject whose self-
conscious and effective activities will have decisive significance for the
success of these programmes. Carrying out an effective programme of
 Ha Thi Phuong Tien 203
health care for people is closely attached to raising women's living stand-
ards and their level of knowledge and responsibility in their own
self-interest.
It is necessary to build a state policy that assigns priority to human
resources, including that of the health of the workers in general and the
female workers in particular. On the other hand, we must pay attention to
the perception of the masses, the majority of whom are women. We should
pay attention to their active participation in state projects and programs for
health care, promote the human factor, and make human welfare the
primary target of all activities.
On the above-mentioned problems, there is a series of problems to be
solved:

I. To use the women's labour more reasonably suited to their psycho-

logical and physiological characteristics, capability, strength, and the living
conditions of their families and themselves, special attention should be paid
to the stage when the woman is going to be a mother and nurse infants.
The problem of occupational training, arranging female labour in a
more scientific way, reducing the stages of hard work and the physical
strength of components of women's work by the introduction of science
and technology, and using small machines in the stages of transportation
and processing should be carried out in order to increase labour productiv-
ity and raise the income of the female workers. It is necessary to pay atten-
tion to the distribution of women's labour in geographic areas in
conformity with their ability, ecological conditions, and the labour force
distribution according to age group, and sex, so that women have the
opportunity to get married and raise their socio-cultural level.
2. The problem of population is closely related to the labourer's health
and her job, in other words, her quality of living. Every year there are 8
hundred thousand young males and females entering the age group of
labour. It is a pressing problem of the society. If this problem is not solved
in a satisfactory way women will become victims of this redundancy of
labour force; then it is inevitable that women must do hard and exhausting
work or act as prostitutes. Curbs on population growth in the present stage
will help women improve their living conditions, reduce the burden of
household chores, guarantee mothers' health and create conditions for
them to raise the level of culture, education and specialization. As a conse-
quence, we can increase labour productivity and effectiveness of women,
that is to raise the labour quality of women.
3. It is necessary to have a well-coordinated policy to encourage
everybody to take part and contribute his or her duty to this health care. In
204 On the Problem of Health Protection for Female Labourers
other words, it is necessary to unite the interests of the female labourer
with those of society. In fact, in the past, there were a Jot of contradictions
between policies promulgated resulting in various negative consequences
affecting workers' lives. Recently, in a number of rural areas, the division
of cultivated land according to the number of inhabitants coupled with
manual labour, customs, psychology, has resulted in the birth of many
children and under age marriages to serve immediate and short-term inter-
ests of the peasants.
4. To do well, education and propaganda among the women taking
part in the programme of health protection should be attached to concrete
campaigns such as those of 'clean roads and beautiful streets' or 'To bring
up one's children healthy and well-behaved' and 'raise family culture'.
Furthermore, the government should increase its investment in the system
of public welfare projects (creches, kindergartens, kitchens, roads, hospi-
tals etc.) in order to lessen the burden of work for female workers, restore
their health, and help them to have time to raise their level of education in
society or their specialization.
5. Woman's health must be regarded as a state resource that is
quantifiable. We must manage, take care of it, and protect it carefully in
that spirit, and also from that we can hope to improve step by step the
health of the people in general and of women in particular.

Appendix: Table 15.2 The ratio of female labourers suffering labour accidents in
the agricultural co-operatives (Nam Ninh district)

The unit 1961 1970 1976 1986

The total number of victims person 40 108 170 238
%female % 75.5 79.5 82 85
The number of fatalities person 2 3 5
%female % 50 100 80
The number of seriously injured person 3 6 10
%female % 77 84 90
The disabled person I 2 3 16
% 100 100 67 87
The number of miscarriages person 18 60 105 150
Part IV
Rural Women and
Agricultural Development
16 Women and Institutional
Changes in a Developing
Rural Area
Nguyen Quang Vinh

Deep social change taking place in the Mekong Delta reflects the determ-
ination of Vietnamese women to gain control of their own fate in the
development process, and exposes existing barriers that cause and increase
difficulties for rural women as social development occurs. Results of soci-
ological surveys I have conducted with my colleagues of residents in
hamlets and villages of the Mekong Delta in the past five years reveal the
dynamics of inter-relationships among rural women, the family, and social
institutions. The women of the Mekong Delta assume major responsibili-
ties for agricultural production and non-agricultural work.

THE MEKONG DELTA

The Mekong Delta is Vietnam's key area of agricultural production, lying

at the far southern tip of the country where the Mekong River opens into
the Eastern Sea through the affluence of the Tien (Front) and Hau (Back)
rivers. With nearly 40,000 square kilometers of natural land ( 1 L9% of the
country's total) and more than 14.8 million people (22% of Vietnam's
population), this region accounts for 44.5% of the country's total sown
area of paddy (1991 data). In 1991 residents in the Mekong Delta reached
a per capita income twice that of the average per capita for all of Vietnam
(1991 data computed according to the 1989 price level: 437,215 VND/
282,514 VND 1). For many years, the per capita income in this area had
been about 20% higher than the national average. Due to specific historical
conditions, market relationships emerged early here; exchanges and
travels between town and countryside have always been bustling. 2 Thus, in
investigating the special trait of women in the Mekong Delta, we must pay
particular attention to the effects of this factor.
At this stage in the rural development of productive forces, the peasant
household still exists as the fundamental unit of production in the Mekong

207
208 Women and Institutional Changes in a Developing Rural Area
Delta, not only in agriculture, but in handicraft and services as well. During
the past decade, massive collectivisation in the region threw peasant fam-
ilies into disarray, but in the end the family organization has manifested its
strong solidarity with, and coherent capacity for, community activities to
fulfil economic as well as socio-cultural functions expected of this institu-
tion. It can be said that to an appreciable extent, then, the rural woman has
contributed her part to enable peasant households in the Mekong Delta to
show their capacity for adaptation and flexible development.
Women make up 52.1% of the Mekong Delta population (national stat-
istics of 1991) and more than 50% of the labour force from age 15 to 65
(figures of sociological surveys 1981, 1991, 1992). Within the framework
of family economic activities, they have the major responsibility for agri-
cultural and non-agricultural work; 82.4% of women age 15 and older
(interviewed as sample respondents in 1991) said that they also play the
principle role in performing domestic chores and clothes-making for
family members. Working women perform other rural family household
tasks: 76% in house sweeping; 66% in going to the market for shopping;
63% are in charge of such functions as anniversaries of the deceased and
lunar new year festivals; and 46.3% in caring for children. (The older
women, no longer in good health, take no active part in economic produc-
tion, but still have a hand in domestic chores.) Although the process of
diversification of agriculture and production is taking its course in the
countryside, the traditional role of housewife is still consciously played
by Mekong Delta women. Community organizations that provide services
for the care and education of children (nurseries, children's groups,
kindergartens, etc.) have been established in the region, but only sparingly.
The majority of rural Mekong Delta women (age 15 and older) work in
farming (rice fields and/or gardens). According to the sociological survey
we made in April 1991 of nearly 400 women over five representative eco-
logical areas in the Delta, 67% give agriculture as their main occupation
(63% in rice growing, almost 4% in gardening). Only 26.4% view agricul-
ture as the secondary occupation. This deep attachment to agriculture and
the high efficiency of agricultural production activities derive, in part,
from the population's ties to the Mekong Delta. From our 1988 survey of
over four of the Delta's large areas, we found that 89% of the families
interviewed are descendants of generations of Delta natives who have
lived in the same area; of the remainder, approximately 13% came here
before 1975 and 2% since 1975.
Through the mechanism of generational transmission of experience, the
peasant woman becomes aware of and brings these regional characteristics
to bear in activities of production. There is scant scientific argumentation
 Nguyen Quang Vinh 209
and studies of women in production; their deeper understanding of the
potentialities of nature (requiring scientific investigation) remains there-
fore poor. However, the Mekong Delta peasants in general, and the
peasant women in particular, have through experiments (trial and error) in
land clearing and business methods and techniques offered science and
agriculture a highly valuable, if rough, ecological map.
This does not mean, however, that productive activities in the area are
merely of an experimental character. On the contrary, it can be maintained
that from 1975 to the present, almost all working women in the Delta have
been highly receptive to adopting and applying new techniques of cultiva-
tion and livestock breeding to benefit their families. About 80% of female
peasant workers surveyed said that from 1976 to 1988, they have adopted
at least one new technique of cultivation or animal breeding. Our 1991
survey has shown that during the five years prior to the survey there were
7.5% more female peasant workers in the area who have adopted a new
technique. From informal interviews held between our team of sociologi-
cal researchers and Mekong Delta peasant women during field surveys,
we learned that the main incentive for their receptiveness and application
of these new methods was very realistic: witnessing the success scored by
others who have adopted new techniques creates the urge to do the same
themselves. The new techniques, once introduced into the countryside,
have spread gradually throughout.
In addition to their strongest point, which consists of working the land,
about 20% of the female labour force in the Mekong Delta also have famil-
iarized themselves with many forms of non-agricultural activities (includ-
ing handicraft production and services). A portion of rural women know a
craft but for various reasons have not had the occasion to market it. Of 420
rural women age 16 years and older interviewed in 1968 (in a highly reli-
able sample), 8.5% said that they were exercising a craft; 4.6% said they
have a craft but have never had a chance to ply it. The sociological survey
of Mekong Delta women which followed in 1991 also reaffirmed the struc-
ture of handicrafts as set out above: 62% or 213 of those with a craft have
exercised it, 38% or about 1/3 of those with a craft have not exercised it.
The greatest majority are those with dress-making skills who have not used
them. What is significant is that young women in the Mekong Delta have a
stronger propensity than the generations of their mothers to ply non-
agricultural trades and crafts. Among those possessing non-agricultural
crafts, young women account for up to 57.7%, this trend being strongest
with women under age 30 who have the expectation of attending courses of
handicraft training (if available). This outlook is six times higher in young
women than that of those who have four or more children.
210 Women and Institutional Changes in a Developing Rural Area

The 1991 survey also found a definite level of preparedness in social-

occupational mobility. While a considerable proportion of rural women
wanted to get more involved in farming, another segment of women want
to start a new trade which would require training and financial assistance.
Socio-psychological tests conducted in the rural environment of the
Mekong Delta show that the women believe that 'in order to ameliorate
the living conditions of rural women', these measures are needed:

• Assistance to become highly efficient in all kinds of agricultural work:

38%.
• Opportunities to be offered to ply a handicraft: 18.9%.

Because of this, as many as 31% of peasant women of working age

express their readiness to attend training courses in new farming methods;
among the group of women with four or more children, 16% feel the
same. However, 11% of those who are skilled in farming want to exercise
a new trade 'if they can obtain financial assistance and training in a craft',
while 32.6% want to learn a new skill, but have no wish to abandon
farming. Clearly, such indicators signal a definite level of social develop-
ment with regard to division of labour in the countryside, but there are, as
yet, no clear indicators that a massive movement of labour away from the
country (to towns and cities) is likely to occur in the near future.
Sociologists are giving greater attention to the study of change in the
sharing of power within the institution of the rural family. We seek to
answer the question: 'Is the internal relationship of the family organiza-
tion, which previously has borne the imprint of paternalistic power, evolv-
ing into a democratization process?'
In the recent sociological survey carried out in relation to women and
families in the provinces of Dong Thap, Cuu Long, Tien Giang, Hau
Giang, and Minh Hai, we have found that the level of female participation
in discussions of important family matters (such as the rotation of crops,
borrowing of a big loan, or a high expenditure) ranges from 46% to 66%
of the total of women in the families studied. With regard to the number of
women who are the chief worker in the family, the level of their actual
participation in the three above family matters is up from 60% to 71%.
Young female peasants also take part in discussions, but at a lower propor-
tion (about two-thirds of the level of the chief worker). However, there are
important differences between holding discussions and making decisions.
Among the group of women capable of having the greatest share of the
power (the group of women who are the chief worker in the family) no
more than 30% participate in decision-making in important matters. In real
 Nguyen Quang Vinh 211
life, young female peasants have almost no significant say in decision-
making. From this preliminary research we can conclude that the demo-
cratization process of family life is under way. The majority of peasant
women in the area are acquiring a status that is growing in important
matters (especially those women who are chief workers in the family).
Nevertheless, they are still assigned a very modest role in the participation
in decisions about important matters, because the man's role as final deci-
sion-maker remains dominant. Regardless, positive indicators are appear-
ing in this region concerning women's right of self-determination and that
of her family. Society must strengthen and reinforce these changes so that
the social role of women in the Mekong Delta is raised higher to be pro-
portional to her contributions in multiple fields of socio-economic life.
In our opinion, one of the fundamental ways to establish a solid base for
upgrading the status of rural woman is to ceaselessly expand the scope of
her abilities. There is a 'channel' in the mechanism of transfer of agricul-
tural technology to the countryside that the majority of women have
adopted with success: they learn from tested experiences and examples of
high economic performance. This is a useful and realistic method to
absorb techniques, especially under conditions of low levels of education
(12% illiterate; 55.6% grade I; 21% grade II; 5.3% grade III) and a small
available force of agricultural scientists. Parallel with this, 20.6% of the
surveyed working women in rural areas have acquired training from tech-
nical cadres, with 4.3% of them learning of new techniques through books,
newspapers, and the radio. It is important to stress that among those with
grade II and III levels of education, as many as 15.4% were able to learn
new techniques through books, newspapers, and the public media (three
times higher than the common proportion for all working women in the
area and almost fourteen times more than the number of women grade I
level of education). Women with a higher level of education have a higher
frequency of absorption of technical know-how from scientific and techni-
cal cadres than the number of women of lower educational levels. Thus,
education is having a very great impact in the creation of a new style of
technical receptiveness among women.
We found similar situations in the application of techniques in handi-
craft production. This points to the need for more systematic development
of agricultural extension and technical training institutions in the important
area of rural commodity production. Particular attention must be paid to
satisfy the educational need among the great majority of rural women,
especially those who are relatively young and possess a relatively high
degree of education. In so doing, institutions of scientific and technological
diffusion (organized in an appropriate manner) may stimulate the progress
212 Women and Institutional Changes in a Developing Rural Area
of female labour, thus envisaging a new round of social labour division
which surely will take place in the Mekong Delta in the near future.
Generational replacement plays as essential role in guaranteeing renova-
tion and social progress. Young women (ages 16 to 30 years old) currently
constitute 41.2% of the rural female labour force in the Mekong Delta,
according to the 1988 census. This group of young people has an average
of education higher than that of previous generations. Although they have
not as yet achieved a higher skill in farming work than the older genera-
tions, they offer to both agriculture and non-agriculture production, a new
style in application of new technology. For example, among young people
the percentage of persons having and plying a craft is higher (12% com-
pared with 6%) than the group of middle-age women who are 31 years of
age or older. In looking at the expectations for future training in agricul-
tural methods (cultivation, animal breeding, and machinery operations) to
raise efficiency in production, we also detect in the group of young women
a more marked 'emphasis' on the means of instruction of a 'methodiza-
tion' character, rather than repetition of experiences although the method
of empirical learning remains valued by young people.
In studying the life of rural young women in fields outside production
we can perceive the presence of a level of development favouring
'freedom of choice', although it has not really been widespread. Our
surveys and interviews of young women in the Mekong Delta have
revealed that more than 60% said that 'young people of both sexes enjoy
more freedom in marriage'. However, in reality, although the majority of
couples who get married have had premarital relations, 'most of parents on
both sides still rely on the assistance of go-betweens'. Their freedom,
therefore, is not full-fledged. There are records of many suicides commit-
ted by young people because of forced or forbidden marriages.
With regard to family planning, while the number of children conceived
by young women in the region is somewhat less than that of women who
now are older, a segment of young women (nearly equivalent to other age
intervals) maintains that 'there is no use to plan in advance; the more
[children] the better'.
Democratization and liberalization in love and marriage are also consid-
ered to be the profound cause of a number of problems - divorces and
suicides that tend to increase among rural young people - that are emerg-
ing. Thus, we should pay attention to the multi-dimensional impact of the
trend of democratization and liberalization that is gaining momentum
among young rural women.
As a young rural region, the Mekong Delta reflects both social progress
and a number of positive results in the lives of rural women, but also
 Nguyen Quang Vinh 213
shows many difficulties and contradictions in the evolution of this com-
munity population.
We believe that from the standpoint of sociological research, it is
important to place these difficulties and contradictions in the context of the
relationships within the developing social structure. When doing so, we
become aware of three relevant observations which require mention:

- Historical heritage is leaving deep imprints in the contradictions

between the imbalance of levels of education and the need to raise the
scientific and technical capacity of production among women, in their
backward conceptions and habits when coping with problems in family
and society.
- Difficulties in and obstacles to the development of women in the
region also are the consequences of imperfections in the prevailing social
structure, which lacks adequate investments and the systematic and
oriented attention to the division of social labour, and therefore constitute
the principal impeding factor.
- Finally, the causes of many problems that those concerned with the
process of the liberation of women must come to grips with are: 1) the
specific conditions of the southern part of the country where the war had
raged for many successive decades; 2) the sudden replacement of political
institutions; and 3) the existence of characteristic conditions of natural and
social ecology (cultural, ethnological).

So, one of the most important objective needs in building and carrying
out programmes of development in the Mekong Delta region is the
concern of the system for women's problems. Therefore, all the projects of
scientific research on women in the Mekong Delta should be designed,
financed, and managed in a more systematic manner.

Notes

1. VND- Vietnamese Dong; 10,000 VND =$1 US 1994 (editor).

2. A sociological poll of women in the Mekong Delta reveals that during a 12-
month period 45.2% of people in all age groups have travelled to at least
one of the following three places: the nearest town, Cantho City, Ho Chi
Minh City. If we compute those who have gone to the urban areas at least
once in the year, the proportions are:
- 67.4% had travelled to the nearest town;
- 38.4 % to Cantho City;
- 21.6% to Ho Chi Minh City.
17 The Direct Loan of Capital
from the Bank to Develop
Production and Gender
Equality
Tran Thi Van Anh

As a state bank specializing in the agricultural field, the Vietnamese Bank

of Agriculture (VBA) since 1991 has officially lent capital to peasant
households. Because of this policy with the loan of capital at relatively
low interest rates in comparison with the unofficial capital market, 1
peasant households have had the means to increase production.
This paper examines the policy of direct loans to peasant households
from the standpoint of gender. In making loans to the peasant households,
according to the VBA, gender differences are not a criteria. In lending
there is no discrimination against various kinds of households (on struc-
ture, sex of the head of household, on income, etc.) although in reality the
'households' are very diverse. This diversity in households based on
gender can lead to differences in the initiative to approach the bank for
capital, and in how the capital is used. Here is one of the reasons to scruti-
nize this problem in practice.
In addition, how the policy of lending to the peasant households is
carried out depends greatly on the bank officials, especially direct credit
officials in the district bank branches. Female bank officials may require
different conditions from those of the male ones. On the basis of the initial
data collected through a number from surveys conducted in 1991 and in
the first quarter of 1992 in a number of rural areas in Vietnam, these two
problems are analyzed.

THE OPPORTUNITIES OF FEMALE PEASANTS TO BORROW

CAPITAL DIRECTLY

According to lending regulations of the VBA, the peasant household in the

spheres of agriculture, forestry and fishery is defined as a productive and

214
 Tran Thi Van Anh 215
business undertaking unit under its own control. The head of the house-
hold is the legal borrower. It is generally assumed that the household is a
nuclear family, that includes a wife, a husband and a few children, in
which the husband is the head. But in reality, there are incomplete house-
holds: women without husbands or men without wives who have children,
the multi-generation families, and single households. In the households
where the women are single or living without husbands, as a matter of
course they must assume the role of the head of household, that is, the
official borrower. In addition we have also seen cases in which the
husband is the head in name but due to his frequent or periodic absence or
for health reasons, the wife is responsible chiefly for farm-work and is the
real head of the household. 2 Many problems arise for these women
because they do not have the certificates issued in their own name that
gives them the right to use the cultivated land, or the ownership of valu-
able things which can be given as payment of the loan. Their rights do not
include taking initiative in making decisions on borrowing capital that has
been conceived as belonging to the man. In the process of borrowing the
capital, these women face many disadvantages in accessing information,
using procedures for borrowing, and using the capital and paying the debt.

Reception of Information

In many areas the level of training and education for the woman is lower
than that of the man, causing major obstacles to women obtaining infor-
mation. Women have less chance of getting information on loans through
mass media than men. The data of sociological investigation at a village in
the Red River delta in May 1991 disclosed that the women who almost
have never listened to the radio comprised 44 percent and those who
almost have never watched television comprised 21 percent of the total
women questioned, while the correspondent numbers of the men were 27
percent and 14 percent respectively. Also, fewer women (39 percent) than
men (70 percent) attend the meetings of the productive teams and peasant
associations where they might get information. The chief reason that
women get less information can be traced to their burden of farm-work
and household chores in all the rural areas at present. This is particularly
the case with the families in which the women are heads of the household
and the families with difficulties such as ill health, a lot of children and
lonely old persons.
Another reason that women have less and especially insufficient knowl-
edge about the credit policy has to do with how it is presented and its con-
tents. Up to now, the decisions and policies of the state, which include
216 The Direct Loan of Capital and Gender Equality
lending to peasant households, have been publicized mainly through
official channels of information such as televisions, newspapers, radios,
broadcasting loudspeakers, meetings of the productive teams in the hamlets
and villages, etc. This way of reporting has advantages such as quickness,
accurateness and timeliness. However, they cannot bring the above effects
into play if they are applied to the actual conditions of the women in the
countryside, let alone the far and secluded areas and regions where there
has not been any kind of mass media. Therefore, relying only on official
channels of information to transmit policies to the peasants, especially
female peasants, is thoroughly inadequate.
The contents of the media transmission still carries considerable general
propaganda, and is definitely short of concrete and practical information
for the citizen such as information on the first thing which the peasant has
to do when he or she wants to borrow the capital of the VBA or the
working hours and place of the local credit and administrative officials,
and on how to write applications and complete dossiers.
These questions may seem to be trifling but in reality they are extremely
important for women and even a number of men- especially those who do
not have experiences in contacting the state authorities with application
forms and administrative procedures. This kind of information can help
women overcome their lack of initiative for coming to the bank as an
equal customer.

Procedures of Borrowing

Up to now, the VBA has provided loans to peasant households through

direct lending, and indirect lending through intermediary economic organ-
izations with the tripartite payment between the peasant household, the
material supplying unit and the bank. This study examines direct lending
in two chief ways: first, when the credit official (or the credit group)
directly organizes the lending and payment of the debt with each peasant
household; second, when the lending is carried out through a credit
reception group that is voluntarily established by a number of peasant
households.
First, the legal procedures required of the peasant household are com-
posed of 2 application forms, 3 borrowing contracts and 2 declarations of
payment in kind (or the promise of 'credit reception'). All the above appli-
cation forms can be bought at the bank for the price of 1800 d/set (March
1992 at the branch of agriculture bank of Yen Hung district, Quang Ninh
province). Among these application forms, two applications for borrowing
and two forms of declaration of payment in kind must have certifying
 Tran Thi Van Anh 217
seals of the village people's committee. The average price for each seal at
the same time and place is 500VND. Though it is small, the above sum is
not easy for poor peasant families to earn. Besides, the time it takes to
follow the paper procedures and to wait for approval is still rather long,
especially for the female heads of households. They may have to go to the
village people's committee many more times and wait longer than the men
in order to have their need for borrowing capital met.
All the local administrative representatives are men, and according to
unwritten custom they prefer to work with a man rather than a woman.
Nowadays it is not a betel nut but a cigarette and cup of tea that initiate the
conversation, and these are very alien to the peasant woman. For the
majority of the peasant women, making necessary contacts with the local
officials asking for the seal means overcoming psychological obstacles
which is very difficult.
The purpose of approval of the application at the village level for the
borrowing of the peasant household is to establish a guarantee of the
capital by the local authority to the bank. This, on the one hand, reveals
that the credit officials have not understood their customers, on the other
hand, the bank has not yet really trusted the peasant. If consideration and
eventual approval at the village level is favorable for the credit official to
make a decision card to permit borrowing, then on the side of the peasants,
it creates or increases their dependence on an intermediary machinery
which in reality has no economic responsibility to them. This dependence
in the cases of the households with female heads may be a considerable
impediment to the approach of the capital source of the VBA and one of
the reasons making them continue to borrow capital in the free market.
The second way, indirect lending through an intermediary organization,
organizes the borrowing through the credit reception group and decreases
some of the procedures to each peasant household. However, the problem
for women occurs in the formation of the intermediary group. If the head of
the group is a man, female heads of households have very few opportunities
to be affiliated with the intermediary group if they have no family relations
with him and these opportunities may be rarer if they are poor households.
If the female heads of households undertake to establish the credit
reception groups, then other difficulties emerge. Their properties are not
always sufficient as payment of the debt of the whole group and they do
not always have sufficient experience to be able to represent the group in
contacting, transacting and in responsibilities to the bank.
In addition to the above difficulties, the place of the district bank
branch or the representative department may also be a problem for the
peasant household, especially to the female heads of the households who
218 The Direct Loan of Capital and Gender Equality
have borrowed capital in their names. To reach the bank, the peasant
households have to cross from two hundred meters to tens of kilometers,
depending on different areas. Since 1991 a number of representative-
departments belonging to the district bank branch have been set up in
order to approach peasant households in places far from the district
capital but these are not many. Poor road quality and high transport fees
in comparison with income are impediments to the women's access to
the bank.

Use of the Capital

Preliminary surveys disclosed that women pay much more attention to

small and short-term loans while the men may pay more attention to big
and long-term ones. The chief investment objectives which the women
often have in mind are food crops, short-term industrial plants and green
vegetables. Particularly the women pay much attention to animal breeding
investment. The popular form of small-scale investment is to rear pigs,
chickens, and ducks. The men generally pay more attention to medium
and large-scale investments in rearing buffaloes, oxen, fishes, shrimps, etc.
For example, all the ponds rearing shrimps and crabs in the coastal areas
of Quang Ninh and Thai Binh provinces with a relatively large capital of
the VBA in more than one year have been made in men's names and under
their management.
In recent years, peasant households in all areas of the entire country
have had great need to borrow capital (from 3 to 6 months) for their crops
to buy materials such as seeds, fertilizer, insecticide, petrol, oil and
employment of manpower. To meet this need is to meet the need of the
majority of peasant women in the present condition.
Timeliness is an important factor in meeting the women's need of bor-
rowing capital. In reality, the women tend to borrow at the time they are
really in need. While the men may borrow capital earlier with the plan for
buying materials at a low cost at the beginning of the crop.
There is a question concerning the effective use of capital to supply the
necessary materials for the production of rice, subsidiary crops and animal
breeding. There may not be large differences between females and the
males in their choice of borrowing materials or cash. The difference may
be larger between one zone and the other with different approaches to the
exchange of goods and materials. Nevertheless, in case of borrowing cash,
the purchase of proper kind of needed materials with guaranteed quality
and reasonable price is a larger problem for women than it is for men.
Women may meet with many difficulties due to their lack of experience,
 Tran Thi Van Anh 219

lack of time, and lack of opportunities to buy and transport from afar.
Even so there have been cases when the women and the men too protest
against a third party transporting materials that are bought by the capital
borrowed from the bank because of the low quality of service and higher
prices in comparison with that of other economic organizations. This
reveals that it is most important for the bank and the third party to respect
the selection of the customers and to build equal and mutual-interest rela-
tions with the peasant households.
For the peasant household to use capital in an effective way, it is impos-
sible not to pay attention to agricultural development. The reality in many
rural areas is that the peasant women's knowledge on cultivation and
animal rearing is greatly limited. Few of them have been trained. Almost
all of them have learned their trade as it has been handed down to them
chiefly by way of 'getting knowledge through practical work' from gener-
ation to generation. Besides some precious experiences, a greater part of
their knowledge of agriculture is backward and does not meet techno-
scientific requirements and does not increase production. Up to now it is
regrettable that because of this, a greater part of the capital borrowed from
the bank has been used in the old style. For example, the households using
the capital borrowed to buy the seed (purebred or grade I) make up a very
small portion in the total sum of households borrowing the capital for
crops. Even in the zone developing commodity agricultural products like
Hau Giang, all the women questioned said that they frequently lay aside
some rice for seeds by themselves.

Paying the Debt

Up to now, there have not been enough data on time to evaluate the ratio
of retrieving capital of the female customers to the male ones of the
VBA. However some projects lending capital to the peasant women spon-
sored by the Vietnam Women's Union in a number of provinces and
districts with the capital of the international organizations and non-
government organizations reveal that the ratio of capital retrieval is very
high.
The experience of a number of credit programmes in Bangladesh such
as Grameen Bank, BRAC project and government credit co-operatives all
reveal that the ratio of capital retrieval from female customers is higher
than that from the male ones. 3 One reason is that these projects all apply
the method of allowing gradual payment debt which is a procedure
perhaps more appropriate to women than full payment at one time.
Second, the investment fields of women in general are less adventurous
220 The Direct Loan of Capital and Gender Equality
than many men's ones. And third, the women's loans are often smaller
than are the men's even when they invest in the same field of activities.
Here we cannot eliminate the possibility that women have a higher sense
of responsibility for their loans than the men.
In reality in Vietnam, another important factor which may influence the
ratio of capital retrieval is the capacity for consumption of products from
peasant households. The large bumper crop of the Winter-Spring
1991-1992 in the provinces of the Mekong Delta tells us that when the
price of agricultural products decreases strongly and the state does not
have effective measures to subsidize, then both female and male cus-
tomers of the VBA are unable to pay the debt in time because they cannot
sell their products or sell them at a price sufficient to compensate the pro-
ductive expenditures.

LENDING TO THE PEASANT HOUSEHOLDS AND THE

DIFFICULTIES OF THE FEMALE CREDIT CADRES

With renovation, when banks shifted from lending to state-owned busi-

ness enterprises and co-operatives to lending to the peasant households
directly, and when they shifted from the state-subsidized salaries to partial
business undertakings, new difficulties arose for credit cadres in general
and the female credit cadres in particular.
The VBA is one of the state institutions which has a rather high rate of
female cadres. With the shift in lending to peasant households, a number
of bank leaders have assumed that the household lending is not suitable for
the female credit cadres. In a number of district branches where the rate of
female cadres comprises up to 70-80 percent of the cadres, this may
significantly hinder the policy of lending to peasant households.

The Responsibility of the Credit Cadre and the System of Bonus

At present, the VBA extracts 10 percent of the loan interest from the loan
to the peasant household for periodical reward for the cadres. This system
of reward is offered to all cadres, without discrimination of the cadres who
directly manage the field of action. According to the rule of the VBA, all
the responsibility for the loans to the peasant household belong to three
persons: the area credit cadre, that is, the person making the consideration
card to permit lending, the head of the undertaking department and the
director of the branch of district bank, the man in charge of judgement
and signing the approval of application.
 Tran Thi Van Anh 221
The above reality poses at least two problems: The first is the system of
reward which is essentially a form of salary and does not depend on the
degree of responsibility of credit cadres. Secondly, because of this and
because it is very low in reality, it is not attractive enough for the bank
cadres in general and does not encourage the credit cadres in particular to
lend to the peasant households.
The above problems in their turn have created various problems for
the bank cadres - female as well as male. For the female credit cadres
the principal disadvantage is their work overload. Owing to the demand
of lending to peasant households, the female credit cadres now have to
give up more time to learn the objectives of borrowing capital, object-
ives of investing, etc. The time saved for their household chores and
especially for business undertaking to boost their family income hence is
reduced. 4
Sometimes male credit cadres do not do the office work because they
realize that this work is not profitable or more simply they do not accept
this kind of work because they want to lay aside their time to do other
jobs outside the office which are more beneficial. In these cases the
women credit cadres have to undertake the office work of some of their
male colleagues. What is worth mentioning here is that in many instances,
at home as well as in the working place, women have fewer choices than
the men. Usually women cannot abandon their household chores that
involve taking care of and nourishing their families. At the same time,
women are unable to neglect their office work or to use the office time for
their family affairs because the pressure to reduce staff is aimed at women
first.
The sense of responsibility, the carefulness and thoughtfulness in work
of the female credit cadres, especially their truthfulness and straightfor-
wardness, are extremely significant conditions for lending to peasant
households. This has been highly valued by a number of leading cadres at
some branches of district and province banks. However, for the women to
be able to bring these potential strengths into play, the state and the VBA
must insure necessary conditions in which the problem of income is the
first.

The Training and Drilling

Lending to peasant households has created new professional requirements

for female as well as male bank cadres. After more than a year of lending
to peasant households, there has been increased pressure on direct credit
cadres to supplement and increase agricultural production. Increased
222 The Direct Loan of Capital and Gender Equality
knowledge of enterprises is necessary. Besides this, practices which for-
merly received little attention such as the attitude towards the customer,
the method of working, the place of working, the time of meeting the
peasants etc., have become important in building the relations between the
bank and the peasant households. All these problems require that the credit
cadres be re-trained or drilled. It is regrettable that until now all the credit
cadres have not yet gone through any drilling class on the lending to the
households. The few classes which have been offered have not been able
to encourage female credit cadres, and especially those with small children
to attend because of their locations in townships and their inadequate
funding.

Working Conditions of the Credit Cadres

It is necessary for female and male credit cadres to be in direct contact

with the peasant households in their areas. To do this, the credit cadres
must periodically or frequently go to the bases. In many cases, movement
for the cadres may be a prerequisite to establish loans to households.
Therefore, there is urgent need for mobility of the credit cadre. But com-
pared with the male credit cadres, female ones have fewer opportunities to
make themselves mobile. The women lack transportation such as motor-
bikes and bicycles of good quality because if their families have such a
means of movement, normally it is chiefly at their husbands' disposal.
Using public communication systems is also difficult because the com-
munication expenditures are very high in relation to the cadre members'
salaries. Furthermore, the time schedule for trips may not be in conformity
with the working time of the cadres. Besides, many villages in the moun-
tainous regions are still beyond the reach of public communication.
In some district branches, the working space is too small, there is a lack
of necessary chairs, fans, kettles and cups, water, etc., to receive the
peasants, who may come twenty at the same time. In some representative
departments, requirements of toilets and bathrooms with sufficient clean
water are not met.
In dealing with the working conditions of the credit cadres, an indirect
factor which has an extremely important impact on the female cadres'
work is the care of children in creches for kindergarten age groups. The
female cadres with small children have to reserve at least the entire official
salary to pay for the service of the public creche and kindergarten and
about 1.5 to 2 times that sum of money if they entrust their children to the
care of private creches. In recent years, because the system of budget sub-
sidies was abolished, the number of creches and kindergartens have
 Tran Thi Van Anh 223
decreased considerably in the townships where district bank branches are
located. Almost all women have been affected and they have found differ-
ent ways to cope. But when they participate in the programme of lending
to the peasant households, the women meet with more difficulties than
before. The programme increases the frequency of their business trips to
the bases. Their working day may be longer; it is not restricted within the
eight-hour office day. The time they have to look after their children may
be less, the length of time that they entrust them to the creches and kinder-
gartens may be longer. This means that the degree of peace in women's
mind about their children decreases while the expenditure for the care of
the children increases.
In doing the business of lending to peasant households, the female cadres
in general and the cadres with small children are facing a great challenge of
balancing occupational and maternal responsibilities. Without concrete
help and support, it is difficult for the women themselves to be able to
accomplish two tasks simultaneously. And this may affect the programme
of lending to peasant households.

SOME SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS

In order to enhance the outcomes of lending to peasant households, it is

necessary to do away with the particular difficulties faced by female peas-
ants as well as the female credit cadres at all levels in the process of
deploying loans. Here we suggest some concrete measures as follows:

1) It is necessary to have discussions within the Central Bank, the

Vietnamese Bank of Agriculture and their branches to develop new crite-
ria for salary, bonus and allowances of communication for bank cadres.
Particular attention should be paid to direct credit cadres.
2) There should be coordination between the Vietnamese Bank of
Agriculture with ministries such as the Ministry of Agriculture, the
Ministry of Forestry, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Sea Products
and concerned organizations such as the Women's Union, the Peasant
Association that are concerned with rural development in order to develop
solutions to help the peasant households, in which the needs of female
peasant households are recognized. We can discuss the plans by which the
social mass organizations can guarantee that their members may borrow
capital.
3) A programme of training and drilling credit cadres on methods of
working with peasants, with specific considerations for lending to the
224 The Direct Loan of Capital and Gender Equality
female heads of households should be developed. This programme must
be organized neatly and lightly, in the appropriate time and place so that
the female credit cadres can participate producing high quantity and quality.
4) A network of mass media should be organized to present regula-
tions and procedures for lending capital to each hamlet. Special attention
should be paid to the discrepancy between females and males in receiving
the information. Here the collaboration with various organizations in the
district area such as the Peasant Association, the Women's Union, the
Youth Union, the cultural institutions and schools may bring about better
results.
5) The ideas of the peasants and the administrative and social organiza-
tions (official and unofficial) in the village regarding the policy of bor-
rowing capital, on the procedures, on the way to guarantee the capital
retrieval and on the role of those organizations in the establishment of the
credit reception groups in the areas should be collected and studied. Here
it is very important to consult the ideas of peasant women and the social
organizations which act as guarantor for the peasant women in borrowing
capital.
6) One of the greatest obstacles to implementing the above solutions
may be the problem of cost. Nevertheless, here we can consult with the
VBA, the Finance Ministry and other concerned ministries for ideas on a
scheme for mass media, training and drilling. In addition, we can consider
a certain possibility of support from the international organizations con-
cerned with this problem.

In accordance with existing conditions of each locality, it is possible to

consider the plan of collaboration among the branches of the district bank,
the local authority (district, village) and social organizations (including
mountain villages to discuss and look for measures to resolve in good time
the difficulties encountered in lending to female and male peasants.

CONCLUSION

The dissimilarity between the female and the male in the borrowing of
capital, as well as in many other activities has objectively arisen from their
different roles in everyday life. To create conditions for the female and
male to realize well their parts in the family and society through more
sufficient satisfaction of their needs is one of the objectives of develop-
ment planning.
 Tran Thi Van Anh 225
Notes

I. Up to March 1992 there were 558-680 peasant households borrowing

capital directly from the VBA with the total capital of 405 billion dong at
lower interests from 30 to 70 percent in comparison with the free market:
Ngan hang (Bank) Magazine W 2-1992.
2. In a number of the rural areas, up to 80 percent of the male work force go to
work or for trade far from home in the time between the two harvests
(survey data in Chau Hung village, Thanh Tri district, Soc Trang province
in September 1991).
3. According to Anne Goetz, Document ofDPU, London, May 1992.
4. 80 percent of the female cadres at the bank branch in Yen Hung district,
Quang Ninh province frequently rear pigs and chickens to increase income.
There is a woman who produces the greatest amount of 2 hundred kilo-
grammes of pigs in a year (survey data of rural credit in February 1992).
18 The Real State of Forestry
Workers' and Peasants'
Families in the Area of
Paper-Making in North
Vietnam
Nguyen Thi Khoa

This research chapter is aimed not only at describing the real state of fami-
lies in a particular locality but also to compare the work and living condi-
tions of the workers' families with those of peasants to clarify the factors
influencing the changes of their families, so as to develop accurate inter-
pretations for building prosperous and happy families. The findings are
based on a 1989-1991 study conducted by the Women and Family Section
of the Center for Women Studies that surveyed 514 peasant families and
64 forestry workers' families at some localities in Vinh Phu and Ha Tuyen
provinces. 1
This data shows that the monogamous family comprises the majority
of peasant families (96.6 percent) and of forestry workers' families (78.7
percent). In addition, there are unofficial polygynist families. Polygyny is
illegal but not seriously condemned by public opinion. They are families
where women have children without license of marriage or following
abandonment by their husbands (who live with other women). This kind
of family formed 3.4 percent of the peasant families and 21.3 percent of
the forestry workers' families. Eighty-six percent of the peasant families
and 69 percent of the worker families are complete (the family in which
the husband, the wife and their children live in the same house) and
14 percent of the peasant families and 31 percent of the worker families
are those in which only the mothers live with their children (see Figure
18.1 ).
The ratio of full families in the countryside is higher than that among
the workers (86 percent in comparison with 69 percent). The ratio of
widow families among the peasants is higher than that among the workers

226
 Nguyen Thi Khoa 227
Figure 18.1 Family make-up

y abandonedin bywhich
Familie.~ women are
their husbands.

' Full families

l Families in which women
' have children out of wedlock.
!liB Families of widows.
dn women.
Families of divorced
Diagram of the Diagram of the ,•. Families in which women's hus-
peasant families worker families bands are absent.

(9.2 percent in comparison with 3.1 percent) and the ratio of women
having children out of wedlock among the workers is higher than that
among the peasants (20.3 percent in comparison with 1.6 percent).
The above identification of family types is significant because these
kinds as well as initial outlines of family physiognomy constitute some-
times the cause, sometimes the effect, of the material and spiritual life of
the family, and are also a reflection of family happiness.
There is a similarity between the worker and peasant families in genera-
tional structure. 97 percent of worker families and 77 percent of peasant
households are nuclear families (see Table 18. 1).
After marriage, young couples want to live separately from their original
families. 2 In many peasant families, this need is in conformity with the
ability and desire of both the spear side and the distaff side. The parents (a
greater part on the spear side) regard the giving of their children in mar-
riage with some property as their responsibility and duty. Although the

Table 18.1 Generations in the family

Kinds offamily (ratio in %)

Generations in the family Worker family Peasant family
One Generation 3 4
Two Generations 97 77
Three Generations l7
Four Generations 2
Total 100 percent 100 percent
228 The Real State of Forestry Workers' and Peasants' Families
newly married couples live separately from their families of origin, there is
frequent contact between them. The chief reason for the tendency for the
nuclearization of peasant families is the desire to receive dwelling land and
cultivated land. It is also the reason for the disintegration of big families of
3 and 4 generations into small ones of two generations. Most of this house-
hold split has happened repeatedly within 2 to 3 years after the Resolution
on household contracts in agriculture. Moreover, in Vinh Phu province
another motive for nuclear families is that household families contract for
the exploitation of hill and forest land. The separation of households is at
present unfolding in our entire countryside nationwide with the conse-
quence that on the one hand, the small two-generation model of family will
create more freedom and democracy in the relations between its members.
It is an important factor because it promotes the independence of young
families. But on the other hand, in the countryside, that nuclear family
model in the scattered plots of rice fields makes the household economy
develop slowly. At the same time the economic development of the farm
and the commodity economy reduces the income of the young families and
makes it difficult to assure the family's livelihood.
In the family of the forestry workers, the tendency of nuclearization has
a quite different basis from that of the peasant family, because first it is the
result of the decision to attract a young workforce from the population in
the countryside to build the forest farms. Second, young male and female
peasants in the Red River delta come to the new economic zone to earn
their living and get married. Therefore almost all of the worker families
are two-generation (nuclear) ones. Their parents and relations remain in
the remote native land, making the link between them and their original
families somewhat loose. In the separation in space between the young
worker families and their families of origin there is less communication
and less information exchange.
The above analysis discloses that socio-economic policies are elements
affecting the change in the generational structure of the family: from the
great family of 3-4 generations into a small one of 2 generations. And it is
this change that influences the household economy and kinship ties.
Although peasant families here live in the midland and mountainous areas,
rice is still their main source of income: 90 percent of the peasant families
pursue agriculture. Many families have not yet invested in handicrafts, pro-
cessing of forest products, planting of fruit trees or breeding of cattle, which
are not considered to be consistent with the development of the household
economy in accordance with the conditions of soil and climate of the area.
Since crop diversification is not advanced, especially to include high-value
commodity crops, the characteristics of family economy rely heavily on pure
agriculture; thus the total revenue of the families here is very low.
 Nguyen Thi Khoa 229
The wage-occupational structure of forestry workers' families is
inverted: while their earnings from wages are very low (average 30,000
dong [$3.00]/per month) and far from sufficient for their livelihood, they
have an additional occupation in agricultural production, from which they
earn a greater profit. Therefore, the income of those workers' families who
have cultivated land and gardens is many times higher than those without
access to land.
The irrational or inverse relationship between the job and the income
has many causes. For example, there are unreasonable requirements of the
business account system and the entanglements in the policy of land and
forest assignment to the workers' families. So both the workers' and the
peasants' families really rely on the paddy rice harvested as their main
support though they have different occupations. This is extremely difficult
for the workers' families because they do not have conditions, means and
knowledge to promote the economic viability of the forest, the hill and
rice field in the midland and mountainous area. The gains from rice plant-
ing are very low in productivity (1.5 quintals/sao).
On the basis of the above analyses, we consider that it is necessary
to have timely socio-economic policies for the families to develop
production with the purpose of building a prosperous people and a
strong nation.
The size of the family (see Figure I 8.2) suggests changing family struc-
ture. In the workers' families, 60 percent of them have 3-4 persons and 18
percent of them have 5-6 persons, most of these families are complete
ones. The families in which the women live in the absence of their hus-
bands have only 2 members. The average number of members in the
workers' families is 3.6. It would be considered small and reaches the
ideal number of members if we compare it with the average number in the
entire country (5.26 members/family) or in the Dong Xuan (Hanoi)
Knitwear factory (4 members/family). But in fact the prospect of the
increase in population in the forestry teams continues because the couples
here are still young and the ratio of women using the IUD is only around
50 percent.
On the contrary, the number of family members in the peasantry is
greater (see Figure 18.2), averaging 6 members/per family. Such a large
family is a reality which should be the focus of the population-family
planning campaign. In the workers' families, although the average scale is
3.6 persons/household, most of the members are children at the age of
creche, pre-school and elerpentary education. While in the peasant family
the proportions of age groups are relatively the same, from the newly born
to the elderly persons. Therefore, peasant families have a larger workforce
than the workers' families.
230 The Real State of Forestry Workers' and Peasants' Families
Figure 18.2 Family sizes

%
60 Worker family
50

40

30 ,-- --- ----- --- ---

-,,Pe~ant family
/
/
/
20 /

/
/
',
10 /
/
',,,

Number of 1-2 3-4 5-6 7 10

persons

The proportion of labourers per family includes families with:

1 principal labourer: 25% among the workers and 17% among the
peasants
2 principal labourers: 75% among the workers and 47% among the
peasants
3 principal labourers: peasant families only, 29%
4 principal labourers: peasant families only, 15%

The peasant families with a plentiful workforce are able to develop pro-
duction, and increase their income more than the workers' families, there-
fore the ratio of the well-to-do peasant families is also greater.

- 81% of the workers' families and 30% of the peasants: 1 to 2 children

- 19% of the workers' families and 38% of the peasants: 3 to 4 children
-0% of the workers' families and 30% of the peasants: 5+ children

Why do the peasant families have more children? First, the ratio of
women who enter the age of bearing children is high, then the number of
newly married couples increases every year and finally there have been
more and more weddings in which the bride and the bridegroom are under
the age stipulated by the law. In addition, the women do not receive infor-
mation concerning family-planning early enough, and the inevitable pref-
erence for having a son in the family still exists. Moreover, we also
consider that the division of rice fields according to the average number of
 Nguyen Thi Khoa 231
inhabitants in a household is an important motivation for early marriage
and numerous births.
Nowadays in the countryside a significant number of families want to
have many members so as to receive a sizeable amount of rice fields and
to have an abundant workforce, but pay little attention to the quality of
their livelihood and the reciprocal relation between material production
and human reproduction. Therefore, in developing socio-economic-policy,
it is necessary to take precautions against this reason for population
increase. It can influence the problem of production and consumption.
At present, population and family planning centres have been estab-
lished in 44 provinces and cities with the great annual investment of the
central government and the localities. The activity of these centres is
aimed at decreasing the number of births by increasing the use of contra-
ceptives, but the fertility is still high, which is manifested in the low rate
of contraception use, below 38 percent. 3
The above structural and developmental analysis of the family reveals
that the worker and peasant families here are on the move, and these
changes are attached to the social changes under the influence of the state
legal policies. Formerly, when all the state activities were based on the
principles of budget subsidies, the functions of the family were obscured
and almost negated. We misconceived the changes in and impact of the
family in our society. Today, the process of socialization of the familial
functions is unfinished, and the direction that families who carry on by
themselves will take is not yet known. These transitions have produced the
appearance of negative social phenomena. For example, the children
become weak pupils or abandon learning, and tum bad in character. It is
correct to ascribe the mistake to either the families not fulfilling the educa-
tional function or the system of education of the schools and the society.
In the last years of the 80s, the policy on contract No.1 0 in agriculture
has confirmed that the family is an independent economic unit. It also cor-
roborates that the familial economic function not only has the effect of
encouraging the family to be active in production, creating wealth for itself,
but also in bringing out the proper motivation of social development.
But, it is indeed difficult to hold up model families for emulation when
in reality the family faces many obstacles and hardships. Separating each
function of the families, first we want to deal with the economic function.
This function is expressed in two aspects: production and consumption.
With respect to production, families here received rice-fields by contract:
the average quota for each family is more or less a mou but it comprises
many plots (averagely 6-7 plots for each household) and scattered in dif-
ferent fields, each distant from the other from 0.5 to 2 kilometers.
232 The Real State of Forestry Workers' and Peasants' Families
Therefore, it is hard for the peasant family to concentrate its production,
cultivation and harvest. The harvest productivity is not high, about 1.5
quintals/sao. Relying chiefly on the rice plant, the families have little
information about the application of science and technology to agricul-
ture, on the methods of raising crop productivity, animal breeding, elimi-
nation of pests and diseases, irrigation and draining ... Because of this, the
harvested products of the families are mainly used to meet the needs of
living and consumption, one part saved as a precaution against a lost
harvest or sudden expenditures. Here the elements for the development of
a commodity economy have not yet emerged. Only a few families know
how to organize production, and dare to invest their capital and labour in
production, such as contracting for the exploitation of tea hills, forest or
planting oranges; these families regard their enterprise as a trial because
their capital is little, the investment for the application of science and tech-
nology has not been realized, the harvest is not big, etc. They are not yet
farmers even of small farms. This reveals that the families here have
carried out their economic function in very difficult conditions. In compar-
ing the peasant family to the worker family, the former has conducted its
production with more self-mastery.
The peasant family has rice-fields as its chief means of production;
though not having the right to ownership, it has long-term usufructuary
rights and the right to transfer according to the stipulation of the newly
amended constitution of 1991. While the worker's family has their wages,
these are not sufficient for their livelihood. So they have to produce food
for their subsistence, However, due to the fact that the majority of poor
worker families have no rice fields, they have to prepare burnt-over hilly
land to grow manioc and rice. In particular, those families where the
women live in the absence of the husbands meet with more difficulty
because they have little labour and have no capital. If the total income of
the peasant family is compared with that of the worker family, we see the
income of the peasant family is higher. Annually, the peasant family can
reserve some of their food aside from consumption. On the contrary if the
forest farm does not lend rice beforehand (rice replaces wages) to the
worker families, most of them suffer from famine.
Secondly, those peasant families living in the region for a long time
have in addition to the plots of land divided by the co-operatives, plots of
land bequeathed by their ancestors and have gardens. The worker's family
have a hard time obtaining such conditions to increase their sources of
income.
We can estimate the value of the livelihood of the worker family and
the peasant family through their gains from rice field, gardens and prop-
 Nguyen Thi Khoa 233
erty. The peasants' housing conditions are better; 86 percent of the fam-
ilies have permanent ones, only 11 of the families have temporary houses.
Whereas 56 percent of the worker families have temporary houses. The
equipment in the peasants' houses is more plentiful (for example in the
Minh Tan co-operative, Ha Tuyen province, three families have motor-
bikes, 6 families have grinding machines, 160 families have transistor
radios, 48 families have sewing machines, out of the total of 212 families).
In contrast, only 4 or 5 worker families have transistor radios. In the fami-
lies where the women live in the absence of the husbands, besides living in
thatched cottages, they even have no table and chairs to receive guests.
Even the components of everyday meals in the worker families are also
less than those in the peasant family.
From the analyses of facts on production and consumption aspects of the
worker and peasant families, we found that besides rice and vegetables and
sometimes a chicken or an egg for daily self-support the families save up
some money for buying indispensable items such as kerosene, fish sauce,
and salt. The market is very far and the luxuries are very scarce and very
few people buy them. The families usually develope a psychology of eating
stintingly for keeping a reserve. Some poor families only eat rice mixed
with farm produce or reduce the meals in the day to have enough paddy to
last until the harvest time.
In general, the household economy here demonstrated the character of
self-production and self~consumption and the simple commodity economy
spread for the first time to this midland and mountainous region. So if we
want to develop the commodity economy of the worker and peasant
households, first of all we must have the knowledge of business and
capital. We have met families that change their pigsties for the fifth time
yet they are unable to breed swine in a usual way because they think that
the place and direction of the pigsties are not proper. There are also many
families which burnt the hilly land to grow rice and as a result though cul-
tivation is done, there is no harvest.
Family education has as important significance in shaping the children's
personality. On the one hand, it involves bringing up of children by the
parents, on the other, it is the acceptance and assimilation of the values
that children express in their everyday behaviour.
Through the investigation of the reality in the care and education of the
children by the families we see that most worker and peasant families do
not yet have desks and benches for their children to study, even though the
bamboo and wood is not unavailable in these areas, and the price of
making these is not so high in comparison with other more expensive fur-
nishings in the family. For example, in Ca Dinh co-operative, Vinh Phu
234 The Real State of Forestry Workers' and Peasants' Families
province, 39 percent of the families have desks and benches for their chil-
dren to study, while 88 percent of the families have tables and chairs for
the reception of guests, 23 percent of the families have cupboards and
buffets, 41 families have transistor radios, 85 percent of families have
bicycles and motor bicycles, etc.
Besides, the families have not met a number of conditions of learning
for the children. There is a shortage of text books. Also many families let
their children start school at a late age (27 percent of children in peasant
families). While pupils have access to paper, pen and magazines and
stories, ink, books which are cultural documents supporting education in
general and familial education in particular, are not available in the local-
ity. Thirty percent of peasant families allow their children to abandon
schooling. There is very little time dedicated to the children so they will
learn their lessons. The families have to devote their time to productive
labour, especially at the harvest time. Although 60 percent of the peasant
families and 90 percent of the worker families claimed that they have
helped their children in learning, only 39 per cent of the families have
seen their children through in learning lessons and doing exercises and
this is limited to the lower grades. The value of instruction has not yet
been instilled in practice. After leaving school, the pupils take part in pro-
ductive labour in the same way as their parents or as other peasants who
had no opportunity of learning or who have a low level of education. That
is why parents permit their children to give up schooling. A number of
children who abandon schooling or do not study belong to the ethnic
minorities. We recognize that in contents of the family's education, the
essential is to educate productive labour and ethics. But the family carries
out education without any outside help from the society through the provi-
sion of books, magazines, and other documents.
The families in which the women live in the absence of the husbands
encounter more difficulties in their education of the children. The mother
is the head of the household and has no time to take care for her children
beyond her solicitude for their everyday livelihood. This is especially true
of the family of the women who live far from patrilineal and matrilineal
relatives. Those women who have been abandoned by their husband, have
divorced or have a child out of wedlock, although all their mother's senti-
ments are devoted to their child often transmit unintentionally to him/her
the aversion and resentment towards his/her father. It is difficult to blame
the mother for educating her child to express apathy, strong dislike and
sometimes hatred towards his or her father only because the burden to
nourish the family and a desolate life has pressed down on her shoulders.
 Nguyen Thi Khoa 235
At present, in our country there are over 9 million peasant households
(nearly 80 percent of the total population) which have an important role in
social development. Therefore the education of the young generation in
the countryside by the family has a very great significance. This not only
imposes the problem of the parents' responsibility but also requires the
co-ordination with the development of education at the school and in the
population.
In brief, at the places where we have studied, in the peasants' and
forestry workers' families there is a motion for a change. The equality and
democracy in the family, the emotional ties of parents with young families
and descendants, the concentration of efforts for productive labour to
increase income, etc., are clearly manifesting. However, the vestiges of
patriarchal relations still excited as evidenced in existed the beating of
wives or the irresponsible polygyny of the husband. The role of the
woman in the family livelihood discloses that it is very strenuous, espe-
cially in the family where the woman alone brings up the children. Her
melancholy spreads in the atmosphere of the family.
The changes of the families here are closely connected with the living
conditions of the population in a renovating country.

Notes
I. At 4 points composing of 2 agricultural co-operatives and 2 forestry teams,
we chose the forestry team and the agricultural co-operative on the same
administrative area of village.
2. The notion of 'family of origin' shows the parent families of both husband
and wife.
3. Population and Family magazine, no. 4-511991, p. 7.
19 Women Engaged in
Household Economy: The
Programme of Poverty
Alleviation in Areas
Outside Ho Chi Minh City
Le Thi Chieu Nghi

POSING THE PROBLEM

Women play a very important role in the national economy. They are
engaged in production, commerce, and in supplying necessary services to
society. Moreover, they contribute not only to development, but also to
perpetuating the race: no one can replace them. Ho Chi Minh City faces
the urgent problem of creating gainful employment to help women and
their families to escape, as quickly as possible, hunger and poverty.
This chapter addresses the problems of women engaging in household
economy activities and on the movement in Vietnam for 'women's mutual
assistance in household economy activities'. Now, the city, society, inter-
national organizations, and local and foreign good-hearted people are
making their support available. To create sources of capital and to make
loans of capital represents one of the many measures within the frame-
work of this important programme - to eradicate hunger and alleviate
poverty.
Ho Chi Minh City came into being in the 17th century and has a long
silhouette on a line going South-West to North-East. Occupying an area
of 2,056 km 2 and made up of 12 urban and six suburban districts, the City
has the highest population in the country: 3,924,435. The population in
the City's urban areas is 2.5 times higher than that of its suburban
districts.
In the population structure of areas outside the City, there are 1.15%
fewer women than men; however, the number of women of working age is
higher (women: 319,506; men: 291,350). The number of women over
working age (55 years or older) is double that of men in the same groups.

236
 Le Thi Chieu Nghi 237
In the countryside, even at advanced ages, the elderly still possess capaci-
ties for work and take part with younger relatives in household economy
activities.
Since 1986 the whole country has implemented radical changes, particu-
larly in economic activities, and for the first phase has achieved progress.
Nevertheless, at present, the country has not as yet emerged from crisis
and is still confronting harsh difficulties, which especially affect the poor
working people. Vietnam's strategy for socio-economic stability and
development until the year 2000 is 'to fight for eradicating hunger and
alleviating poverty, for solving unemployment, for ensuring basic needs,
for ameliorating the material, cultural and moral existence of the people'.
As part of that goal, in 1992 the programme of 'eradicating hunger and
alleviating poverty' was established for suburban districts. With the agree-
ment and support of the people, the programme aims to contribute toward
stabilizing and improving the life of the people, and reducing disparities
between rich and poor in society.
However, when viewed according to gender, women are the ones who
suffer most, as they are the principal victims in families of whatever
degree of destitution. As the poverty increases with families of lonely
women, of wives of disabled military men, and of mothers and wives of
dead warriors, women are, in the last analysis, the people in society who
are subjected to the most losses and hardships. Every day, without respite
in their lives, they have to drudge and to engage in all types of commercial
activities to help their husbands to maintain and look after their families.
They work for country and society. Research documents show that in
almost all countries women's earnings are spent on food and necessities,
while men's incomes are used to pay for less essential commodities. In
addition, a number of men squander money on useless things such as
alcohol, tea, and gambling. Therefore, employment to generate or augment
income for the benefit of Vietnamese women - and women in other devel-
oping countries - should receive attention especially for families with
women as the household head.
Poverty is a relative concept, depending upon specific conditions
varying in each country, area, locality and distinct time period. Poverty
can be understood as the incapacity to satisfy ordinary needs which many
other people in society are able to satisfy. In Vietnam each year, some
three million people starved due to natural disasters or to catastrophic cir-
cumstances, principally in coastline provinces of the Centre. National
calamities - yearly floods or typhoons - also cause starvation.
Poverty is common. There are poverty-stricken areas where there is no
such concept as a commodity economy, the people being ignorant of what
238 Women Engaged in Household Economy
a market is, and who, throughout the year, restrict themselves within their
village boundaries. In many remote areas far distant from the city, socio-
economic and cultural development lags far behind that of the city. The
result is a very desolate existence, both materially and morally, with
severe lack of food and employment.
In Vietnam indexes that evaluate poverty include: per capita yearly
income; the level of consumption; the number of people who are
employed or unemployed; the average rate of life expectancy; the number
of literates; and the standard of technical education. According to the
report of the steering committee of Ho Chi Minh City's programme of
'hunger eradication and poverty alleviation', the indices to categorize the
number of starving families are: the category of 'starving' that includes
families not having adequate food in six months; the category of 'poor'
that includes families with yearly average earnings of less than 50,000d
[$5U.S.] per person.
The rural areas outside Ho Chi Minh City (with a 15% proportion of
agricultural households) have up to 31 ,500 starving and poor families,
according to Ho Chi Minh City's steering committee of the programme
'Eradication of Hunger and Alleviation of Poverty'. Those families
account for 30% of the total of 102,160 agricultural households. Among
these poor households, approximately 9000 households permanently
require food subsidies, and 2000 households lack capital, land for cultiva-
tion, and have no means of production.
The village with the highest proportion of starving poor families is
Phuoc Loc (Nha Be) which registers up to 444 such families, which is
78% of the 569 households in the village. Village Nhon Due (Nha Be)
counts 1091 of its total of 6324 people categorized as starving poor
people. Only 836 hectares of land are under cultivation of a total area of
I 044 hectares of natural land. The village only cultivates one harvested
rice crop during the rainy season when there is sweet water. The culti-
vated area of this rural district is being reduced more and more every day.
Rice is planted as a monoculture; handicrafts do not develop; and the
rearing of ducks as a traditional occupation is declining because people
have no capital.
In the Can Gio suburban district, the City's poorest district, the propor-
tion of poor starving families accounts for 22.2% of the district's total
families. As their main occupation, the inhabitants go out to work for
wages, catching crabs and shellfish. The district has more than 2000 fami-
lies beset by starvation of which 1357 family households go hungry from
five to eight months in the year. A total of 350 families are in a state of
recurrent starvation and need subsidized food on a permanent basis; 500
 Le Thi Chieu Nghi 239
families in the category of those in the care of the State require subsidies
because of grinding poverty.
In the Thu Due suburban district, there are nearly 3000 poor starving
family households, of which 500 are targeted for permanent assistance.
The village, An Khanh, in the district is characteristic of those where exist
starvation and poverty. It lies on an area of only 174 ha of cultivated land
of a total of 514 ha of natural land; most of the remainder of the land con-
sists of ponds, lakes, ditches, and canals. Cultivated land only grows one
harvested rice crop per year. Peasants here are engaged in rice cultivation
for only six months. Rice cultivation does not bring enough to subsist,
while working for wages does not tum them into factory workers. When
work is available, they go to BaSon, Carie boat-repairing yards to scratch
rust off hulls, to repaint them or to be dockers or bricklayers. When no
work is to be found, they go out to catch crabs and shellfish along the
Saigon river and the village's canals and ditches. Or, if they have some
money, they buy barges or sampans to become boatmen.
Many factors cause the hunger and poverty that befall people in these
districts near Ho Chi Minh City. The common cause is undeveloped agri-
cultural production, which points to a widespread backward level of pro-
duction, a still marked autarchy character, mono-culture of rice as the
most prominent feature, and a very low average of cultivated land for each
person. Traditional trades have declined; handicrafts have not developed.
Industry's impact on agriculture remains insignificant. The application of
scientific methods is subject to many limitations. Peasants here do not
have enough work to do - resulting in low earnings - in an existence bur-
dened with scarcities. They find they have much free time, chiefly during
non-agricultural months.
Objective causes stem from families being underemployed (43% of
families in Can Gio lack work), lacking cultivated land, having too many
children, possessing of no capital; being unknowlegeable about work tech-
niques, having no skills or trades, and being ignorant about business. The
majority of peasants lack any means of production. Some areas are located
in severe natural conditions and in disadvantageous geographical situa-
tions such as Nha Be, Can Gio. In addition, other causes include: families
beset with misfortunes because many of their members are lazy, or they
indulge in narcotics, alcohol, gambling, or clandestine lotteries. Not a few
cases of starvation and poverty are due to riotous and unhealthy modes of
life of household heads, who keep their families in a permanent precarious
state. Hunger and poverty result from a number of causes; but, the single
outstanding cause is the one that reflects the contradiction. It raises
concern for each family and each area.
240 Women Engaged in Household Economy
How are we to achieve the objective to eradicate interminable starvation
and reduce the number of impoverished people? To this end, we require a
system of multi-faceted economic development with many occupations
and branches, and myriad commodities that will enable the development
of a market economy. We must absolutely take advantage of the strengths
of each area, of each branch and occupation, and of each crop season so as
to generate high incomes and attendant accumulations, and to control, to
the lowest, seasons and harvests assailed by natural calamities, and to min-
imize losses. The first measure consists of subsidizing capital to poor fam-
ilies in general and poor women in particular.

MEASURES FOR BORROWING CAPITAL FOR WOMEN TO

DEVELOP HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY

The city's programme of Hunger Eradication and Poverty Alleviation was

designed out of the difficult situation befalling people in suburban dis-
tricts. The resolution of the City's Party Congress Session 5 has laid down
the policy to continue to help solve some of the immediate difficulties con-
fronting the majority of the people: to create employment and to produce
commodities for society. The programme is enlisting the participation of
the whole society, according to the method of giving assistance so that
starving poor families may have capital, means of production, occupa-
tions, and an existence built by the results of their own labour.
From the realities of the 'mutual assistance in economic activities'
movement as well as of the policy on 'hunger starvation and of poverty
alleviation' with its principal measure of offering loans from various
sources, it can be said that positive effects have been had on the gradual
stabilization of the lives of poor people facing difficulties. Sources of
loans are still being mobilized, which is borne out by the organization of
'classes of love' for poor families' children, the granting of scholarships to
underprivileged students, the advocation to companies to sell to impover-
ished families seeds and breeder animals at low prices or to be paid at
deferred terms. The state allots cultivated land to landless families, or
assists those who wish to settle in new economic zones. Many families of
the category of families in the care of the state are donated houses of
'national recognition' and savings books. Almost all poor families, fami-
lies of lonely women, and those whose heads are women, can borrow
capital to develop household economy projects to the value of from
100,000 dong to one million dong for each household. The fund to eradi-
cate hunger and to alleviate poverty has received 2416 billion dong and
 Le Thi Chieu Nghi 241
invested 2116 billion dong for the benefit of 4105 household families in
six of the city's suburban districts.

ROLE OF WOMEN IN HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY

Women, at present, shoulder the duties of management and domestic work

in rural families. It is principally the labour of women that creates up to
67% of earnings from household economy. Household economy activities
usually do not require continuity in time, are less arduous, less exacting,
less dependent on and influenced by natural conditions, and are not of a
precise, intertwined nature. In household economy activities, the women
can easily combine the labour of different age groups. In mainly family
labour, the mothers especially, are good examples for children to gain con-
sciousness about work when they are still very young.
However, women always suffer losses because they have to work in
household economy activities and bring up children at the same time.
They are bedevilled by a lower standard of knowledge than that of men,
and are deprived of opportunities for education and social intercourse.
They must overcome these great difficulties if they are to fulfil well their
functions as managers of household economy. At present, developing it
demands that household heads in general and women in particular rise to
settle the demands of commodity production and family life. Having
capital to develop household economy gradually will uplift rural women to
become worthy of their status and responsibilities in family and society.
Household economy plays an important role in the national economic
system and in the life of each family. It can be viewed as a type of overall
economic activity using capital and labour at the family level with the
purpose of increasing the families' incomes. In the process of developing a
·commodity economy, modern household economy has succeeded in com-
bining the traditional nature and factors of the rural household economy,
while simultaneously making new progress in amount of production and in
overall economic activities. Although household economy represents only
the first step, it has fostered the effect of 'self-determination' in produc-
tion, and exploited efficiently the means of production, capital, and labour
under the family's management. In Vietnam, household economy is in
large measure at the second stage of the world's history of evolution of
household economies. The first stage is autarchy; the second stage is
small-scale commodity production; and the third is large-scale and spe-
cialized commodity production. In some areas, household economy has
transformed into the second stage with the use of machinery, electricity,
242 Women Engaged in Household Economy
and modern techniques. Units of household economy, family factories and
family farms are all being formed. Since the implementation of Resolution
10 in the countryside, the household economy has developed more and
more.
At present, the household economy in Vietnam is producing 30% of the
vegetables, meat, fish, eggs, from 15 to 20% of the food fund, and a part of
consumer and export goods. It is bringing to peasants 60% of their earn-
ings and, to cadres and functionaries, more than 10% of theirs. It also is a
source to guarantee the daily food needs for each member of the family.

MEASURES FOR WOMEN'S PARTICIPATION IN HO CHI MINH

CITY'S PROGRAMME OF HUNGER AND POVERTY
ALLEVIATION

The principal measure to create employment and to increase income is to

offer loans for women and their families to develop household economy or
to engage in economic activities of all kinds. For poor people, the initial
obstacle is having capital to start a business. Capital makes it possible to
acquire the means and tools in whatever line of activity - cultivation,
animal breeding, sea fishing, handicrafts, or services. Because they have
no capital, a good number of peasants at Can Gio and Nha Be find them-
selves under the obligation to sell 'their right of land use' over their allot-
ted plots and to become empty-handed, and therefore return to the
necessity of going out to work for wages, catching crabs and shellfish as
before. Women in suburban districts work hard and assiduously, and are
proficient in many traditional occupations such as animal breeding, culti-
vation and handicrafts. But for Jack of capital and means of production,
many families cannot escape from poverty.
For the last two years, under the leadership of the Central Women's
Association and that of Ho Chi Minh City, women in the outer areas of the
city have carried out the movement 'of mutual assistance in economic
activities'. They help one another with projects from new seeds and animal
breeders to experiences in production. Numerous families have started
business with a little capital loaned by the Women's Associations of the
city or districts. The programme seems to have given added strength to
poor women's endeavours to develop household economy. They are given
loans at a low rate of interest (2% per month), so they are not victims of
usury and can engage in production. All have concrete goals and expecta-
tions, compatible with family circumstances and characteristics of local
trades and occupations, and make plans to pay back the loans when due.
 Le Thi Chieu Nghi 243
From August 1992 loans offered out of this programme will not charge
interest. Almost all peasants have done well in economic activities and
have paid back the loans.

V.A.C MODEL AND MULTI-BRANCH BUSINESS

Developing diversified and multi-branched household economy activities

according to the VIAJC (garden/pond/sty) model of business can use fully
the family's free time and can mobilize all available labour. Families that
have V (garden) and C (sty) will develop gardening, animal and fowl
rearing. Families who dispose of a sty devote themselves to animal breed-
ing combined with exercising secondary occupations. Reality has shown
that of the three links in the VAC chain, V and C yield higher earnings. At
the Binh Chanh district, the model for household economy is animal
breeding and cultivation. After three years of promotion for rural help to
develop household economy, poverty in the district has been alleviated to
an appreciable extent. In 1988, from a rural district where some 1200
households had to be subsidized in food, it now counts only 500 house-
holds of this category.
Making investments to develop the VAC model is inexpensive, but it
yields high economic returns. Reality has proven that economic returns
could be much higher if new technical and technological measures are
applied. Now seeds and animal breeders are introduced into each family
business. Nevertheless, to be suitable, each family must adapt the model to
the characteristics of each area and the needs of the market.
At present, a good number of impoverished families in these districts
are able to obtain loans of capital, and women have started keeping pigs,
ducks, chicken, quails, shrimps, crabs, or planting legumes and vegeta-
bles, mushrooms, short-term trees like peanuts, cashew. Utilizing the
capital, they manufacture traditional handicraft products such as bamboo-
baskets, wicker-bags, winnowing baskets or rice papers for export, or
unrefined processed foodstuffs and vegetables. At the district Cu Chi,
nearly 200 family households breed cows and more than 300 households
manufacture rice paper to earn stable incomes. Traditional occupations
like duck breeding at Nha Be, pig rearing at Hoc Mon, rice paper manu-
facturing at Cu Chi, and bamboo basket weaving at Thu Due are being
revived.
Until now, the household economy in these districts has been develop-
ing in multiple and diversified forms. However, it is still on a small-scale
consisting of cultivation, animal breeding, handicraft production or
244 Women Engaged in Household Economy
commerce and service. Eventually, when production is brought up to a
larger scale, management and measures should be devised for new seeds,
fertilizers, and raw materials and to find markets for finished goods at rela-
tively stable prices. It is principally due to this need that a number of fami-
lies refuse to accept loans. Nevertheless, the size and structure of the
household economy are moreover based on general conditions of each
area and each locality. No matter what, conditions should be created for
the reduction of women's time spent on domestic work in order to ensure
women time for other work, but also time for rest, and possibilities to
increase their cultural and technical standards.
The great role of women's participation in the programme of hunger
eradication and poverty alleviation and in the campaign for mutual assist-
ance to develop the household economy cannot be denied. Great expecta-
tions exist for the possibility of mobilizing many sources of capital to
finance women's activities in the household economy. Nevertheless, man-
aging the sources of capital, using it to materialize results in production,
improving women's standard of life, calling capital back and circulating it
to create profits are no simple matters.
According to a report made public by City authorities, over the past
year and as a result of efforts in many aspects, this programme has
financed capital to more than 22,500 households reaching amounts valued
at 1.2 billion dong, entrusted land for cultivation to 85 households, and
found employment for 2000 people. More than 30,000 helping hands in
the family also have been given provisional jobs. The City's Women
Association has made available to 53,444 poor women capital to the value
of 2.6 billion dong to engage in household economic activities. The
Steering Committee of the programme has, on its part, aided 1408 poor
women with 600 million to be used in production, animal breeding, and
small trading.
Almost all underprivileged families can borrow capital to organize
production to make a living, principally in the development of the house-
hold economy. A number of impoverished families have achieved a stable
existence, thus putting an end to their subsisting in grinding poverty all
year. A number of people- even inveterate drunkards or women who have
gone wayward -have recovered family stability and happiness. They have
regained social esteem, thanks to assistance and training facilities.
In years to come, the household economy irr rural, as well as in urban
areas, will help to create employment for the working people in general
and women in particular. It will develop strongly and result in high
efficiency if there is close co-ordination and support from the state system
of business in technical services, seeds, raw materials and markets of con-
 Le Thi Chieu Nghi 245

sumption. Developing household economy is the main way to help peas-

ants in outlying districts to build a life of relative plenty and of security.
And, women can rise up to become the real masters of the countryside, of
their families, and of their own lives.

PROPOSALS

The city must develop rational policies to give direction to the develop-
ment of the household economy in activities which are compatible with
each urban centre and rural area, and by linking this development closely
with the ecosystem:

• To give strong impetus to making investments in developing occu-

pations, chiefly traditional trades and services in suburban districts.
• To establish specialized banks to make loans at low rates of interest
exclusively to impoverished families for the purpose of developing
household economy - priorities to be given to families in the care of
the State, to those having lonely or single women which bear risks.
• To create extensive domestic and foreign markets to usher house-
hold economy to a market economy so as to reduce polarization
between rich and poor in the countryside.

At specific localities, clubs of production and business should be orga-

nized for women to exchange and learn experiences. Courses on agricul-
tural extension, and handicrafts should be held; female cadres should be
trained and taught business management so that they may assume the role
of family heads responsible for running their businesses with good results,
and for co-operating naturally with their husbands to manage their families
with intelligence and on the footing of equality.
20 Rural Women: Agriculture
and the Environment in
Vietnam
Carolyn Sachs

Rural Vietnamese women's work and lives are intricately tied to agricul-
tural systems and the natural environment. Current shifts towards agricul-
tural modernization are likely to have major impacts on rural women's
lives because the majority of their labour involves producing food for the
subsistence needs of their family and cash crops for income. In addition to
agricultural modernization, changes and deterioration of the natural envir-
onment also severely effect rural women's lives. Due to their responsibil-
ity for agricultural production, other subsistence and income earning
activities. and reproductive activities including household maintenance
and family care, environmental problems in rural areas fall most heavily
on the shoulders of rural women.
Analysis of the specific context of Vietnamese women's lives related to
agriculture, forests, and health concerns relies on writings on Vietnamese
rural life, discussions during my visit to Vietnam, and observations. In
order to understand Vietnamese rural women's situation, and the possible
impacts of modernization and increased industrialization on rural women,
the situation of rural women in other regions of Asia highlights problems
and strategies and raises questions about possible implications for rural
Vietnamese women. Around the globe, rural women are beginning to
organize for increased recognition of their work, more power in decision-
making, and an end to environmental degradation.

AGRICULTURE

For the majority of Vietnamese rural women, agriculture constitutes their

principal activity. In the South, in the Mekong Delta, 67 percent of women
reported agriculture as their principal occupation and another 26 percent
claimed agriculture as their secondary occupation (Vinh, 1993). Recent
studies of the entire country find that women contribute 72.9 percent of the

246
 Carolyn Sachs 247
labour in silviculture and agriculture. Particularly important is women's
work in rice, Vietnam's major food staple and export crop. Men and
women co-operate in rice production, but women carry the heaviest work-
load in most phases of agricultural production (Thi, 1993). A recent study
documents women's extensive contribution in the rice paddies especially
in transplanting and weeding. In planting, 82.5 percent of people reported
that women do much more than men; in care of plants, 55 percent reported
that wives do more than husbands, 35.1 percent report that husband and
wives to the same amount and 11.1 percent report that husbands do more
than wives (Tien, 1992). Much of women's work in rice production is
arduous and performed in knee-deep water. After harvesting, much of the
work in processing and drying rice is almost exclusively women's respons-
ibility. Due to the importance of agricultural labour in rural women's
lives, strategies of agricultural development will have enormous implica-
tions for the lives of rural women. But there are specific issues and con-
cerns related to the introduction of new technologies; access to land,
capital and credit; and rural households.

Introduction of New Technologies

Efforts to improve agricultural production in Vietnam are focusing on

increasing rice yields through the adoption of new seeds, fertilizer and
pesticides. A recent World Bank (1990) report states that increased use of
fertilizer and wider use of high-yielding varieties are likely to be the most
important sources of increases in rice production. Improved agricultural
extension services represent the major initiative suggested by the World
Bank in the move to help farmers adopt new seed varieties and techniques
of production. In an effort to modernize agricultural production, Vietnam
seems to be following the green revolution path to increasing rice produc-
tion. Green revolution technologies in rice production include reliance on
new high-yielding seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides. Experiences with green
revolution rice production technologies in other Asian countries have led
to mixed results. First, in many instances, production increases have come
at the expense of equitable distribution of benefits. Wealthier farmers
benefit from the new production technologies, while in many cases poorer
farmers remain unable to afford the new seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides:
In other cases, poor farmers have fallen into persistent debt in their
attempts to purchase the new inputs. Second, the new technologies change
the organization of labour. As large farmers benefit, production becomes
more concentrated with more labour performed by hired agricultural
workers. In rice production, women comprise the majority of hired
248 Rural Women: Agriculture and the Environment
workers who perform transplanting and weeding. Thus, for many poorer
rural women, these new technologies simultaneously increased their work-
loads but also provided them with income earning opportunities. Third,
green revolution technologies are resource intensive and rely heavily on
the use of fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides. Toxic chemical use in
agriculture increase environmental and health problems. Women, who
work long hours in transplanting and weeding in the paddies, exhibit high
susceptibility to these chemicals. Also, the cost of agricultural chemicals
often remains beyond the reach of poor farmers.
In most regions of the world, green revolution technologies have usually
been transferred to men through credit schemes that enable them to pur-
chase the new seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. Information about new
technologies are typically provided by agricultural extension services that
target men farmers. In such instances, women's knowledge about seeds,
plants, and production techniques appears irrelevant, backward, and in need
of being replaced with scientific knowledge. Although women historically
save and store seeds, their knowledge and seed stores have long been disre-
garded by plant geneticists and seed collectors. Plant geneticists breed rice
with little consideration for women's knowledge and appreciation of diver-
sity. As Lipton (1989) points out, there are differences in what plant breed-
ers emphasize and what poor farmers need. Poor farmers, many of whom
are women, select seeds based on their cross-crop effects, stability, multiple
uses, and maturation dates whereas plant breeders emphasize quantity of
grain. Breeders select high-yielding varieties of rice primarily for their
grain yield, while ignoring many of the other qualities of rice varieties such
as taste, nutrition, and biomass availability. For small producers in many
regions of Asia, rice is not simply used as a grain, but also for straw.
Women use rice straw for thatching, mat making, fodder for livestock, and
use rice husks for fuel. Higher yielding varieties, selected to reduce
lodging, are shorter and provide less straw. The grain/straw ratio for the
improved varieties is .45 : .55 compared to .30 : 70
. for traditional varieties.
International researchers overlook the value of non-grain products such as
straw and husks, which are not world trade commodities.
Janice Jiggins (1986) comments that it has been extremely difficult to
convince scientists at the international research centers that women
possess skills, knowledge, and experience with seeds that is not replicated
by men. For example, the Kpelle women rice growers in Liberia use and
recognize 100 different varieties of rice. In describing rice varieties,

women used categories which formed a clear and systematic framework

for describing rice. They mentioned such features as husk and seed
 Carolyn Sachs 249
colour, length of hair at the tip of the rice, size of the grain, ease with
which the husk can be removed, length of time required to cook, and
suitability to different types of soil and terrain. They knew their busi-
ness (as quoted in Jiggins, 1986, p. 18).

Similarly, among the Ifugao in Northern Luzon in the Philippines, women

select rice seed and are more knowledgeable than local men. Women con-
sider diversity of uses and properties of plants as well as increasing grain
yields. However, their concerns fall by the wayside as the seed industry
and research programmes continue to favour genetic uniformity and look
to biotechnology as the strategy for achieving diversity.
In Vietnam there is recognition of the major role that women play in
rice production and concern that women be included as beneficiaries of the
new technologies. Evidence suggests that women are highly receptive to
new techniques. During the past five years, 80 percent of women in the
Mekong Delta region have adopted at least one new technique such as
crop rotation, improved use of manure, or new seeds (Vinh, 1993). Efforts
to develop agricultural extension services and training in the countryside
must focus on women as well as men. Extension efforts in many regions
of the world have erroneously been directed only towards men, when
women were the actual cultivators. Also, experiences from other countries
reveal that agricultural extension efforts that promote home economics for
women and agriculture for men, based on the erroneous assumption that
women's only role is in the domestic realm, are wrought with problems.
Clearly, programmes for women must recognize their multiple roles in
agriculture, non-agriculture, and domestic activities.
New agricultural techniques can benefit Vietnamese agriculture, but
caution should be exercised in the wholesale adoption of green revolution
technologies such as new varieties, fertilizers, and pesticides. The value of
women's and men's knowledge concerning local agricultural and ecologi-
cal conditions should not be dismissed in the rush to move towards more
productive agriculture. Chemical-intensive technologies, while increasing
production, are expensive and pose environmental and health risks. In
Vietnam health officials express concern for women's health as a result of
exposure to toxic pesticides and herbicides in the rice paddies. Both
women and men, wearing minimal protective clothing, spray fields with
backpack sprayers. Also, contamination of water sources by fertilizers and
pesticides is likely to become an increasing problem as chemical use
expands. Adoption of green revolution approaches bring both benefits and
problems. Agriculture development strategies that incorporate both tradi-
tional knowledge and scientific knowledge may be more appropriate than
250 Rural Women: Agriculture and the Environment
wholesale adoption of green revolution approaches to agriculture.
Strategies of agricultural development for poor families may wisely focus
on multiple enterprises rather than relying solely on rice production. Many
poor rural families raise gardens, have ponds, and raise small livestock.
For example, in the suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City, women raise pigs,
chickens, ducks, mushrooms, peanuts, jujubes, and cashews for the
market. Also, women's traditional activities of raising pigs, ducks, and
processing rice flour papers are expanding tremendously (Nghi, 1993).
Thus, agriculture development for women must encompass a wide array of
activities rather than focusing solely on rice production.

Access to Land, Capital and Credit

In the move towards a market economy, access to land, credit, and capital
become important for women's contribution to agriculture. Access to land
for women in most regions of the world comes not from ownership, but
from use rights granted by their husbands or other male family members.
In the transition towards a free market economy, Vietnam has lengthened
and strengthened land tenure rights for households and decentralized pro-
duction and marketing decisions to the household level. Limited informa-
tion is available on how women have fared in the move towards
decentralizing land tenure. In discussions with people in a village council
in the Mekong Delta, it seemed that the decentralization of production
decisions to farm households and distribution of land to farmers involves
returning state-controlled land to the previous owners. Thus, in such
scenarios, men will probably be the primary recipients of land rights
unless specific policies assure women's access to land. Given the
increasing number of women in female-headed households, specific
policies that enable women to have access to land on which they can make
the key production and marketing decisions is crucial.
Another concern for women in agriculture is access to credit. In many
regions of the world, women in farming have limited access to capital and
credit. Lack of credit limits women's capacity to innovate and expand
their agricultural enterprises. The Vietnam Bank of Agriculture began
lending money to peasant households in 1991, a change from previous
policies of lending to state-owned businesses and co-operatives. Anh
(1992) describes how the policies of the Bank of Agriculture have not ad-
equately considered women's needs and suggests solutions for addressing
the different credit needs of men and women. Typically loans are desig-
nated with the head of household as the legal borrower. As Anh points
out, in reality, many of the rural households are not comprised of nuclear
 Carolyn Sachs 251
families, but rather in many cases no husband is present or the husband is
absent for long periods of time. Thus, women in these households must
either assume the role of the official borrower or find themselves unable to
receive loans because their husbands remain the formal head of the house-
hold. Women and men have different abilities to access information about
credit, use formal borrowing procedures, and use their capital. In making
policies concerning loans to peasant households, Anh (1992) suggests col-
lecting ideas from peasant women concerning their credit needs and ideas
for social organizations that may be appropriate for meeting their credit
needs. Several other efforts in Asia, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and
the Working Women's Forum in India, have been successful in providing
creative credit programs to women and may provide insights for
Vietnamese efforts.

Women's Position in Rural Households

The rural household is the context in which women's work and daily lives
occurs. Typically, peasant or family farms are based on patriarchal control
over women's lives. Fathers exercise control over their sons and daugh-
ters, and husbands exercise control over their wives. In patriarchal farm
households, young women have the least amount of control over their
daily activities and decisions. In his study of peasant households in the
Mekong Delta, Vinh (1993) asks if there is a democratization of power in
the countryside and a move away from paternalism. He finds that the role
of the father continues to be strong and young female peasants have
almost no say in the farm activities.
In many regions of the world, farm women complain about their lack of
recognition and power in rural households. In the past twenty years, since
the publication of Ester Boserup's (1970) book, Women in Economic
Development, there has been increasing recognition of the important role
that women play in agriculture throughout the world and their specific role
in many regions. Despite this recognition, changing power relations in
farm households has been excruciatingly difficult and a struggle often
carried out by individual negotiations between women and men in their
households. But for many women, heavy workloads and limited power
seem less acceptable. In the face of intransigent power relations, many
young farm women throughout the world find that their only avenue. for
escaping patriarchal authority is to leave rural areas. For example, recent
studies in Japan, Yugoslavia, and Australia report that young women's
refusal to marry farmers causes major problems in the agricultural sector.
Farm women in these regions are calling for the demise of patriarchal
252 Rural Women: Agriculture and the Environment
authority. In parts of Asia young rural women escape from patriarchal
authority in the home only to find themselves under other types of male
domination in urban areas. Young rural women who migrate to urban
areas often work in low~paying, exploitative jobs in factories, as street
vendors in the informal economy, or as prostitutes. Thus, in order to
provide equitable opportunities for rural women as well as to continue to
improve agriculture and rural life in Vietnam, democratization of power in
families in the countryside will be an essential step.

FORESTS

Deforestation

During the Vietnam-American war huge tracts of Vietnam's forests were

devastated. The U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries conducted massive
defoliation attacks spraying 72 million litres of herbicides over 1.7 million
hectares in South Vietnam (Kempf, 1988). Between 1961 and 1971
'Operation Ranch Hand', with the motto 'We Prevent Forests', sprayed
40 million Iitres of Agent Orange, 20 million litres of Agent White and
8 million litres of Agent Blue over 35 percent of cropland, forests, and
woods in southern Vietnam (Kempf, 1988). Vietnamese scientists estimate
that 2.2 million hectares of forest and farm land were destroyed as a result
of bombing, mechanized land clearing, napalming and defoliation. In addi-
tion another 5.6 million hectares of upland forest were damaged in the
south and numerous species of indigenous tropical trees and plants were
destroyed as well as the elephants, tigers, bears, deer and other animals
that populated the forest. The aftermath of war has brought further
destruction of Vietnam's forests. Due to war~time devastation, extensive
post-war lumbering operations were initiated to rebuild 10 million homes,
schools, hospitals, road and irrigation systems. In addition, hardwoods are
being harvested for timber for export to meet Vietnam's drastic problem
of lack of foreign exchange. Thus, more forest has been lost since 1975
than during the AmericanNietnam war; Vietnam loses an average of
200,000 hectares of forest each year. Approximately 40 percent of the
country is considered wasteland (Kempf, 1988). Problems associated with
the destruction of the world's forests, especially tropical rainforests, have
gained world wide attention in the 1990s. Exploitation of tropical forests
by Northern people has a long history beginning with colonialism and
continuing under different auspices. Currently destruction and harvesting
of much of the remaining world's forests continues apace by multinational
 Carolyn Sachs 253
corporations, financial institutions, and national governments in their
attempts to achieve profits or foreign exchange through timber sales and
expansion of agricultural production. In addition to economic exploitation
of forests, military interests and activities have also been responsible for
the destruction of forest ecosystems.
Advocates of saving the forests point to the vast biological diversity in
rainforests and appeal to biodiversity as a major reason for preserving
forests. Also, the environmental movement has brought to light the extent
of human dependence on forests for their survival at both global and local
levels. Their organizing strategies focus on convincing Northern people
that their well-being depends on the existence of tropical forests as well as
the importance of preserving tribal cultures. Recognition of the connection
between people and forests is not news to rural people in many regions of
the world who have long relied on plants and animals of the forest for
food, housing, clothing, and fuel. In many areas of Asia rural women
assume the major responsibility for collection of firewood and other plant
materials for the forest. These rural women and other indigenous people
are often been blamed for the destruction of forests, when in fact many
rural women acted as conservers of the forest.
The Chipko movement in India achieved worldwide notoriety as an
exemplar of women's grassroots efforts to protect the forest from com-
mercial foresters. Vandana Shiva (1988) tells the story of the Chipko
movement and emphasizes women's leadership and grassroots participa-
tion in these efforts. Chipko means literally 'hugging' and the poem that
came to represent the movement, written by the male activist Ghansyam
Raturi, was:

Embrace our trees

Save them from being felled
The property of our hills
Save it from being looted.

During the 1960s, women began resisting commercial logging in Indian

forests and by the 1970s there was widespread protest in India concerning
local people's right to use forest products. Deforestation increased
women's workload and reduced their abilities to feed their families as
Hima Devi explained at protests against forest auctions:

My sisters are busy in harvesting the kharif crop. They are busy in win-
nowing. I have come to you with their message. Stop cutting trees.
There are no trees even for birds to perch on. Birds flock to our crops
254 Rural Women: Agriculture and the Environment
and eat them. What will we eat? The firewood is disappearing: how will
we cook? (as quoted in Shiva, 1988, p. 75).

In 1977 Chipko activists successfully protected the forests from com-

mercial loggers through embracing trees in Garhwal, Adwani, Amersar,
Chanchnidhar, Dungari, Paintoi and Badiyaharh. Shiva emphasizes that
this movement spread through various regions of India largely through the
decentred leadership of local women. She points out that the centrality of
women in this movement has often been overlooked because several men
have emerged as the spokesmen for Chipko. From her perspective, Chipko
became both an ecological and feminist movement in 1977 when the poli-
tics shifted. Prior to that time, resistance efforts were directed at outside
forest contractors, but when local men began obtaining contracts for
logging, local women protested. Shiva notes 'it did not matter to them
whether the forest was destroyed by outsiders or their own men' (1988,
p. 76).
In this case, community interests fragment by gender. Local men, hired
to cut trees, receive benefits in the form of wages. By contrast, for women,
the felling of trees means they must walk further to obtain firewood.
Therefore, Shiva argues that women see forest conservation as in their
interest. Based on their daily activities, they recognize the diverse uses of
the forest and do not view the forest solely as timber to be harvested.
In Asia, protests against forestry programmes have been most pro-
nounced in India. Tribals, women, and hill people in India have contested
social forestry programmes of the Indian government and the World Bank.
These groups realized that these social forestry programmes promote
monoculture stands of fast growing trees such as eucalyptus and teak to
meet the demand~ of a market economy rather than to provide local people
with biomass, fodder, oil, medicine, and housing- needs they have previ-
ously met through their forests. As a result, people involved in a grassroots
movement in Karnataka in 1983 pulled out eucalyptus saplings and
replaced them with tamarind and mango trees and tribals in Jharkhand in
1980 pulled out teak saplings and replaced them with saal trees. Other
organized efforts by rural Asian women to protect forests or plant trees
have occurred in Nepal and Korea (Dankelman and Davidson, 1988).
Women's efforts are unlikely to substantially reverse the trends towards
deforestation, but they can begin to address issues of injustice and inequal-
ity and provide grassroots and local support for reforestation (Dankelman
and Davidson, 1988). Lessening deforestation could decrease women's
workload, but reforestation programmes must be designed to provide
women access to trees.
 Carolyn Sachs 255
Reforestation

In Vietnam, major reforestation efforts have been implemented by the

Vietnamese government. Wartime destruction of forests was severe; the
massive use of defoliants was fairly successful in 'preventing forests'.
Efforts to replant indigenous trees in defoliated areas initially met with
failure, but after I 0 years of trial plantings, several indigenous species sur-
vived under the cover of eucalyptus and acacia on 300 hectares. Tree
replanting remains a high priority of the Vietnamese government despite
their major economic crisis. For example, in 1988, 500 million trees were
planted on 160,000 hectares with plans to continue massive tree replanting
every year. Women and school children have been enlisted as the primary
tree replanters,
Based on lessons from other regions in Asia, Vietnamese women would
benefit from asking what types of reforestation efforts should be imple-
mented, who will do the work and who will receive the benefits. In terms of
assessing what types of reforestation efforts should be implemented, gender
differences in use of forest products should be understood. Women collect-
ing firewood are less interested in felling trees and more interested in using
dead branches and dry limbs that will burn easily. Also, women use the
forest for collecting food for their families, fodder for their livestock, and
other items such as manure, bamboo, medicinal herbs, materials for making
shelter or various types of household goods, honey, spices, and oils. The
contribution of wild foods collected from the forest to the diets of rural
people has often been overlooked. The types of trees and other plant species
that are most useful to women have seldom been the species planted during
reforestation efforts. Therefore, Vietnamese reforestation policies would
benefit from planting indigenous species in addition to timber trees or fast
growing eucalyptus. Such efforts will increase ecosystem diversity as well
as provide multiple use products for both men and women.
In addressing the issues of who will provide the labour and who will
receive the benefits, experiences of other countries may also be instructive.
Many reforestation efforts have relied on women's volunteer labour to do
the planting. Such programmes have tended to undervalue women's labour
and failed to understand the heavy work burdens already shouldered by
rural women. Thus, women are expected to plant trees for the good of
their countries and communities with little compensation. In several coun-
tries, women's enthusiasm for tree planting waned as they became aware
of the lack of benefits they would obtain from planting trees. Restructuring
of projects so that women had access to the trees after they were planted
led to marked improvements in reforestation efforts.
256 Rural Women: Agriculture and the Environment
In addition to women's role in reforestation efforts, Vietnamese women
have been the predominant workers in state forestry production teams. The
problems and concerns of these women are quite different from women
living in agricultural households. Women who work in the forest often
migrate from distant provinces to work in predominantly female produc-
tion teams in isolated areas. Many of these workers are young women who
are interested in having children, but have little prospect of finding hus-
bands in these isolated regions. The proportion of women with children
without husbands is especially high among these forestry workers reach-
ing 27.6 percent in the forestry team in Minh Dan (Le Thi, 1993). Given
the problems that women face having children without husbands, women
in the forestry production teams are requesting information about artificial
insemination. These unmarried women are not living in patriarchal family
households, but they face social stigma for having children outside mar-
riage. Thus, although these women contribute substantially to the
Vietnamese economy, their reproductive and family needs in these iso-
lated environments have not been adequately met.

TOXIC CHEMICALS AND HEALTH CONCERNS

Concerns with the health effects of toxic chemicals has fostered a major
grassroots environmental movement in the U.S. and other regions of the
world. Many of these movements have been organized by one or a handful
of women working in their local neighbourhoods or communities. The
cumulative effects of these efforts has raised widespread awareness of the
presence of toxics in many localities, prevented unacceptable disposal of
toxic wastes, and placed intense pressure on chemical and other industries
to reduce the use of toxics in their production processes. However, many
communities are facing the situation of how to live and what to do with
the toxic chemicals and wastes that already exist in their localities. Often,
military activities constitute a major source of environmental destruction
and human health problems. In South Vietnam, the severe impact of mili-
tary activities is readily apparent as evidenced by the persistence of chemi-
cals in the environment. For example, a primary defoliant used during the
war, Agent Orange, contains a highly toxic dioxin that continues to persist
in soil, food, and animal tissue in Southern Vietnam.
The persistence of toxic chemicals poses particular problems for women
both in terms of their own health and in their care of their families. Studies
in Vietnam found high levels of toxics in human breast milk and high inci-
dence of cancer in women. Women's reproductive roles make them par-
 Carolyn Sachs 257
ticularly vulnerable to toxins in the environment. In addition to their own
health problems, women are responsible for the care of children and the
sick who are victims of illness from toxic chemicals.
Rural women collect water for their families for drinking, personal
hygiene, sanitation, farm, and other household needs. Women often have
the knowledge of the location, quality, and reliability of various water
sources (Rodda, 1991). With degradation and toxicity of water supplies,
women's workload expands as they must often walk longer and further to
collect safe water. Also, women's health is at risk from hygiene and toxic
problems with water. About 80 percent of diseases affecting rural women
are caused by environmental factors, especially lack of safe, clean water
(Thoa, 1993). High rates of gynecological disease exist in jute and rush
growing areas where women stand deep in water to cultivate rush. Also in
the Mekong Delta problems with the water supply have contributed to
high levels of vaginitis and exocervitis. Approximately 40 to 60 percent of
women in the Mekong Delta have vaginitis and exocervitis. Health ser-
vices, the Women's Union, and local governments have attempted to treat
these women, but the problem can only be resolved through improved
water supplies (Phuong, 1993). Health care for rural women must address
women in the growing private sector as well as those in the state sector.
The Vietnamese government has recognized the health effects of toxi~
chemicals sprayed during war time and makes efforts to provide health
care to people in these areas. In order to insure that women's health care
needs are met, facilities are needed that provide health care for rural
women. In many regions of the world, rural women's particular health
care needs have not been adequately met. Due to their low status in house-
holds, they are the most likely members of the family to be undernour-
ished and overworked. Travelling to health care clinics is time intensive
for women who have little free time and limited access to transportation.
Thus, creative strategies for providing health care for rural women are
drastically needed.

CONCLUSION

Changes in agriculture and environmental conditions in Vietnam effects

rural women's lives. At times, women are victims of agricultural develop-
ment efforts and environmental degradation and at other times they are
repositories of knowledge and creative strategies concerning human rela-
tion to the environment. Efforts to modernize agriculture should consider
the impacts of new technologies, extension programmes, credit, and land
258 Rural Women: Agriculture and the Environment
distribution on rural women's work, access to resources, and control over
resources.
Rural women who have been primary cultivators and responsible for
collecting fuel and fodder are likely to be severely effected by environ-
mental deterioration and are also likely to acquire knowledge of processes
of natural regeneration (Agarwal, 1992). Therefore, in the transition to a
market economy, rural women's experiential understanding and knowl-
edge might provide special perspectives for agricultural development and
environmental regeneration that would set the stage for innovative and
creative strategies for development.

References

Agarwal, Bina (1992), 'The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from
India', Feminist Studies 18(1), pp. 119-158.
Anh, Tran Thi Van (1992), 'The Direct Loan of Capital from the Bank to Develop
Production and Gender Equality', Social Sciences 4, pp. 25-37.
Boserup, Ester (1970), Women and Economic Development, New York:
St. Martin's Press.
Dankelman, Irene and Joan Davidson (1988), Women and Environment in the
Third World, London: Earthscan Publications.
Jiggins, Janice ( 1986), Gender-Related Impacts and the Work of the International
Agricultural Research Centers, Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.
Kempf, Elizabeth (1988), 'The Re-Greening of Vietnam', New Scientist, June 23,
pp. 53-57.
Lipton, Michael (1989), New Seeds Poor People, London: Unwin Hyman.
Nghi, Le Thi Chieu (1993), 'The Making of Household Economy by Women
Within the Program Against Hunger and Poverty in the Suburbs of Ho Chi Minh
City', paper presented at Family and the Condition of Women in Society,
Institute of Social Sciences, Ho Chi Minh City, January.
Phuong, Nguyen Thi Ngoc (1993), 'Vietnam: Socioeconomic Development and
Women's Role', paper presented at Family and the Condition of Women in
Society, Institute of Social Sciences, Ho Chi Minh City, January.
Rodda, Annabel (1991), Women and the Environment, London: Zed Books.
Sachs, Carolyn (1992), 'Reconsidering Diversity in Agriculture and Food Systems:
An Ecofeminist Approach', Agriculture and Human Values 9(3), pp. 4-10.
Shiva, Vandana (1988), Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development,
London: Zed Books.
Thi, Le (1993), 'Women, Marriage, Family and Sex Equality', paper presented at
Family and the Condition of Women in Society, Institute of Social Sciences,
Ho Chi Minh City, January.
Thoa, Duong (1992), 'On the Present Situation of Vietnamese Women's Living
and Working Conditions and Orientations for their Improvement', Social
Sciences 4, pp. 42-52.
 Carolyn Sachs 259
Tien, Ha Thi Phuong (1992), 'On the Problem of Female Labourer's Health
Protection', Social Sciences 4, pp. 51-64.
Vinh, Nguyen Quang (1993), 'Women and Institutional Changes in a Developing
Rural Area', paper presented at Family and the Condition of Women in Society,
Institute of Social Sciences, Ho Chi Minh City, January.
World Bank (1990), Vietnam Stabilization and Structural Reforms, Washington,
D.C.: World Bank.
Part V
Violence Against Women
21 Domestic Violence in
Vietnam and Efforts to
Curb it
Le Thi Quy

In Vietnam, the development of the commodity economy has had some

remarkable successes. However, along with the market economy, many
social evils - including domestic violence - are also on the rise.
Inadequate preparations on societal plane - as the country shifts from a
centralized planning system of management to a market mechanism -
have caused a number of obstacles and embarrassments in analyzing and
ameliorating the emerging social ills. While contributing to the change of
traditional values and ethics, the market mechanism has sometimes led to
the impression that it controls all relationships in the family and society.
This requires a renewal and strong adjustment of the societal perceptions
and activities in order to help curb the spread of social evils without
harming the development of the economy.
In my research and this analysis, I divide domestic violence into two
forms: invisible violence and visible violence (or indirect and direct viol-
ence). In some cases these two forms of violence are closely inter-related;
in others, they are separate occurrences.

INVISIBLE VIOLENCE

This form of domestic violence has come to my knowledge only recently

while I studied the Vietnamese family and the role of women. For many
years almost every Vietnamese woman took it for granted that uncondi-
tional service to men is the natural function, a required sacrifice, and an
expression of self-denial, necessary in the role of women in the family.
These beliefs are deeply rooted in society. In the ancient Vietnamese
society dominated by Confucian morality, women were completely
dependent on men.

263
264 Domestic Violence in Vietnam
The Confucian doctrine divides the members of a family into two cate-
gories: the 'upper' and the 'lower'. The 'upper' category - the grandfa-
ther, the father, the elder brothers and other men - hold undisputed
supremacy in the family. The 'lower' category - the children, younger sib-
lings, grandchildren and, of course, women - are those who are born to
obey, serve and even sacrifice their lives. All forms of violence intended
as 'educational measures' are solely directed at the 'lower' category. In
the old society, the highest obligation of a woman when still in her
parents' home is to unconditionally to serve her father and elder brothers.
After marriage, she gives her life to the service of her husband and chil-
dren. She finds pleasure in preparing the best dishes for her husband to eat
and in adorning herself with the best dresses and jewels for her husband to
admire. She must speak softly to please the ears of her husband, and
remain absolutely loyal to him in all circumstances. If her husband dies,
she must unconditionally serve her sons. Under such a system, all male
members of the family might take turns in governing the family, but a
woman could never become the mistress of the family even if she actually
runs all family affairs and, sometimes, the affairs of the nation. History
has recorded many instances of junior kings whose mothers ran all the
country's affairs, but only from behind the scenes.
Since the triumph of the August Revolution in 1945, a persistent struggle
for equality of the sexes has been undertaken in all spheres, legislation,
family, and society. This has led to a fundamental change in the position,
rights and interests of women. However, any struggle has its difficulties, in
particular, the struggle against backward perceptions and customs which
have existed for centuries. It is then understandable that today, forty years
after the liberation from the colonial and feudal yoke, vestiges of the
Confucian attitude of 'honouring men and despising women' still linger and
have even regained vitality in some places. This attitude creates a kind of
terrible violence against women. It transforms women into obedient slaves
for drudgery and menial jobs, although no one flogs, scolds, or curses them.
Today, although there are husbands who really love and care for their
wives and share with them the family burden, not a few still assume the
right to put the entire responsibility for family management on the shoul-
ders of their wives. They behave like 'kings' who rule their wives and
children. Sometimes, they have gained firm support from other family
members, their relatives, neighbours, society at large, and even the women
themselves. Therefore, it is not uncommon to see the wife up to her ears in
household work: cooking, washing, scrubbing the floor, and tending the
children while the husband sits in an armchair with a newspaper, watches
television, or plays table tennis or some other sport in the neighbourhood.
 Le Thi Quy 265
He visits friends or, as happens more frequently, hangs around a cafe or
beer stand. In a sociological survey I conducted at the Dong Xuan
Knitwear Factory in Hanoi, I found that in every one of the 189 surveyed
families of women workers, the husband had more leisure time than the
wife. 79.4 percent of the women do the cooking (against 15.8 percent the
husbands), 79.2 percent do the washing (against 11.6 percent), 76.7
percent guide the children in their homework (against 20.1 percent).
Meanwhile, 66.1 percent of the surveyed women make more money than
their husbands.
To arrive at these 'achievements', the women workers have had to work
about five or six extra hours at home after their factory hours. All that has
taken its toll on the efforts of women to raise their cultural standard and on
their legitimate right to entertainment and cultural enjoyment. In fact, the
number of women workers who read newspapers and books regularly
makes up only 11.6 percent of the total; 28.6 percent have some time for
listening to the radio or watching the television; 5.8 percent can see films
in movie houses; and 30.8 percent can make calls to friends.
This situation has also led to tension in family life. Only 62 percent of
the women said they were happy with their husbands. The women who
were not are those with the lowest cultural standard. And it seems bizarre
that the lower their cultural standard, the less their husbands want them to
learn. Fifteen percent of the surveyed women complained of patriarchal-
ism of their husbands, 19% said they were bored and fed up with family
life but tried to endure it. Only 2 percent of the conjugal discords or
conflicts came from the difference in the outlook on life, while 34 percent
resulted from petty disputes about the trifles of everyday life. This allows
us to affirm that the prolonged drudgery of the lives of the wives is one of
the fundamental causes of tension in the family.
In recent years the policy of allocating product quotas to the households
has created a real breakthrough in agricultural production. Rice production
has increased many times over compared to the past. The lives of many
farm families have improved markedly. But, it must be recognized that
these successes have been won at the cost of great physical effort by the
women, who must work with rudimentary tools. In between two harvests
when farm work becomes less tense, women have to do many sideline
jobs, such as weaving, poultry and pig raising, growing vegetables, or
petty trading. Obviously, the new policies have helped to liberate the pro-
ductive force and increase food production enormously and have increased
the burden on rural women, especially those in poor families.
Among the 425 women interviewed at Dong Hoa commune, Dong Son
district, Thanh Hoa province, 84 percent said that those who suffer most in
266 Domestic Violence in Vietnam
poor families are women and children. They have to work from very early
in the morning till very late in the afternoon, doing practically all of the
heaviest jobs for planting, ploughing, harvesting, and carrying the paddy
home. In some localities women have even taken up jobs which used to be
done by men alone. Meanwhile, many husbands pass their time in drinking
bouts or card games. They stop at no measure - from coaxing, intimidation,
or even force- to squeeze a little money from their wives' purses.
Under such conditions, how can rural women spare some time for rest
or, even less, for self-education to raise their cultural standard? Forty-two
percent of the interviewees said that they had not left the village for three
years. Among poor families, this rate rises to 75 percent. In many other
localities in North Vietnam, not a few women had not seen a play or film
for two or three years, even when an art troupe or a projection team came
to the village.
The lower the cultural standard, the more likely it is that they will shy
away from cultural and social activities and the greater will be their feel-
ings of inferiority. The end result is that their only resort is to give all their
time to toiling to earn a living. This has become a vicious circle from which
women cannot break without the assistance, encouragement, and support
from their husbands, children, and society. This is not limited to rural
women. Even women office employees, teachers, service workers, and
traders in the cities have to work very hard. Many intellectuals cannot
arrange the necessary time to read the scientific materials of their special-
ties. Neither can they afford to attend refresher courses or foreign-language
courses. Women traders leave their homes at 5 a.m. and come home at
II p.m. They have no time to care for husbands and children, and some must
give their husbands money to spend as they choose, often with prostitutes.
We can see that invisible violence emasculates women's intellectual
power. The gap between men and women is widening in labour and enjoy-
ment. In fact, the accepted norms of labour division have created among
men the tendency to take for granted this inequality, especially in enjoy-
ment. They may take compassion for the plight of their wives or daughters,
but one thing is certain: few among them ever think of the necessity to
change this situation. Worse still, not a few women themselves still think
that the advantages of men and disadvantages of women are 'predestined'.

VISIBLE VIOLENCE

Violence is seen in all parts of the world, and in Vietnam, it has grown in
recent years. A judiciary report says that of the 17,834 divorces in
 Le Thi Quy 267
Vietnam in 1978, 15,570 cases were due to violence and violence-related
causes (or nearly 87.5 percent of the total divorces).
Likewise, of the 22,634 divorces in 1991, the cases due to violence and
violence-related causes accounted for more than 70.1 percent of the total
divorces. Of the 29,225 divorces in 1992, the cases due to violence and
violence-related causes represented more than 65.2 percent of the total.
Data on divorces in other years vary little in comparison. Obviously,
family violence plays an important part - or is the main cause - of
divorces in Vietnam at present. We can safely assume that most, if not all,
cases resulted from the rude behaviour of the husbands or maltreatment of
the wives.
Besides divorce, violence among family members annually caused hun-
dreds of injuries or deaths. These law-breaking deeds have not yet been
brought to trial. It is important to note that the culprits and victims of
many cases of family violence - large or small - did not want others to
know or interfere in their affairs. Therefore, family violence has for
several years now increased so rapidly that it has almost escaped control
of the law.
The causes of family violence are many, but they can be divided into
four groups: economic, level of education, cultural and social background,
and health status.

Economic Causes

The latest sociological surveys show that low economic status is one of the
main causes of family violence. Families with low incomes, too many
children, or who are failing in business are often subjected to family viol-
ence. In difficult situations, many fathers and husbands forget that their
wives and children share their misfortunes and hardships. The men are
ready to discharge their anger and despair on their innocent wives and
children, sometimes leading to grave consequences. A number of others
value money more than their dear ones. Not a few men treat their wives as
slaves. The men keep all the money they earn and give their wives just
enough to pay for the daily necessities. Whenever wives ask for money,
the men fly into a rage.
Not a few men who used to share wealth and woes with their wives
when they were poor have betrayed their wives or have mistreated them
when they get rich or are appointed to higher positions. The following are
cases in Ho Chi Minh City and in Ba Dinh precinct of Hanoi.
Case I, Ho Chi Minh City. The husband and wife have three children.
In the first I 0 years of their conjugal life, she lived happily with him and
268 Domestic Violence in Vietnam
he tried to save up to build a house. As soon as the couple had built a
brick house, the husband beat his wife and children and drove them from
the house. He always kept two knives and an iron rod under his bed in
order to threaten her and the three children. His wife and children had to
obey his orders and do whatever he wanted. He threatened to kill his wife
many times with his knives. To those who dissuaded him from his brutal
acts, he unwarrantedly charged them with courting his wife. Expelled from
home, she had to hide in a garbage truck of her enterprise. Their little child
who was born in 1978, was beaten black and blue by his father. The child
was stripped of his clothes - in both winter and summer- and was chained
to a tree. He was not even allowed to drive away the flies which clustered
around the wounds caused by the beatings. In July 1991, the father beat
his child with a rod dipped into hot liquid asphalt, causing pieces of his
skin to fall off. This was repeated several times. On October 24, 1991, the
father took off all of the little one's clothes and tied the child to a tree for
an entire day in cold weather. Meanwhile, he treated himself to a chicken
inside the house. 1
But family violence has not always stemmed from economic hardship.
Many men vented all of their dissatisfaction and anger with their offices
and business on their wives and children. Most later repented, but it was
already too late. The irreparable harm had been done.
Domestic violence exists not only in the relationship between husband
and wife but also between parents and their children. Some people who
not only fail in their responsibilities toward their parents also treat them in
a ruthless and ungrateful manner.

Educational Standard

The men who are violent toward their wives and children are mainly those
who still are heavily influenced by vestiges of feudalism in 'thinking
highly of men and slightly of women'. Until now, many men still think
that they have absolute power in the family, including the right to beat
and mistreat their wives and children. A Vietnamese proverb says, 'You
must educate your children when they are still young and teach your wife
when she first comes in your home.' Many have 'taught' their wives with
the rod. Some couples have been married for a long time but have been
unable to conceive a child, particularly a son. Because of their low
scientific knowledge, the husbands, tormented by the fear of having(no
son to continue the ancestral line, have tortured their wives, indulged in
adultery, or have forced their wives to arrange for a concubine. This last
practice has not abated with the Revolution. According to Hanoi court, the
 Le Thi Quy 269
number of divorces for this reason in 1992 increased by more than six
times since 1978. Some people have brought home their lovers; if their
wives and children show any objection, the men would beat them and
even kill the wives. In addition, there are lazy husbands who want to shift
all the family burden onto their wives and children, including the provi-
sion of food and drink. Instead of showing gratitude, the husbands beat
and mistreat their wives.
Recently, many crimes have originated from the sayings of fortune-
tellers. This has usually taken place in rural and mountain areas where the
educational level is generally still very low.

Cultural and Social Background

Violence caused by the husband's drinking, gambling, adultery and jeal-

ousy has increased at an alarming rate. When social evils develop, family
violence also increases and women are the first to suffer the consequences.
Husbands have lost at gambling, sold their houses, and even pawned their
wives in order to pay their debts. Others take money from their wives to
buy wine. When the money runs out, they pick a quarrel with their wives
and beat them. The family may not have enough food, the wife and chil-
dren may not have clothes to wear, but husbands of this kind cannot go
without alcohol. When drunk, the husband will beat his wife and children
then ask for forgiveness. But the next day he will get drunk and beat his
wife again. This vicious circle seems to never end.
There was a son who killed his father in Dai Mao hamlet, Hoai Thung
district, Ha Bao province. His family was large. The father was a drinker
and his wife was the family's main bread-earner. The couple's eldest son,
was born in 1976. When he was 12 years old, he was forced by his father
to give up his studies to help his mother earn a living for the family. He
was a well-mannered and assiduous son who helped his mother in farm
work, as well as in her business. The son was very much aggrieved by his
father's frequent beatings of his mother. One day while being beaten bar-
barously by his father, the son lost his self-control and killed his father.
Another cause of domestic violence is the complexity and crisis in the
relationship between the parents and their daughters-in-law or sons-in-law,
between step-father or step-mother and the step-children. This tension is
always present when the couple live under the same roof with a big
family. Many husbands have mistreated their wives by listening to the
complaints of their parents.
In My Van district, Hai Hung province, a husband, 24, and wife, 25 had
an 18-month-old son. The wife was in the third month of her new preg-
270 Domestic Violence in Vietnam
nancy. The couple lived with the husband's parents who behaved very
rudely toward her and often humiliated her. She had to assume all the farm
work because her husband was frail in health. Even so, her parents-in-law
forced their son, the husband to beat his wife in spite of her pregnancy.
One day, her parents-in-law forced her to leave for work without food
early in the morning. When she returned home late in the afternoon, she
was again cursed and beaten by her husband. She was hungry, so she took
some rice to cook but the husband kicked the pot to prevent her from
cooking. She went to bed and wept all night. Early the next morning, July
21, 1992, she left her house and jumped into a pond in the commune. Even
after she was gone for two days, no one in the family cared to go out and
look for her. The sad thing is that after her death a number of people in her
locality still held that the tense relationship between the husband's parents
and the daughter-in-law was a normal conflict and circumstance of daily
life.
It will not be fair if I do not mention causes produced by women. In
reality, there are women who are lazy and do not want to work or look
after families; some live extravagantly. In addition, many violate moral
principles or do not know how to behave properly towards their families
and other people. Some commit serious acts, such as adultery or they cheat
their husbands and families. It is these women who make their husbands
and fathers angry, and beat or kill them.

Health Causes

Many acts of violence in the family are caused by sick people, particularly
those having mental diseases - 'mad blood'. These people always feel
anxious and angry, and want to shift their indignation to others. Often, the
victims are their next of kin. In these cases, low incomes plus poor health
service are additional factors in the increase of family violence.

EFFECTS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ON WOMEN'S LIVES

Domestic violence is obviously a universally dangerous vice that causes

numerous bad consequences for family life, particularly for women and
children. First, family violence is detrimental to the health and lives of the
victims. Every year, hundreds of people are killed or are forced to commit
suicide. Thousands of others are wounded, handicapped, or suffer from
mental diseases, and tens of thousands are beaten. In the first six months
of I 992, there were 449 cases of killings in Vietnam. Of those, 17.5
 Le Thi Quy 271

percent of the deaths were due to family violence, as compared to 13.1

percent in the corresponding period in 1991.
Domestic violence also seriously affects the sentimental and moral life
and identity of its victims. Because they live in frequent anxiety, people
who are beaten usually lack self-confidence. They lose their energy and
become torpid. They have almost no belief in men. Some women who
were badly treated by their husbands got muddle-headed, and killed their
children and themselves. Family violence has serious effects on daily
work, the raising and education of children, the quality of the material and
cultural life, and the recreation of all families, particularly for women and
children.
All cases of domestic violence violate the dignity of women and chil-
dren. Many were beaten or scolded in front of neighbours, friends, rela-
tives. Some were stripped of their clothing and driven into the street.
Many women - choking with anger - ran away and fell into brothels,
where they became prostitutes by force or with willingness. In a social
survey conducted in Ho Chi Minh City in 1992, we learned that 34 percent
of the prostitutes surveyed had turned to prostitution for their living
because they came from broken families or had suffered maltreatment by
their husbands.
Similar events occurred in Hanoi, where mistreatment by their husbands
had pushed a number of women into this mean job. We interviewed about
40 small vagabonds in Hanoi. Most said that their fathers were alcohol
addicts or gamblers who frequently beat their mothers and them. This is a
common reason that made them run away to lead a vagabond life in the
street with its many risks to children. When asked whether they wanted to
return home if they were assisted, most broke into cries and said no.
Obviously, the nightmare still haunted them.
Finally, family violence also has serious effects on the creative powers
of every family member. Unfortunately, not a few young and intelligent
girls - after the injustice of marriage to brutal men - soon became victims
of an early death, or were handicapped physically or mentally. They, of
course, had no opportunity to develop their talents for the benefit of their
families and society.

SOLUTIONS TO OVERCOME FAMILY VIOLENCE

Today, according to law, men no longer have absolute power in all areas
of the family as they had in the feudal colonial regime. Each family
member has his/her own material and cultural rights, including the right to
272 Domestic Violence in Vietnam
have his/her own economic income; and these rights are respected. The
concept of 'equality between men and women' is recognized by law.
Women have the rights of citizenship, the rights to study and work, and
they receive equal treatment as men do. It is these things that basically do
away with their previous complete dependence on men, and provide the
social basis for the prevention of domestic violence in whatever form,
especially invisible violence. The State strictly prohibits and punishes
violations of human beings, particularly women and children. Many law
provisions define the protection of corporal inviolability of all citizens. To
scrupulously implement all provisions written in the laws, the State of
Vietnam has built up a system to prevent domestic violence - from the
administration to mass organizations and from central to local levels.
The recent development of the market economy has caused the fast
growth of services, especially in urban areas. Popular inns, restaurants,
semi-processed foods available at markets, and private and public creches
have helped women to reduce the family burden.
The State once extended the maternity leave. Female state servants were
allowed to take a six.IJTlonth maternity leave with full pay (compared with
only two months in the past). However, dozens of female civil servants
refused to take the entire maternity leave. Due to economic difficulties, they
returned to work earlier than scheduled in order to receive, besides salaries,
fees and bonuses. Faced with that situation, the Vietnamese state adopted as
of June 1, 1993, a regulation for a maternity leave of four months.
In addition, the fight against patriarchialism and the way of preference
for males and prejudice against females is being carried out in many
places. The State attaches importance to education of the people to live in
a new civilized way in a cultural family and it put forth new standards in
family life. As a result, the concept of people of all walks of life had sub-
stantive changes, producing strong condemnations in society against viola-
tions of morality in family and the society, particularly against beatings
and mistreatment of wives and children.
The close management by the administration and mass organizations,
the concern of neighbours, friends, colleagues, and public opinion had
positive impact on preventing social vices and the tendencies for violence,
including domestic violence. Subsequently, there were only a few particu-
lar and covert cases of domestic violence, and they were vehemently con-
demned. That is why the fight against domestic violence is not an easy
one, and it could not immediately bring about complete success.
From my research, I base my recommendations to help to contribute to
eliminating the evil of domestic violence. Obviously, liberation of women
cannot be carried out unilaterally, but it can be closely coordinated with
 Le Thi Quy 273
the social renovation now taking place in the country. Starting with the
specific situation of the country, the State should work out appropriate
policies to improve women's life in all fields: professionally, culturally,
mentally, in health, and living standards .
. . .Training, cultural standard, pregnancy and maternity leaves, house-
hold labour, thus contribute to the control of the evil of invisible domestic
violence. It is important to continue to change the concept of society, and
encourage public opinion to condemn and nip acts of violence in the bud.
This is important and imperative work. In addition, it is necessary to
change women's own concept about domestic violence. Every woman
should have a sense of protection for herself and her children, and know
how to obtain sympathy and support from the family, friends, neighbours,
and administration to fight acts of violence. The administration should
have a harder attitude in preventing acts of violence. More active, effect-
ive and severe legal measures should be taken against the criminals.
According to the severity of the cases, the names and photographs of those
who often mistreat their wives or children could be mentioned in mass
media, or they could be driven out of their homes.
At present, social opinion in Vietnam is suggesting a rise in the ceiling
of punishment of all forms of family violence. Harsh punishment should
be applied - not only to those who do not directly commit homicide or
beat others - but indirectly drive the victims to commit suicide, to be
killed, or to become criminals. Severe punishment should be the penalty
against those who have breached the morality which the Vietnamese
people traditionally respect, such as filial piety towards parents, love and
respect for wives, and kind-heartedness and generosity towards children.
In addition, we request that the government soon promulgate the act of
'Life insurance for all citizens', whose main contents would include:

• The insurance for the bodily safety of all citizens regardless of age,
sex, and ethnic group;
• The insurance against deliberate violations or risks that harm or
deprive part of the body; and
• The insurance against losses of human honour and dignity.

The act should have financial regulations attached, stipulating that a

monetary fine be applied to false insurance claims. Those who violate
others' bodies with serious consequences could be treated according to the
penal code, but a monetary fine could be applied in minor cases. Premiums
shall be paid yearly, with an amount varying for each insurant. However,
the insurance could be many times bigger than the premiums.
274 Domestic Violence in Vietnam
In the socio-cultural area, there should be some reforms such as the
introduction of teaching about marriage and the family into grade schools,
colleges and universities to educate the young people in correct and
scientific concepts about this very important issue. In Vietnam there
should be consulting centres and charitable funds to help women in dis-
tress. It is also necessary to establish clubs and consulting offices that deal
with marriage and family affairs and whose members could be people of
both sexes.
Our efforts aim at nothing more than to help both sexes become closer
in their family and social relations, so as to build together a beautiful and
ci viii zed society.

Notes

1. Hanoi Women's Bi-Weekly, issue March 23-AprilS, 1992.

Data for the chapter were drawn from the following sources:
Sociological Survey at the Dong Xuan Knitwear Factory in Hanoi in 1990 by
Center for Family and Women Studies.
Sociological Survey at Dong Hoa Commune, Dong Son district, Thanh hoa
province in 1991 by Institute of Psychology of the National Center for Social
Sciences and Humanities of Vietnam.
Materials from the Civilian Tribunal in Hanoi.
22 Sexual Assault in the
United States and
Vietnam: Some Thoughts
and Questions
Lynne Goodstein

Exploring the problems of rape in Vietnam and confronting silence on the

subject, I began to wonder whether Vietnam was one of those rare coun-
tries that Sanday ( 1981) would label 'rape free'. After all, to most people
in the West, the crime of rape still evokes the image of the woman
accosted on the street by a stranger wearing a ski mask and wielding a
knife or gun, forcing her to submit to sexual intercourse against her will
and after exerting as much physical resistance as she could muster. This
scenario would be quite unlikely to occur in the context of the lives of the
vast majority of Vietnam's people who live agrarian lifestyles surrounded
by community members and family. Moreover, rape by intimates and
acquaintances, known now in the West to be far more prevalent than rape
by a stranger, might not be acknowledged as rape, either by Vietnamese
scholars or victims themselves.
With the formidable challenges that face the people of Vietnam in
moving their economy from an agricultural to an industrial base and their
social systems from traditional multi-generational families to 'modern'
nuclear families, it is understandable that Vietnamese scholars with inter-
ests in women's studies would focus on other issues. Despite the recent
influx of consumer goods, the legacy of two major wars and an ongoing
United States trade embargo is apparent in the paucity of industrial and
technological 'necessities' for competitiveness in the modern world
economy. The creation of jobs for Vietnamese citizens, women and men,
is crucial in enhancing a standard of living hobbled by Vietnam's embat-
tled past. Vietnamese policy-makers and social scientists are quite aware
of the necessity of harnessing all available energy and creativity, of
women as well as men, to the task of developing the nation.
Reluctance to discuss the topic of rape in Vietnam can be contrasted
with the extensive role that analyses of rape have played in the United

275
276 Sexual Assault in the United States and Vietnam
States feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Inspired by the second
wave of feminism that came of age in the late 1960s, the problem of
sexual victimization of women has received considerable attention from
Western scholars, researchers, the media and the public at large. Vietnam
and the United States appear to be at very different points in their respect-
ive public discourses on the topic of sexual violence. There are probably
differences also between Vietnam and the United States in the actual inci-
dence of various types of rape (stranger, acquaintance, intimate) due to
the considerable differences between the two nations in social attitudes
regarding women, their roles and everyday activities.

RAPE AS A PROBLEM IN THE UNITED STATES AND VIETNAM

The crime of rape is considered among the most serious by both the
United States and Vietnamese criminal justice systems. Other than homi-
cide and kidnapping, forcible rape carries the most severe sentences of all
crimes in the United States, with a national average sentence of over ten
years in prison (Flanagan and Maguire, 1992). Because it is a crime that
'violates human dignity', rape in Vietnam carries long prison sentences of
up to twelve years. The seriousness of the crime of rape is recognized also
by its impact on rape victims. Absence of research and silence on the
subject in Vietnam means that little is known of Vietnamese rape victims.
We do know that victims of rape in the United States report extreme emo-
tional trauma as a result of the experience. Reactions to rape include sleep
disturbances, uncontrollable cr.,ying, muscular pain, sexual dysfunction,
anxiety, depression, disruption of everyday patterns of work and living,
nightmares, and flashbacks. Many victims require professional counselling
for what is often a recovery period that may span many years (Burgess and
Holmstrom, 1979).
Rape is not only a serious crime in the United States; it is an all too
common one as well. According to official statistics reported to the police,
women in the United States have the highest risk of rape of any nation in
the world. Most recently available statistics suggest that the United States
is the clear leader of industrialized nations in rapes reported to the police.
With a rate of 37.6 per 100,000 persons in 1987, the United States out-
paced the nations of Belgium (5.0 per 100,000), France (5.75 per
100,000), and England and Wales (4.9 per 100,000) by a factor of at least
six (Interpol, 1991).
Compared with the reality of rape for United States women, we can
speculate that Vietnamese women may be more protected from victimiza-
 Lynne Goodstein 277
tion by strangers, the type of rape most likely to be reported to official
authorities. At the present time there are no official statistics available on
the incidence and prevalence of sexual assault in Vietnam. However, con-
sidering the vast discrepancies between the rape rates of the United States
and nations that neighbour Vietnam, such as Thailand, Malaysia, and Sri
Lanka (4.9, 3.6, and 1.8 per 100,000 persons, respectively: Interpol, 1991),
it is reasonable to assume that the risk of rape in Vietnam is lower.
To understand the differences in rape rates between the two nations, it is
useful to examine societal forces that influence the ways in which gender
is constructed and women's roles are defined. I identify three sets of soci-
etal forces that are likely to shape Vietnamese perspectives on gender,
women's roles, and women's sexual victimization. The first set concerns
the traditional, patriarchal, Confucianism-inspired, 'feudal' culture that
defines women's obligations and responsibilities to the family. Second is
the focus on gender equality in official governmental policy and socialist
ideology. Finally, there is the impending introduction of industrialization
into this predominantly agricultural nation.

VESTIGES OF TRADITIONAL ROLES FOR WOMEN

Contemporary Vietnamese women's lives continue to be influenced by

what the Vietnamese call 'feudalism' within the family. This expression
captures the impact of Confucian doctrine with respect to the relative
value and significance of the sexes. and the roles prescribed for women
and men. To quote the Vietnamese-produced volume Vietnamese Women
in the Eighties ( 1989) 'Feudal ideology despises women: "Man is noble,
woman is base", or "To have a son is to have something, to have ten
daughters is to have nothing"' (p. 17). Under this system, Vietnamese
women hold no power and are devalued to the point of being functionally
considered non-persons. A woman is expected to be totally obedient to
her husband and his parents, who are considered justified in treating her as
they would a slave.
This condition of oppression for women was exacerbated during the
century of French rule. Women had to function in a subordinate position
in the family but were also vulnerable to exploitation and victimization in
the workplace as a result of their poverty. In Vietnamese texts on this
period there are allusions to the sexualization of women; women became
prostitutes or were victimized by rape and what we now know as sexual
harassment in the workplace with no recourse because they needed to
retain their employment or face dire poverty. The period following the
278 Sexual Assault in the United States and Vietnam
French domination brought with it a continued legacy of rape, prostitution,
and sexual harassment during wartime in the conflict with the United
States armed forces.
Vestiges of traditional, 'feudal', attitudes toward women persist even in
modern Vietnam. Popular discourse focuses on the responsibility of
Vietnamese women to foster 'family happiness', a term encompassing the
emotional, material, and spiritual well-being of all family members.
Women, more than men, continue to be responsible for domestic duties,
regardless of the fact that both work outside the home as well.
Moreover, the preference for sons over daughters continues, perhaps
even fortified by the Vietnamese aggressive family planning policies of
restricting the number of children per family to no more than two.
Indicators of the perseverance of traditional values regarding the desirabil-
ity of sons are evident in patterns of adoption of Vietnamese infants by
Vietnamese and Western families. While it is generally hospital policy to
give priority to Vietnamese families who wish to adopt children, there is a
supply of girl children for foreign adoptions. The availability of
Vietnamese girl babies for adoption is the result of a nine-to-one prefer-
ence for male babies among Vietnamese prospective adoptive parents.
The societal devaluing of women in contemporary Vietnamese life is
evident in other ways as well. There appears to be a greater concern for
job creation for ex-servicemen than for women who also desperately need
work (Kim Quy, 1993a). This situation is reminiscent of the United States
following the end of World War II, where women who had taken over
factory jobs were expected to turn them over to the returning veterans and
return happily to their domestic duties. Also, like Western women,
Vietnamese women tend to trail men in their participation in higher-level
positions in business and academia. Even highly qualified women who
have been privileged with education and who possess high-level skills
tend to occupy lower status positions than their male counterparts.

IMPACT OF VIETNAM'S SOCIALIST EGALITARIAN AGENDA

In counterpoint to centuries-old patriarchal traditions, over recent decades

Vietnam's socialist government has promulgated ideologies and policies
stressing egalitarianism between the sexes. The government and related
agencies stress the importance of valuing women's contributions to
society and recognizing the need for all people of Vietnam to contribute to
their utmost if the nation is to move forward. At the same time, there is a
conscious recognition, reflected in social policy, that women are a particu-
 Lynne Goodstein 279
Jar constituency with concerns, not shared by men, that deserve official
attention and response. In this sense, Vietnam's conceptualization of
gender equality is not gender blindness but rather reflects a recognition of
biological and historically constructed differences between the sexes -
most especially women's unique responsibility for reproduction as well as
for production.
Apparently recognizing its potential for dismissing the legitimate needs
of women, the Vietnamese government has implemented a resolution -
Decision no. 163 (Vietnamese Women in the Eighties, p. 83) that insures
women's input in creating laws and social policy. This input is provided
through the mandated involvement of members of the eleven-million
strong Women's Union at all levels -local, regional, and national- in all
policy decisions relevant to women's lives. This decision formally recog-
nizes women as stakeholders who have a legitimate voice in policy
making. Implicitly this decision reflects the fact that because of women's
historical responsibilities for household management and the bearing and
raising of children, social policies may have differential impacts on
women and men. Moreover, in some cases, for social policy to foster
equality between the sexes, women's biological or historically traditional
responsibilities for reproduction and the management and nurturing of the
family must be taken into account. An instance of the approach is the fact
that Vietnamese women enjoy a liberal four-month paid maternity leave
following the births of their first two children.
The commitment of the Vietnamese government to recognizing the
legitimate rights of women to have their lives be considered in shaping
social policy stands in stark contrast to the United States government's
prevailing emphasis on 'gender blindness'. This approach is based upon
the naive assumption that the end to women's oppression will be achieved
by ignoring gender altogether and treating men and women exactly alike.
This approach decontextualizes the lives of women and men and dismisses
the fact that gender differences are deeply embedded in our cultural fabric
and are likely to take generations to alter.
The results of the Vietnamese commitment to gender equality are
evident in the extent of participation of women in public life. While
gender differentials continue to exist in social and political power, women
in Vietnam are playing significant roles in government, industry, and aca-
demia. For example Vietnamese women hold 73 of the 395 positions in
the National Assembly (19 percent). This compares quite favourably with
the fact that, prior to the 1992 election, only 2 of 100 United States sena-
tors and 35 of the 438 members of the House of Representatives were
women. In addition, a woman currently holds the position of Vice President
280 Sexual Assault in the United States and Vietnam
of Vietnam and women hold some of the highest positions in the nation in
industry and the health care system.

THE TRANSITION FROM AN AGRARIAN TO AN INDUSTRIAL

ECONOMY

Despite the government's ernest commitment to women's empowennent,

the impact of social policies designed to further this process is limited by the
nature of the contemporary Vietnamese economy. At present the
Vietnamese population continues to be overwhelmingly rural, with approx·
imately 80 percent residing outside cities. Moreover, women constitute
between seventy and eighty percent of all agricultural workers, While there
are some women who relocate away from home to work on rubber, coffee,
and tea plantations, the vast majority of these workers are located in rural
villages and contribute to small scale production of rice and other foodstuffs.
The nature of the work perfonned by most women agricultural workers
involves close contact with family and neighbours in close proximity to
the women's homes. Women working in rice paddies or tending to live-
stock are constantly interacting with family members and other members
of their rural community who are closely acquainted with them and prob-
ably have been for most of the women's lives. The daily routine of rural
women is therefore under the surveillance of persons who not only know
the women themselves but their families as well. In most situations they
are unlikely to encounter persons with whom they are not previously
acquainted. Moreover, others with whom they would have contact would
be acquainted with their family members and would perceive them as a
member of a larger social unit, their family.
With the increasing industrialization of the nation of Vietnam, it is
likely that the nature of women's daily routines will experience cata-
clysmic change. Their place of work and place of residence will be sep-
arated; they will be forced to travel some distance from their homes to
their jobs in factories or offices. The vast bulk of their waking time will be
spent removed from the context of their family, village, and home commu-
nity, either in transit or at their place of employment. Those persons with
whom they interact, co-workers and fellow commuters, are unlikely to
have the same knowledge of the women's family and village connections.
Instead, they will view the women workers as individuals, not necessarily
as part of a family system. Women's role as daughter or wife, highly rel-
evant within the village context, becomes largely irrelevant in the imper-
sonal atmosphere of the industrialized workplace where women are likely
to be viewed by their superiors and co-workers simply as women.
 Lynne Goodstein 281
IMPACT OF SOCIAL CONDITIONS ON SEXUAL VICTIMIZATION

What are the implications of these three conditions on our understanding

of the nature and extent of sexual victimization of women in Vietnam? To
address this issue, it is useful to consider the work of United States fem-
inists who have theorized on the interrelationships between women's
social conditions and sexual victimization.
Peggy Reeves Sanday (1981), a cultural anthropologist, has investigated
the wide differences in the incidence of sexual victimization among a large
cross-cultural sample of tribal societies. She notes that in some nations,
social, political, and economic conditions coalesce in creating what she calls
'rape-prone cultures'. These societies, which would obviously include the
United States, share one or more of the following characteristics: 1) sexual
assault is either allowable or overlooked; 2) men are posed as a social group
against women; 3) rituals that include rape exist; and 4) women are consid-
ered the property of men. In contrast, 'rape free' societies are characterized
by: 1) the notion that the sexes are complementary, although they may not
perform the same duties; 2) importance ascribed to women's contribution to
social continuity; and 3) the infrequence of interpersonal violence of any sort.
Sanday suggests that the social construction of male and female roles
contributes significantly to the extent of sexual violence to be found within
a society. She notes that 'female power and authority are lower in rape
prone societies. Women do not participate in public decision making in
these societies and males express contempt for women as decision makers'
(p. 25). Conversely, she observes that the males of such societies fashion
their behaviour in line with a 'socio-cultural script' that defines interper-
sonal violence and toughness as desirable and valued attributes.
Furthermore, to facilitate these gender distinctions, societies that set the
stage for sexual violence enforce greater separation of the sexes.
Catharine MacKinnon (1987) supports Sanday's analysis by focusing
on the mechanisms by which women as a class are prevented from sharing
in societal power through the existence of a pervasive system of social
inequality. In her discussions of pornography, sexual harassment, prostitu-
tion, and sexual assault, she underscores the ways in which women's sexu-
ality is used to reduce women to the status of non-persons, where
women's apparent worth and value come only from their ability to fulfil
men's expectations and fantasies.
Analysts of contemporary United States society note the existence in
American life of many of the attributes Sanday enumerates as sympto-
matic of rape-prone cultures. Women and men do not share economic or
political equality. Women continue to earn only two thirds of what men
earn. They, and the children they often must raise as single parents, are
282 Sexual Assault in the United States and Vietnam
much more likely than men to live in poverty. Despite recent gains,
women still do not share political power with men, as evidenced by their
lack of representation in high-level governmental and industrial organiza-
tions. Women encounter barriers to professional advancement in work-
place organizations, occupying the lower and middle ranks and rarely
breaking through the 'glass ceiling' to high-level executive positions.
United States men's gendered roles also conform closely to Sanday's
model. Critics discuss men's fascination with physical and social power,
their conceptualization of women as sexual prey, and their preoccupation
with violence in sports and popular culture as the 'masculine ideal' (Ruth,
1990). Finally, in many residential, social, and workplace settings the sexes
continue to be segregated. Women and men join different organizations
(clubs, voluntary organizations) and despite exceptional cases of women
entering formerly male-dominated professions (e.g. policing), most occupa-
tions continue to be primarily sex specific (Fox and Hesse Biber, 1984).
Considering Sanday's model, Vietnamese culture can be distinguished
from United States culture in several ways that would suggest a lower risk
of sexual victimization. The socialist egalitarian philosophy supportive of
women's equality appears to have counteracted traditional patriarchal
beliefs that devalued women's worth. The various policies and pro-
grammes that have been put in place to give women voice in governmental
affairs mitigate against women's lesser power and authority compared
with men. There is no United States equivalent to the official power held
by the Vietnamese Women's Union.
Moreover, the articulated valuing of 'family happiness' and the import-
ance the Vietnamese place upon domestic life also indirectly support
women's status. The fact that Vietnamese women outpace United States
women in formal leadership positions offers evidence of the relative higher
status of Vietnamese women. The male role in Vietnamese culture is also
Jess reflective of the western cult of masculinity. Little emphasis is placed
on physical power; violence in sport is a rare or nonexistent phenomenon.
Vietnamese women are also probably at lower risk of rape, at least by
strangers, to the extent that their interpersonal interactions occur within
the web of family and community supervision. Their availability to
strangers would be limited by their involvement with others known to
them while they carry out their everyday work and home maintenance
duties. In addition, potential acquaintance rapists might be deterred from
perpetrating crimes against women whom they perceive as being embed-
ded in a web of family and community relationships. Women whose
public identities reflect their relationships to men- as daughters or wives-
may receive greater protection from sexual victimization. Viewing a
 Lynne Goodstein 283
woman as part of a social system, a would-be rapist may be unlikely to
perceive her as sexually available. Potential violators may perceive that
their crime would victimize not only the woman herself but her male pro-
tector and entire family; hence, he may decide that the adverse conse-
quences of such behaviour would outweigh the benefits.
On the other hand, certain aspects of Vietnamese society would suggest
that victimization by close acquaintances and family members may exist.
Within the 'feudal' tradition women had virtually no rights and were con-
sidered as virtual property of their husbands' families. To the extent that
women continue to perceive themselves as accountable to male family
members, they may be subject to sexual coercion and victimization, par-
ticularly within the context of intimate relationships.
Contemporary social and economic trends in Vietnam may also result in
an increased risk of rape by non· family members in the future. While the
feudal family structure may be oppressive to women in many ways, it may
be viewed as protecting women from violence by strangers. With industri-
alization, increasing numbers of women will experience a fundamental
change in the organization of their time and the locations in which they
spend it. Working in factories or offices, women will inevitably spend
more most of their time with persons who are not familiar with the
women's roles within their families and local communities. Thus, their
risk of victimization by acquaintances and strangers will be increased and
the deterrent effects of potential perpetrators perceiving the women's
places in their social networks reduced.
The increased risk of victimization that comes with the transition to the
less personalized world of the factory or office would be exacerbated if the
status of women in these settings is lower than that of their male co-
workers. Women in traditionally lower status positions are particularly
susceptible to sexual coercion because they may feel that they cannot exert
resistance against male sexual aggression without risking their jobs.
Women who are perceived by men as separated from the web of commu-
nity and family ties and thus not as potential marriage partners are more
likely to be viewed by men as sexual prey.

DEFINING AND REPORTING SEXUAL VICTIMIZATION

There is reason to believe that Vietnamese women may be more reluctant

than United States women to report rape to the authorities. Vietnam con-
tinues to maintain conventional standards of conduct with respect to sexu-
ality. The 'double standard', which has lost much of its power since the
284 Sexual Assault in the United States and Vietnam
sexual revolution of the 1960s in the United States, is still very much in
evidence in Vietnam. Because women are expected to be virginal for mar-
riage, sexual victimization continues to bring shame to women victims and
could have serious ramifications with respect to their chances of marriage-
ability. If revealing one's victimization leads to a less desirable marriage
arrangement, it is reasonable that women would conceal their rapes.
This point is underscored in the recounting of rape endured during the
war with the United States by Le Ly Hayslip in her book, When Heaven
and Earth Changed Places (1990). Then a thirteen-year-old virgin accused
of complicity with the United States forces, Hayslip was forced to undergo
sexual assault by two fellow villagers. She perceived that the violations
had changed her life completely: 'I had been raped[ ... ] What had been
saved a lifetime for my husband had been ripped away in less time than it
takes to tell. Most horrible of all was that the act of making life itself had
left me feeling dead[ ... ] He could shoot me now- I wouldn't even feel the
bullet' (p. 93). Despite her youth, Hayslip concealed the rape from her
family and community, ashamed of her changed status and fearful that
further retaliation would occur if she told of her assaults. Hayslip's con-
cealment of her rapes illustrates the willingness of Vietnamese women to
endure the aftermath of sexual victimization in silence rather than face
the social consequences of being perceived as no longer virginal.
Extrapolating this experience to modern Vietnamese women, one can
understand why official statistics of rape in Vietnam are likely to under-
estimate the true extent of the problem.
It is possible that the generally accepted position that 'rape is not a
major problem in Vietnam' reflects: 1) their characterization of rape as
occurring only among strangers, and 2) a relatively low rate of rape by
strangers in Vietnam. Considering the conditions of most Vietnamese
women's lives, it is reasonable to speculate that sexual victimization by
strangers would be less likely than in the United States. Vietnamese
women are commonly in situations in which others who are familiar with
them can observe their behaviour. This is particularly the case in the rural
areas where the vast majority of Vietnamese women live. Even in urban
areas women infrequently find themselves in unsupervised situations in
which they may encounter strangers. Urban women's mobility is restricted
in the sense that others close to them are aware of their destinations, so
they essentially move from one protected situation to another. Thus
strangers, both in rural and urban areas, would have a difficult time corner-
ing prospective victims in a secure enough location to complete the crime.
Yet, as Western feminist scholars and researchers have found, rape by
strangers is the exception while rape by acquaintances the rule. In-depth
 Lynne Goodstein 285
explorations of the nature of sexual victimization by interviewing victims
and closely examining official records have enabled Western researchers to
conclude that 'classic' rape by strangers is far from representative. Rather,
sexual victimization by acquaintances - from men the victim hardly
knows to boyfriends, lovers, and husbands - is by far the most prevalent
form of rape. Rapes where the victim and assailant are known to each
other account for 55 to 60 percent of rapes reported to the police (U.S.
Department of Justice, 1987). Moreover, most researchers believe this
figure to be a gross underestimate because it reflects only reported rapes,
and many women do not tell the police about rapes by people they know.
I suspect that the state of contemporary Vietnamese thinking about rape
is similar to the state of Western thinking before the issue became a rally-
ing point for feminist activism and scholarship in the early 1970s. Prior to
this period the crime of rape was also generally thought to be restricted to
incidents of rape by strangers, labelled in the literature as 'classic', 'blitz',
or 'aggravated' rape. If a woman had been raped by an acquaintance or her
husband, she was not usually considered by the public or the criminal
justice system to be a victim at all. Ironically, victims of marital or
acquaintance rape sometimes failed to acknowledge to themselves that the
sexual violence perpetrated upon them conformed to the definition of rape.
In Vietnam the concept of rape as occurring among intimates still
appears to be a foreign one. Recent Vietnamese research recognizes the
existence of intimate situations in which women do suffer as targets of
physical and emotional abuse (Le Thi Quy, 1992). Considering Vietnam
women's continuing lower status and the vestiges of the feudal mentality,
it is reasonable to expect that women would also be forced to submit sexu-
ally to the will of their husbands, resulting in marital rape, or their
fathers/uncles, resulting in incest. These acts, however, may be defined as
'normal' men's behaviour that women simply have to endure. Indeed,
when asked about husbands forcing their wives to submit to sexual
advances against their will, one Vietnamese scholar gave a terse but clear
response, 'Everywhere' (Kim Quy, 1993b).

GENDER AWARENESS AND THE DEFINITION OF RAPE IN

VIETNAM

Vietnamese intellectuals have only recently begun to consider the condi-

tions of women from what Western academics would label a feminist per-
spective. The recent interest among social scientists and leaders of the
Women's Union in the issue of 'gender awareness' signals an amenability
286 Sexual Assault in the United States and Vietnam
of the Vietnamese to pose critical questions about the contemporary condi-
tion of women and women's oppression. It is likely that as this movement
toward gender awareness progresses, issues such as violence against
women and sexual victimization by acquaintances/intimates will begin to
receive greater attention. Vietnamese women may begin to rethink their
definition of sexual violence and expand it to include cases previously
'defined out' of acts categorized as rape.

References

Burgess, Ann Wolbert, and Lynn Lytle Holmstrom, Rape: Crisis and Recovery,
Bowie, MD: Robert J. Brady Co., 1979.
Coker v. Georgia, 433 U.S. 485, 1977.
Flanagan, Timothy, and Kathleen Maguire (eds) Sourcebook of Criminal Justice
Statistics 1991, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics,
Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1992.
Fox, Mary Frank, and Sharlene Hesse Biber, Women at Work, Palo Alto, CA:
Mayfield, 1984.
Hayslip, Le Ly, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, New York: Penguin
Books, 1990.
Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization), International Crime
Statistics 1990, Saint-Cloud, France: Interpol, 1991.
Kim Quy, Bui Thi, 'Work for women in relationship with social development and
family happiness fostering', paper presented at the Seminar on Family and the
Conditions of Women in Society, Ho Chi Minh City, January 1993a.
Kim Quy, Bui Thi, personal communication, 1993b.
Le Thi Quy, 'On the question of consolidating family ties and preventing the use
of violence against women', unpublished manuscript, 1993.
MacKinnon, Catherine, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Ruth, Sheila, Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women's Studies, Mountain
View, CA: Mayfield, 1990.
Sanday, Peggy Reeves, 'The socio-cultural context of rape: A cross-cultural
study.' Journal of Social Issues 37, 1981, pp. 5-27.
U.S. Department of Justice, Statistics, Criminal Victimization 1986, Bureau of
Justice Statistics, Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987.
Vietnam Women's Union and Centre for Women's Studies, Vietnamese Women in
the Eighties, Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1989.
23 Violence Against Women
in the Family: The United
States and Vietnam
Michael P. Johnson

You must go through a play of ebb and flow

and watch such things as make you sick at heart.
NguyenDu 1

According to a 1989 United Nations report,Z violence against women in

the home is a serious problem in all countries of the world. In the United
States active concern with this pervasive threat to the well-being of
women has produced considerable social change since 1970, as well as a
large body of social science research documenting the nature of the
problem in the U.S. In Vietnam the importance of the problem has
recently begun to receive careful attention: 'In recent years [the] problem
not only stung everybody's conscience, but also became the anxiety of the
whole society' .3
As Le Thi4 has noted, the emancipation of women has always been a
central concern of the Party and the state. However, Le Thi5 also points
out that violence against women continues to plague the Vietnamese
family, including husbands insulting and beating up their wives, sexual
violence against wives, and the use of force to interfere with wives'
attempts to use contraception. It seems, nevertheless, that so far there has
been little systematic research carried out regarding the problem of viol-
ence against women in the Vietnamese family. Perhaps something can be
learned from the results of twenty years of research activity in the United
States.

THE ROLE OF THE CONTEMPORARY WOMEN'S MOVEMENT IN

THE UNITED STATES

The growth of attention in the United States to the issue of wife-beating is

generally attributed to developments in the women's movement of the

287
288 Violence Against Women in the Family

mid-twentieth century. 6 One of the important political aspects of the con-

temporary women's movement has been the experience of 'consciousness-
raising', modelled on the self-criticism groups of the Chinese Revolution. 7
In the consciousness-raising groups of the grassroots women's movement,
women came together to discuss their problems as women and discovered
that many issues that they had previously thought of as individual prob-
lems (such as rape and wife-beating) were much more widely shared than
anyone had imagined. Women in the movement came to realize that prob-
lems that they had defined as private were actually social and therefore
required a political rather than a personal solution. Hence, one movement
slogan was 'The personal is political'.
The more specific initiative to provide shelter to women who were
being beaten by their husbands or live-in partners is often traced to a series
of events in St Paul, Minnesota. In 1971 a consciousness-raising group
called Women's Advocates started a utopian community for themselves
and other women. Although the home was not initially intended to func-
tion as what we would now call a 'shelter', it soon filled with battered
women. 8 By 1989 there were 1200 shelter programmes in the United
States, housing over 300,000 women and children per year. 9
Although the provision of shelters to support women during the transi-
tion from an abusive relationship to independent living for them and their
children has been the major focus of the movement, changing public
policy has been another important goal. Police officers had been reluctant
to intervene in family violence, both out of 'reverence' for the privacy of
family life and out of reluctance to enter situations that were perceived to
be among the most dangerous of all law enforcement tasks. The courts
had treated domestic violence quite differently from other forms of
assault, often blaming the victim and releasing the offender to enact retri-
bution for the wife's temerity in bringing charges against her partner.
Social welfare agencies often refused to provide aid to women who left
their abusive husbands, arguing that the husband's income made them
ineligible for assistance.
The grassroots political activities of women have produced major
changes in all of these areas, including domestic violence training for
police officers, special domestic violence units in some police forces,
Protection from Abuse Orders that allow the courts to intervene early in a
reported pattern of violence, mandatory arrest laws for domestic violence
that take the decision out of the hands of the terrorized woman, welfare
system recognition of the special needs of battered women, and legal deci-
sions that recognize the 'battered woman syndrome' as a mitigating factor
in female violence against abusive partners. 10
 Michael P. Johnson 289
SOSIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON VIOLENCE AGAINST
WOMEN IN THE FAMILY

During the same period in which the women's movement was changing
the face of societal reaction to wife-beating, social scientists were begin-
ning to turn their attention to the problem. There are two major streams of
this work, one which is generally referred to as the 'family violence per-
spective', the other which we will call 'the feminist perspective'.

The Feminist Perspective

Research from the feminist perspective began with a specific focus on the
plight of women who are the victims of wife-beating, developing a litera-
ture that is organized around an understanding of factors specific to
violence perpetrated against women by their male partners. 11 Methodo-
logically the feminist analysis has relied heavily upon qualitative interpre-
tations of information provided by battered women, especially those who
have come into contact with law enforcement agencies, hospitals, or shel-
ters. Statistics from these agencies suggest that at least one million,
perhaps over three million, U.S. women are beaten by their husbands each
year. The qualitative research based on interviews with women who come
into contact with shelters indicates that the beatings occur on average
more than once a week, and escalate in seriousness over time, often ending
in serious injury, sometimes in death. The violence is initiated by the
husband, most wives never attempt to fight back, and among those who do
about one third quickly desist. In only a small minority of the cases do the
women respond with self-defensive violence.
These patterns have led researchers in the feminist tradition to conclude
that violence against women in the family has its roots in the sexist struc-
ture of the U.S. family. The central motivating factor behind the violence
is assumed to be a man's desire to exercise general control over 'his'
woman, a desire that is rooted in patriarchal traditions that give men the
right to beat their women if they 'misbehave'.

The Family Violence Perspective

Work in the family violence perspective grew out of family scholars' interest
in family conflict in general, rather than out of a specific interest in violence
against women. In the early 1970s a research agenda was developed based on
the use of survey interview techniques to elicit information regarding family
violence from large samples of the adult population of the United StatesP
290 Violence Against Women in the Family
These studies seem to indicate an interpersonal dynamic of violence that is
quite different from that described by the feminist perspective, one in which
the conflicts of family life occasionally get 'out-of-hand' in some families
(about 16% in the United States). The violence is no more likely to be initi-
ated by men than by women, and although such conflicts may sometimes
erupt into serious, even life-threatening forms of violence, most of the inci-
dents do not involve actions that are likely to cause serious injury. There
appears to be little likelihood of escalation of the level of violence over time.
This pattern of violence has led researchers who work in the family violence
perspective to emphasize a variety of causes of couple violence, most of
them common to other forms of family violence as well. They include,
among others, 1) the everyday tensions of family life, 2) the privatization of
family dynamics and relative freedom from scrutiny by those outside the
nuclear family; 3) the general American acceptance of 'minor' forms of viol-
ence; and 4) patriarchal norms of family power.'3

Two Forms of Violence

In the debate that has arisen between the feminist researchers and the
family violence researchers, the feminists have argued that the description
of violence against women that is derived from family violence research is
seriously flawed and simply cannot be reconciled with the results of femi-
nist research. Much of the family violence researchers' response to these
critiques has been in the form of rebuttal to specific criticisms of method-
ology or interpretation, and the debate continues to be framed as a con-
tention over the validity of two radically different descriptions of the
nature of couple violence in the United States.
One simple resolution of these striking inconsistencies lies, however, in
the position that there are two qualitatively different forms of violence
against women in the family context, exhibiting quite different patterns of
interpersonal development and different cultural roots. It can reasonably
be argued that the two research traditions are in fact dealing with distinctly
different types of violence, and that their findings and interpretations are
generally reconcilable, once one recognizes that the two literatures do not
deal with the same phenomenon. The dramatic differences in the patterns
of violence described by these two research traditions arise because the
methodological decisions of the two traditions have given them access to
two different, largely non-overlapping populations, experiencing two dif-
ferent forms of violence. 14
Large sample survey techniques such as those used by the family vio-
lence researchers are unlikely to provide access to families that are
 Michael P. Johnson 291
embroiled in the type of violence described in the feminist research tradi-
tion. Men who regularly beat their wives are likely either to refuse to par-
ticipate at all, or to misrepresent seriously the extent of their violence. The
women whom they beat are likely to refuse to respond to survey
researchers out of fear of provoking violent reactions from their husbands.
In contrast, families in which couple violence is only intermittent, an
unusual response to family conflict, are unlikely to come into contact with
the public agencies that are the source of information for the feminist
researchers. The woman or man who is struck or pushed by his/her partner
a few times a year will not in most cases report the incident to the police,
or go to a shelter, or file for divorce or need to seek medical treatment.
Thus, one form of family violence, described in the research tradition of
the family violence researchers, involves occasional violent responses to
the ordinary conflicts of family life. It does not necessarily escalate or
involve a general pattern of male dominance and control.
The second form of violence against women in the U.S. family, which
is described by the feminist research tradition, and which has been the
focus of the women's movement, is rooted in traditions of the patriarchal
family that award men the status of 'head of household' and entitle them
to respond to insubordination with corporal punishment. The pattern
described in the feminist research tradition involves a man who takes this
mandate to its limit, systematically utilizing economic subordination,
threats, isolation, violence and a variety of other tactics as a form of terror-
istic control of his wife. 15 If his partner resists his control, he may escalate
the level of violence until she is subdued. Even if she submits, some of
these men may be motivated not only by a desire to control, but by a need
to display that control, yielding a pattern of violence in which no amount
of compliance can assure a wife that she will not be beaten: 'For a woman
simply to live her daily life she is always in a position in which almost
anything she does may be deemed a violation of her wifely duties or a
challenge to her husband's authority and thus defined as the cause of the
violence she continues to experience' . 16

IMPLICATIONS FOR VIETNAM

Systematic Wife Abuse and Intermittent Family Violence in Vietnam

Although Vietnamese social scientists do not yet have available to them

extensive data on systematic wife abuse, a number of scholars have
addressed the issue of violence against women in the home. Thai Thi Ngoc
292 Violence Against Women in the Family

Du's research on divorce in Ho Chi Minh City 17 offers some evidence that
Vietnamese women must sometimes leave a marriage to escape mistreat-
ment. Almost twice as many petitions for divorce are filed by wives as are
filed by husbands. In 1991 83% of the divorce petitions filed in Ho Chi
Minh City were based on grounds of family conflict, beatings or mistreat-
ment. Although we cannot be certain how many of these involve systematic
beatings, data in the United States suggest that it is unlikely that a woman
would file for a divorce over intermittent violence. Furthermore, Thai Thi
Ngoc Du's discussion of the causes of divorce includes the very type of
patriarchal thinking that has been argued to be the primary cause of patriar-
chal terrorism (systematic wife abuse) in the United States: 'The remnants
of the old feudal ideology or ways of life still exist among men. Not only in
rural areas, but in Ho Chi Minh City among the low culture level strata,
images of "husbands as masters and wives as slaves still exist,..' Or as Le
Thi Quy puts it: 'Recently the spirit of thinking highly of men and slighting
women, a product of Confucianism, seemed to be restored in some places.
In reality, when getting married, many men, in the countryside and moun-
tainous areas in particular, think of their wives as their thorough depen-
dents like the ploughs and hoes. The arbitrary and patriarchal habit is more
amplified when they give themselves the right to decide everything and
punish in their homes' .18 Compare this with the proclamation of a Scottish
man when his wife protested against her beating on their honeymoon: 'I
married you so I own you.' 19
It is even harder to know the extent to which Vietnamese families are
subject to intermittent violence. The research in the United States indi-
cates that such violence rarely comes to the attention of the authorities,
and is therefore unlikely to be detected by any means other than survey
research, the kind of research that has not as yet been carried out to any
large extent in Vietnam.

Some Thoughts About Policy

There are two basic means of approaching the problem of violence against
women in the home: change the behaviour of men or help women to
escape from the men who beat them.
Changing Men. There are three basic approaches to changing the
behaviour of men. First, we can address educational efforts to changing aU
men's (and women's) ideas about family life. Second, we can attempt to
educate specific men who are known to mistreat their wives. Third, we
can make the costs of such behaviour high enough and certain enough that
even the most patriarchal of men will control their behaviour.
 Michael P. Johnson 293
Social scientists in the United States must be sceptical about the
efficacy of education for addressing the problems of patriarchy, because
decentralization of decisions regarding educational curricula and wide-
spread access to a variety of private media resources both militate against
the possibility of providing consistent anti-patriarchal messages to the
general population. In Vietnam, however, centralized control of education
and the media, and the presence of networks such as the eleven-million-
member Vietnamese Women's Union offer the potential for effective
widespread educational efforts. The Women's Union leadership in Hanoi
is already focusing some of its resources on the issue of gender aware-
ness. Through its own networks throughout Vietnam, and through its
influence on the central government, the Women's Union may be able to
put together an effective nationwide campaign of anti-patriarchal educa-
tion that will affect the next generation of Vietnamese boys in ways that
will dramatically reduce the incidence of violence against women in the
home.
With respect to particular men who have already abused their wives,
although the United States experience has been quite mixed with respect
to re-education programmes, it is likely that the Vietnamese context may
allow for more effective action. When we asked about reactions to viol-
ence against wives in Vietnam, the following steps were described to us.
First, the family tries to put pressure on the man to mend his ways. If that
is not effective, the family may go to the Women's Union and they will
bring the man before the village Women's Union committee to be warned
about his misconduct. If he continues to beat his wife, he will be brought
before the entire community and punished as appropriate. All of these
steps are taken before the criminal justice system is brought into play, and
all but the first are approaches to the problem that are not available in the
United States.
If the Women's Union were to develop a systematic plan for dealing
with abusive husbands, it has the resources and the local networks that
can make true community-based education of offenders more effective
than it is in the United States. The strength of Vietnamese ties to commu-
nity and family, combined with the influence of a national Women's
Union with committees at the local level can come together to provide a
powerful force for re-education.
Finally, when all else fails, Vietnamese wife-beaters are brought before
the courts. In the United States twenty years ago the police and courts
were reluctant to interfere in what was perceived as a private family
matter. There have, however, been major changes in the law related to
domestic violence and in the attitude of law enforcement officials regard-
294 Violence Against Women in the Family
ing the application of those laws. Some jurisdictions have moved to
mandatory arrests and jail time for men who beat their wives. The courts
are beginning to realize that by the time this problem comes to the atten-
tion of the authorities, the men's behaviour will only be changed if they
believe that punishment for beating their wives is certain and severe
enough to act as a true deterrent. In Vietnam the Women's Union might
look into the Vietnamese experience in the courts and encourage policies
that will intervene swiftly and surely when re-education efforts fail.
Helping Women to Escape. Perhaps even more than in the United
States, the Vietnamese context encourages an emphasis on the tactics dis-
cussed above, attempts to change the behaviour of men so that families
can be kept together. Both Le Thi Quy 20 and Thai Thi Ngoc Du 21 argue for
keeping families together, the latter arguing for steps that will reduce the
incidence of divorce, and the former arguing against an approach that
helps women to get out of an abusive home. Although keeping families
together is a laudable goal, the experience in the United States is that
many men who abuse their wives are simply intractable and the only solu-
tion is to help women to escape from them.
The central issue involved in helping women to escape is the availabil-
ity of viable options of which they are aware. In the United States two
developments have dramatically increased women's ability to escape from
men who repeatedly abuse them: the shelter movement, and the develop-
ment of Protection from Abuse Orders in the courts. Shelters for women
who are battered by their partners are not primarily places for women to
live. They are organizations that provide women with alternatives to
staying with an abusive man. In order to escape, women need first a means
of ensuring their safety, and second a means of constructing an econom-
ically viable life for themselves and their children. Shelters provide the
first by offering temporary housing in a safe place and/or help in getting a
court order that protects them from the abuser. In the United States we
have found that one of the most dangerous times for women who are bat-
tered is when they are trying to end the relationship with their batterer.
Men who batter are often deeply committed to maintaining their control
over their wives and are especially likely to turn to extreme violence when
their wives attempt to escape from that control. Shelters provide tempor-
ary safe housing while the courts move to protect the woman in ways that
will allow her to live safely in her own home. Protection from Abuse
Orders often order the abuser to leave the home, to desist from any form
of harassment, to remain a specified distance away from their victim, and
to provide reasonable support for their children. Violation of the order
results in swift imprisonment and fines.
 Michael P. Johnson 295
Once a woman is safe, she needs to be able to develop a means to
support herself and her children. Shelters help in this effort by educating
women regarding the various ways in which the state can provide econ-
omic aid. In the United States these include government food stamps that
can be used to purchase food, clothing from various public and private
charitable organizations, subsidized housing and direct financial aid.
Shelter staff also connect women with job training programs or educa-
tional opportunities that can lead to longer-term solutions to the difficulties
of supporting a single-parent family.
The Vietnamese Women's Union. In Vietnam it is easy to imagine the
central role that the Women's Union could play, not only in education and
re-education efforts, but also in the development of programmes that
would function much as shelters do in the United States. The Women's
Union has local committees throughout the country that could develop
facilities that would provide temporary housing for women and their chil-
dren, and facilitate co-ordination with the courts and police to provide
long-term protection from abuse. The Women's Union already has educa-
tion programmes for women that help them to develop skills that improve
the economic viability of the household economy. The president of the
Women's Union is also a member of the Presidium and is therefore in a
position to recommend national policies that would be designed both to
influence the behaviour of men, and to help women to escape from them
when that is necessary. Through organizations such as the Centre for
Women's Studies, the Women's Union could support research that would
document the extent of the problem of violence against wives, and would
track the effectiveness of the various means of intervention discussed
above.
In the United States progress on the issue of violence against women in
their homes has depended almost entirely on the efforts of informal
women's organizations that have had to rely heavily upon the volunteer
work of women, voluntary economic contributions, and grassroots politi-
cal organization to influence government policy. The going has been slow.
Vietnam has the tremendous advantage of having in place an organized,
officially sanctioned network of eleven million women that can do the
work at the community level to educate men and protect women, and that
can function effectively at the national level to affect official policies that
are designed to improve the lives of women generally, and of women who
are battered in particular.
296 Violence Against Women in the Family
Notes

I. Nguyen Du, The Tale of Kieu, translated and edited by H11ynh Sanh Thong,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
2. United Nations, Violence Against Women in the Family, New York: United
Nations, 1989.
3. Le Thi Quy, 'Some Views on Family Violence', Vietnam Social Sciences, 4
(1992), pp. 80-87.
4. Le Thi, 'Gender, Growth and Scientific Study on Women', Vietnam Social
Sciences, 4 ( 1992), pp. 3-10.
5. Le Thi, 'Women, Marriage, Family and Sex Equality', paper presented at
Seminar on the Family and the Condition of Women in Society, Institute of
Social Sciences, Ho Chi Minh City.
6. R. Emerson Dobash and Russell P. Dobash, Violence Against Wives, New
York: The Free Press, 1992; Susan Schechter, Women and Male Violence,
Boston: South End Press, 1982.
7. Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women's Liberation: A Case Study of an
Emerging Movement, New York: David McKay Company, 1975.
8. Schechter, p. 33-34.
9. Kathleen J. Ferraro, 'The Legal RespQnse in the United States', in
J. Hanmer, J. Radford and E. Stanko (eds.), Women, Policing and Male
Violence, London: Routledge, 1989.
10. Dobash and Dobash (1992).
II. Dobash and Dobash (1979), Del Martin, Battered Wives. Volcano, CA:
Volcano Press, 1981.
I 2. Murray A. Straus and Richard J. Gelles (eds.), Physical Violence in
American Families, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990.
13. Murray A. Straus and Christine Smith, 'Family Patterns and Primary Pre-
vention of Family Violence', pp. 507-26 in Straus and Gelles (1990).
14. Michael P. Johnson, 'Patriarchal Terrorism and Common Couple Violence:
Two Forms of Violence Against Women in U.S. Families', Journal of
Marriage and the Family, 57 (May I 995).
15. I will occasionally refer to this form of violence as 'patriarchal terrorism'.
See Johnson (1995).
16. Dobash and Dobash (1979), p. 137.
17. Thai Thi Ngoc Du, 'Situation of Divorce and its Influence on Women and
Families in Ho Chi Minh City', paper presented at Seminar on the Family
and the Condition of Women in Society, Institute of Social Sciences, Ho
Chi Minh City, 1993.
18. Le Thi Quy (1992), p. 83.
19. Dobash and Dobash (1979), p. 94.
20. Le Thi Quy (1992).
21. Thai Thi Ngoc Du (1993).
Part VI
Beyond War
24 Women After Wars:
Puzzles and Warnings
Cynthia Enloe

Wars don't simply end.

And wars don't end simply.
Most of us who have observed wars or experienced them first hand
know both of these things. Still, there is the temptation to give any process
a too neat starting date and too neat ending date. To do so makes the world
seem more manageable, more susceptible to human understanding. At no
time is this temptation more potent than when we are analyzing a war.
Then we are subject not only to our historian's urge to assign definitive
dates; we are, in addition, inclined to put the hurtful past behind us, to
look forward, to get on with our lives. But to give in to this combination of
emotional and intellectual urges not only, I think, risks general analytical
naivety; it risks seriously underestimating the differences between
women's and men's experiences of post-war social change.
'Gender awareness' is a phrase now being used by United Nations
women officials in order to describe an attitude, a way of seeing.
Advocates of doing research equipped with 'gender awareness' argue, I
think very convincingly, that paying close attention to how ideas about
womanhood and manhood shape individuals' behaviour and institutions'
policies will produce a much more realistic understanding of how this
world operates. If as scholars and activists we don our 'gender awareness'
eyeglasses, we will be able to make better sense of how foreign invest-
ment affects a local community, we will be smarter in figuring out how
family dynamics shape citizen participation, and we will be better able to
explain why policy-makers forget to ask certain questions at all.
In this chapter I will try to use gender awareness, then, to spell out what
seems to me to be some of the lessons about the often unequal post-war
conditions that women's studies research has revealed. The research and
the lessons it has generated come from countries as diverse as Zimbabwe,
Japan and France. But currently some of the most important analyses of
the ways in which post-war social processes are gendered - that is, are
fuelled by informal and official presumptions about femininity and mas-

299
300 Women After Wars: Puzzles and Warnings
culinity - are coming from women's studies researchers in Vietnam,
scholars who themselves have experienced not one, but four wars that
tripped over each other's heels in deadly succession from the late 1930s
through to the late 1980s. Hopefully, the questions and tentative conclu-
sions that follow, therefore, will shed light on Vietnamese women's
complex experiences of post-war life. At the same time, what follows is
partly inspired by the work already done by this pioneering generation of
Vietnamese women's studies scholars.

MUSEUMS: INSTITUTIONALIZING POST-WAR MEMORIES OF

WARTIME WOMEN

The museum commemorating southern Vietnamese women's resistance to

colonialism and contributions to national liberation is situated, fittingly,
in one of the stately colonial mansions that still line many of the streets of
post-war Ho Chi Minh City. Its spacious front driveway and its high-
ceilinged interior remind today's visitor of an earlier era, an era when men
and women related to each other according not only to presumptions about
regional cultures, class rankings and ethnic backgrounds, but also accord-
ing to notions of the globally maldistributed resources for being 'civil-
ized', 'rational' and 'modern'. The earlier residents of this mansion most
probably were French women and men - and later perhaps Americans -
who imagined that Vietnamese women were born to serve. They were in
for a surprise.
The South Vietnam Women's Museum is one of the few in the world
today devoted entirely to the wartime risks, sacrifices and achievements of
women. It has been built with funds privately collected by southern
Vietnamese women themselves. Its displays are comprised of objects col-
lected by women from women. The captions interpreting each display
have been written by women. The guides and the directors are women. 1
Every war museum is in fact a post-war museum. It portrays wartime
experiences, but its design is based on post-war memories, post-war con-
cerns. Not until the shooting stops, the forced migrations end, the dust -
quite literally - settles, can anyone muster the time and resources to sort
out trivial from the significant memories and provide the latter with walls,
a roof and typed captions. Most war museums are inspired by not just
men's memories, but by masculinized memories. That is, it is not simply
that most war museums are funded and designed by men, usually men of
the elite; it is also that the assignments of significance or triviality -that is,
visibility or invisibility -are typically based on the gendered presumption
 Cynthia Enloe 301
that what men did must have been more important than what women did
in determining how the war was fought, how it ended and what its impact
is on post-war society. Men are on most war museums' centre stage
because war is imagined to be a masculinized process; women are the side
show because femininity, it is erroneously thought, does not, cannot shape
the course and outcome of a war. Thus it is the male policy-makers - of
governments and movements - who have their childhood photographs,
their diaries, their declarations, their furniture, their pipes and uniforms
featured in the standard war museum. Likewise in the masculinized war
museum it is male soldiers of all sides who have their battles mapped,
their weapons on display, their letters home under glass.
To underscore the presumptions informing a masculinized war museum
and to start suggesting the impacts of such museums on post-war women's
ideas about themselves, about the men in their lives and in the public
sphere generally, one might therefore compare the Ho Chi Minh City's
women's museum with any other museum in Vietnam. Or one might
travel to London and visit Britain's famous Imperial War Museum.
Responding to pressures from a new generation of British feminist war
historians, its curators have tried somewhat to demasculinize its displays
and its underlying messages. But thus far those efforts have made women
barely visible. On a recent visit I tried to imagine what would happen to
the very post-war understanding of war if, instead of just the present two
glass cases filled with women's ration books and 'support your boys'
posters, the Imperial War Museum's curators added a battlefront nursing
station - and perhaps even a brothel. 2
The displays in the Vietnamese women's war museum cover the period
beginning with the 1920s, a decade of lively Vietnamese debate over the
prescribed roles for women in family life and public life according to
Confucianist teachings, Vietnamese historical experience and new ideas
coming from France. It was also a time of autonomous women's organiz-
ing in Vietnam. But the museum curators' principal focus is the years
1945-1954, the time of the anti-colonial war against the French, and
1960-1975, the years in which nationalists waged war against the
Americans and their Saigon-based Vietnamese allies. More recent mili-
tary conflicts, on the northern border with the Chinese and to the west in
Cambodia, are not yet addressed by the museum. This makes women from
non-Vietnamese ethnic groups almost invisible. The implications for
women of the insurgent quality of the anti-French and anti-American wars
are made clear by displays showing photographs and testimonies of
women arrested by the Saigon regime and subjected to torture and impris-
onment. Rural women's participation is made visible by two statues. The
302 Women After Wars: Puzzles and Warnings
first, carved out of a highly polished dark wood, depicts an elderly woman
seemingly going about her ordinary routine of grinding betelnut with a
mortar and pestle, a motion that in fact was designed to alert resistance
fighters that enemy troops were nearby. A second statue, out of a smooth
cream-coloured stone, depicts a younger woman, stretched out on the
ground, one arm around her infant, the other grasping a rifle. The guide
explains to visitors that women such as the model for this statue gained
a well-deserved reputation for being able to hit American helicopters
overhead.
As in any museum, there are themes which float up to the surface
because of particular choices made by its curators. Some of those themes
are deliberately crafted. Others may be more subliminal. In this rare
women's war museum, one theme is that the Vietnamese women who par-
ticipated in the resistance and liberation movements never surrendered
their femininity. A woman could wield a rifle and suckle a child; there
was no need - and no desire - to choose between motherhood and nation-
alist combat. As all feminists know, this is an assertion fraught with politi-
cal pitfalls insofar as it covers up not only ideological contradictions, but
actual struggles that had to occur between fathers and daughters, perhaps
between mothers and daughters too, over what it meant to be a woman and
a nationalist. Any museum that leaves out contradictions and the processes
by which they are resolved -or left unresolved- has to remain a museum
as incomplete as it would be if the electrical outlets remained unwired.
One of the museum's glass cases, for instance, showed colourful,
careful needlework done by women while they were in prison, needlework
for which Vietnamese women are famous and which today is making its
way into the rapidly spreading international market economy. The guide
wants to be sure that visitors looking at this impressive embroidery not
only admire the skills behind it, but appreciate the wartime embroidery
as evidence that a woman who engaged in anti-colonial politics was a
feminine woman all the while.
This theme - femininity's compatibility with otherwise disruptive
nationalist wartime mobilization - is not unique to the Vietnamese
women's war museum. It is a theme - often far more bluntly insisted upon
- that runs through virtually every institutionalized remembrance of
women's active war efforts in every society for which we thus far have
accounts. And it is a theme with distinctly post-war significance.
Especially in wars fought to preserve the existing social order - e.g.,
World War II as waged by Americans- but even in wars fought to alter
the existing social order - e.g., the Rhodesian civil war as waged by
Zimbabwean rebels- there has been anxiety expressed about femininity.
 Cynthia Enloe 303
If women are mobilized to wage the war, if they are pulled out of the
kitchen, out of the farm field, will they lose their supposedly essential fem-
inine qualities: domesticity, sexual reserve, emotional sensitivity and
maternalism? While this anxiety may be expressed during any war in ways
that shape wartime decisions about military recruitment, personnel deploy-
ment, and political symbolism, it is a feeling that doesn't disappear when
the war is over. It may crop up in museums.
Some women are convinced during a war and immediately after that
war that any unconventional roles they played were assigned to them only
due to extraordinary wartime exigencies. These are the women who will
be most accepting of a post-war reimposition of pre-war gendered 'nor-
malcy'. They won't expect to run the post-war government; they won't
expect to be promoted to the higher-paying jobs; they won't expect their
husbands to take more responsibility for housework or for birth control.
By contrast, those women who see their new wartime skills and respons-
ibilities as challenging older notions about what is 'natural' or 'proper'
for a woman may well be reluctant to squeeze themselves back into pre-war
gender conventions once the shooting has stopped. How any war museum
- or school book, or popular movie or formal ceremony - engages with
these competing interpretations of wartime femininity will affect post-war
women's self-images and opportunities for generations to come. 3
The women's museum in Ho Chi Minh City does not represent, nor is it
meant to represent, the experiences of all southern Vietnamese women
who lived through the colonial period and the war years. Rather, its pre-
sentations are designed to make visible the contributions to the nation of
those southern women who refused to be co-opted by the foreigners and
their local allies, who became politically conscious in such a way that they
joined the anti-French and then anti-American nationalist movements.
A comparison with a United States effort might be useful here to
suggest how any women's museum involves choices not only about how
to interpret femininity, but also about which women to include at all. Out
of 7000 museums in the United States today, only three are devoted
exclusively to women. The newest is the Women of the West Museum. It
eventually will open in Boulder, Colorado, though now it is still in its con-
ceptualizing and fund-raising stage. It will not formally be called a war
museum. But because conflict for control of that region now referred to as
'the American West' so often escalated into open warfare, one might think
of this new Women of the West Museum as at least in part a war museum.
During the crucial years of planning, this museum's designers are asking
each other hard questions, questions that probably would have a familiar
ring to some of the southern Vietnam women's museum organizers: which
304 Women After Wars: Puzzles and Warnings
women will be represented in the museum? which dimensions of those
women's lives are important enough to be made visible? Perhaps they
even will ask each other, 'What is the "West"?' 4 The particular answers
they reach will determine how 'women' will be defined for future visitors.
But those answers also will dictate what lessons visitors will derive from
the displays, lessons about the range of behaviours that can be classified as
'feminine', lessons about what events open up opportunities for women
and what events close them down. Also the Vietnamese women's war
museum, like its Colorado counterpart, will generate lessons about
women's relationships to men. They will suggest - by omission or comis-
sion - either that the very violence of inter-state wars reduces the violence
of men against women in their own families or that violence at the public
level often exacerbates it at the private level. This is what an accurate
Salvadoran or Serbian women's war museum display would show. Neither
the Vietnamese nor the American women's museum curators have dared
broach this politically delicate topic- yet.
A museum is made of brick and electrical cable, but it doesn't have to
be any more fixed than a memory is. As women re-imagine what hap-
pened to them during a war and what they contributed to that war, a
women's war museum might be redesigned. A 'post-war' era in any
country lasts as long as its people have a stake in debating exactly what
wartime experiences meant. Many of those debates are about what it
meant during that war to be a woman or to be a man.
Thus it is possible that future southern Vietnamese women museum
curators will add new rooms to include new ideas and new groups. For
instance, a new wing might serve to make visible the lives of those
Vietnamese women who during the 1940s or 1960s remained politically
uncommitted, women who devoted their daily energies merely to coping
with colonial humiliations and wartime dangers, even women who at least
superficially cast their lots with the foreigners for reasons we may not yet
fully fathom. Adding such a new wing would make the women's war
museum less celebratory. It could indeed cause the visitor to question,
even to scowl. But it would produce a museum that would suggest the full
impact of gender on the waging of war. It would thereby help post-war
lessons to be more fully informed by 'gender awareness'. Did the pre-
sumptions about femininity's relationship to transplanting rice or building
irrigation dikes change during wartime? How were the relationships
between mothers and fathers in the raising of children upset by military
conscription and government arrests? This isn't the stuff of heroism, but
making it visible, giving it material meaning and explicit labels would
reveal just how deeply any war is a series of surprisingly gendered events.
 Cynthia Enloe 305
Such an expanded museum of womeri in wartime could throw new light
on why prostitution became so integral to both the French and American
wars in Vietnam. Why did women who fled villages become prostitutes
servicing soldiers in the towns and around the foreign military bases? A
reimagined women's war museum could help us understand, in other
words, all of the ways a particular war becomes gendered. Such a museum
could also help us to understand what the 'nation' meant to women who
chose to stay on the political sidelines in the midst of a dislocating war.
It would throw into even sharper relief the processes by which ideas
about 'womanhood', 'daughterly loyalty', wifely support', and 'motherly
sacrifice', could inspire some women to cast off in boats on moonless
nights, while they prompted other women to smuggle messages, endure
prison and shoot down helicopters.
Other Vietnamese women's studies researchers might direct their atten-
tions northwards, to the modern, well-financed and handsome Ho Chi
Minh Museum in Hanoi. There, amid the beautifully designed displays
depicting the history of the Vietnamese nationalist struggle through the
life of Ho himself, women are virtually invisible. It is clear that none of
the curators of this impressive museum travelled from the capital down to
Ho Chi Minh City to discuss their plans with the curators at the women's
museum. Or perhaps those making the choices for the sparkling Ho Chi
Minh Museum about what was serious, what trivial concluded that pre-
cisely because the Women's Museum existed, they were licensed to
design a conventionally masculinized museum. As Vietnamese women's
studies researchers dig into the deeply gendered realities of the wars
against the French and the Americans (and their Vietnamese allies), they
will have the opportunity not only to subtly redesign the women's
museum, but to intervene radically in the currently nationalist but still
patriarchal flagship of Vietnamese war museums in Hanoi. The amount of
resistance they encounter in either of these ventures will be a measure of
the extent to which ideas about wartime femininity and masculinity
remain politically charged twenty years after the end of the nationalist
war.
War museums are powerful institutions. They bestow the mantle of
'seriousness' on only some memories, but not others. They preserve some
interpretations, but not others. By the very sequencing of displays - what
is placed next to what, what comes after what - a museum can imply an
explanation for why at least some people acted the way they did during the
war. All of these choices, all of these selective inclusions and cause-and-
effect sequencings, help shape post-war relationships between women and
men and between various groups of women themselves. We, the post-war
306 Women After Wars: Puzzles and Warnings
visitors, walk out of any war museum with ideas newly backed up by
graphic images. We come away with stronger beliefs about how our
society got to be the way it now is; we, the post-war museum goers, come
away from our hour among the statues, glass display cases and mural
paintings with firmer ideas about who deserves the credit or the blame for
that. We also wander out into the sunlight with lasting notions about role
models- negative as well as positive: the kind of men worth admiring, the
kind of women to emulate, the sort of masculine behaviour that is abhor-
rent, the kind of feminine behaviour that deserves contempt - or maybe
just forgetting.

MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE AFTER THE WAR

Most war museums, which are most masculinized war museums, don't
have much to say about widows. They have even less to say about the
wives of male soldiers who fought on the winning side and managed to
survive the war. Banished from the murals and display cases altogether in
these conventional war museums, those institutions designed to teach us
what the war meant, are the wives of male soldiers who survived but had
the misfortune to fight on the losing side. But marriages go on after a war
ends. And many of those marriages are forever changed because of the
gendered dynamics of that war.
Wars have their endings inside families. Just as putting on one's 'gender
awareness' eyeglasses allows one to see a war museum in a new light, so
donning those same lenses enables the keen observer to think about post-
war marital relationships with a fresh understanding of what wartime
gender dynamics do to relationships between women and men in the years
after that war.
If the family is assigned that crucial status by nationalist officials, intel-
lectuals and organizers, then disruption of marital relationships is likely to
be imagined not just to weaken a family, but to threaten the very fabric of
the nation itself.S Such a belief imposes a burden on any woman or man
who considers divorce. It might also make courts and other state institu-
tions reluctant to facilitate divorce proceedings. At no time is nationalism
more salient than during wartime. If the family is being described by
wartime mobilizers and their supporters in the popular culture as a
wartime resource, analogous to the agricultural harvest and a skilled work-
force, then divorce will become especially hard to legitimize during
wartime. This will be true despite the fact that the war itself may generate
new tensions in an already strained marriage. In fact, American feminist
 Cynthia Enloe 307
historians have found that divorce rates did decline during the 1940-1945
period. French feminist historians have found the same. 6 Women were
expected to keep up morale on the home front. In practice, that meant
silencing themselves when writing to their husbands and lovers on the bat-
tlefronts. 'Dear John' letters (which told of new romances, of ardour
cooled) allegedly were written only by cruel women, women who cared
little for their soldier and their nation. 7
Post-wartime is not simply a time when weary soldiers come home to
happy women and children. It can be a time of extremely difficult private
adjustments. These adjustments may be - mistakenly - trivialized as
merely domestic or private because they take place outside the public
arena, behind closed family doors. But in reality, every one of these
adjustments - the successful and the unsuccessful - is a building block in
creating the post-war society. Many post-war governments in fact count
on women to bear the brunt of these adjustments. Officials in many gov-
ernments struggling with post-war economic dislocations need women to
step aside when male veterans come home expecting to take over the paid
jobs that women assumed during the war. They expect women who have
become independent managers of households to at least feign dependency
when their veteran-husband returns to the family expecting to find a role to
fulfil. They often expect a woman to provide physical and emotional
therapy if her husband returns damaged by the war, therapy that the
strapped post-war government itself lacks the capability to provide for its
returning soldiers.
It is no wonder that under these conditions, divorce rates in many post-
war societies rise. Vietnamese women's studies researcher Thai Thi Ngoc
Du, for instance, has found that divorce rates in Ho Chi Minh City rose
markedly in the years following the end of the war in 1975. She also dis-
covered that women were as likely as men to initiate those divorces. Many
of these women note that the long separations imposed by wartime condi-
tions made their husbands strangers to them. Furthermore, many women
married to men who were sent away after 1975 to re-education camps -
camps that were established in a deliberate effort to recreate a post-war
society - found the extended separations intolerable. 8 In post-war
America, by contrast, divorce rates declined to levels lower than the
1930s. 9 The marriages on which the nuclear family depended in these
post-war years came to be seen as proof of United States superiority in the
emerging cold war rivalry with the Soviet Union. 10 But even this interna-
tional scenario could not contain the impetus for divorce in America for a
long time. By the late 1960s women and men were ending their marriages
at an unprecedented rate.
308 Women After Wars: Puzzles and Warnings
SHRINKING MILITARIES WITHOUT PRIVILEGING MEN

Thus marriages have both wartime and post-war careers. If divorce rates
rise after a war has ended, then women's relationships to the waged labour
force will change as well. It could well be that if women divorce, or are
divorced by their husbands, they will need waged work not only to support
themselves, but to support their children. This newly urgent need for
women to have access to decently paid jobs may come precisely at a time
when the government wants to demobilize a mostly male military force. It
is not inconceivable, therefore, that in many post-war societies the newly
divorced woman and the newly demobilized male veteran will be com-
petitors for the same post-war job.
If there were an American equivalent of the South Vietnam Women's
Museum, certainly 'Rosie the Riveter'- the 1940s welding torch-wielding
icon and the actual women who came closest to matching her - would
have pride of place. And in fact many of the women portrayed in the Ho
Chi Minh City museum do capture a similar spirit insofar as they are rep-
resented as having tom themselves away from conventional feminine roles
and from personal routines and aspirations in order to carry ammunition,
feed guerrillas or relay secret messages. They were joined by thousands of
women in the North who played similar wartime roles that were heralded
at the time and for the years after 1975 as having been crucial for the
Communists' and nationalists' victory over the American forces and their
local allies.
But post-war eras can last more than a generation. They can extend into
future generations if their members believe they too have a stake in think-
ing about the war's implications for them, not just for their parents. Thus it
is that young Vietnamese women visit the museum in the south to find
models for themselves, though in the larger Hanoi museum they have to
search much more diligently to spot a woman to model themselves after.
Thus too it has been American women who are the daughters, even the
grand-daughters of World War II women industrial workers who have
invested intellectual energy in learning more about Rosie the Riveter -
again, both the symbol and the women she allegedly represented. 11
Vietnamese women researchers have scarcely begun this digging. It
may be too politically delicate, given that so many of the senior women
intellectuals are themselves of the generation that was active in the war
and given, too, that the same party and many of the same male officials
which led the fight against the Americans - and Chinese and Cambodians
- remain in power today. Finally, given that so much else of the past
nationalist and socialist programme is being thrown overboard for the sake
 Cynthia Enloe 309
of luring badly needed foreign capital, maintaining the halo around the
war itself has become in the 1990s all the more strategically necessary for
that regime. Yet research tracing Rosie the Riveter's post-war journey
back into the kitchen or back into low-waged service jobs has been done
in many cases by American feminist historians wanting to understand their
own mothers' not entirely voluntary domestication. 12 Perhaps younger
Vietnamese researchers will be prompted in the 1990s ·by a similar
motivation.
Militaries, as well as defence factories, undergo major transformations
after a war is over. But those transformations aren't necessarily in the
shape of mere personnel reductions. Some governments don't shrink their
militaries when wars end or enemies fade because of their gendered anxi-
eties. Often it is the very shortage of jobs 'fit for grown men' in the civil-
ian economy that makes government officials reluctant to demobilize
soldiers in a post-war era. The Nigerian government, for instance, was
slow to cut its forces after winning the Biafran war in the 1960s. Similarly
today the Russian government is reducing its military manpower at a
snail's pace because it cannot guarantee civilian employment for male vet-
erans. Even the American administration of President Bill Clinton, an
administration that came into office with relatively few emotional ties to
the military, is moving more slowly than many expected in cutting back
U.S. military personnel. All of these governments have dragged their feet
in demobilizing soldiers for fear that veterans will join the unemployment
lines, as so many did in the post-war years following the end of the
Vietnam war.
And 'fear' is the operative word here. Many government officials
responsible for cutting military manpower in a post-war era act out of fear.
They are afraid of the disgruntled male veteran. Women veterans do not
seem to inspire the same political worry. They are less specifically organ-
ized. They do not control other influential public organizations. Few mili-
tary manpower strategists in any country lie awake at night worrying
about women veterans conspiring to perform a coup or creating dissident
clubs that will foment discontent in the general public. The woman veteran
becomes invisible in these officials' minds because they imagine her
simply returning to what she does 'naturally' - caring for her children,
emotionally supporting her husband, taking most of her personal satisfac-
tion (even if she had a paid job) out of unpaid domestic work. This official
imagining is the opposite side of the fear-of-the-unemployed-male-veteran
coin. As is usually the case in any sphere of gendered public policy - poli-
cies about housing, about land ownership, about population control -
official decisions about male citizens rest upon official presumptions about
310 Women After Wars: Puzzles and Warnings
female citizens. Conducting public policy research in a post-war era,
therefore, calls for gender awareness precisely because I) any policy
choices make distinctions between women and men and 2) most of the
policies concerning men could not be rationalized without supporting
arguments concerning women.
Thus a women's studies researcher needs to be curious about any post-
war image of the unemployed male veteran that makes senior government
officials nervous. It will have profound effects on that society's women.
But this does not mean that officials' worries are totally unrealistic. In
countries as different as 1930s Germany, 1950s Yugoslavia, 1980s France
and United States, and 1990s Zaire and South Africa, male veterans have
turned themselves into a potent political force. They mobilize out of their
sense of patriotism and betrayal: they have sacrificed for their country,
and now they come home and discover that women and other men have
taken 'their' jobs. Similarly, in Vietnam it has been male veterans' clubs
which have formed the base of the emergent non-party opposition in
recent years. Government officials have responded by treating male veter-
ans economic expectations gingerly. Consequently, when the post-war
unemployment rate for women markedly exceeds that for men, women's
studies analysts would be wise to look for at least part of the cause in man-
agers' and government officials' gendered fears and gendered notions of
political anxiety and patriotic gratitude to help explain the jobs gap.
When any military shrinks, it usually changes its ethnic, gender and class
composition. That is, the kinds of soldiers that the defence officials let go
are rarely random. The soldiers who are the first to be demilitarized are
likely to be disproportionately from those ethnic and racial groups that the
military senior command finds less compatible, even less 'reliable'. These
are often the men from the same ethnic and racial groups that the military
was reluctant to mobilize in the first place. 13 In Vietnam, the smaller army
of the 1990s is likely to be a more thoroughly ethnic Vietnamese army.
Especially since the demobilization following Vietnam's withdrawal from
Cambodia in the late 1980s, fewer hill tribes women, fewer ethnic Khmer,
Cham and Chinese women will be living their lives as the wives, mothers
and girlfriends ofthe government's soldiers.
In class terms, it is likely to be those soldiers who come from the more
affluent social classes that are able to get demobilized earliest: first, because
their continued enlistment may arouse the sort of political discontent that
governments want to avoid at the end of a war; second, because these are
the sorts of young people more likely to be able to find jobs in the post-war
economy and thus not so quickly swell the disturbing ranks of unemployed
veterans. Foreign investors now crowding Hanoi's and Ho Chi Minh City's
 Cynthia Enloe 311
best hotels are playing their part in this military reconfiguration insofar as
they are offering private sector opportunities disproportionately to men
already relatively advantaged in the Vietnamese social structure. Thus how
the wife of a southern, ethnic Vietnamese educated soldier experiences
Vietnam's post-war society might be quite different from how the wife of a
northern hill tribe peasant soldier experiences those same years.
There is still a third dimension of a shrinking military's social transfor-
mation. That is its re-gendering. There has been a marked preference by
post-war military commanders to demobilize women soldiers before
letting go of male soldiers. In the Soviet Union, the United States and
Britain, World War II was fought with thousands of women joining men
in the uniformed forces. But a after 1945 all three of these governments
deliberately demobilized women at a much more rapid pace than they
demobilized men. Their presumption was adopted by the male leaders of
many liberation armies as well: while both female and male soldiers had
been necessary during the war, a post-war, peacetime military could- and
should - revert to its 'natural' core of male soldiery. These planners
imagine the somewhat (not entirely) demasculinized wartime military to
have been an anomaly. They consequently design their post-war military
demobilization in order to remasculinize the military. 14 In the 1990s South
Africa, Haiti and El Salvador all are in the process of shrinking their mili-
taries, though analogies with Vietnamese demobilization should be made
with caution since the armies of the former have been the objects of wide-
spread loathing, while that of the latter still is held in high popular
regard. 15
If the Vietnamese military continues to consume a significant portion of
the national budget and if it continues to carry significant influence in the
country's policy-making, then it cannot be to Vietnamese women's advan-
tage to have that important institution made devoid of women. Vietnamese
women, like those in South Africa and El Salvador, face the choice of
being satisfied with visibility behind glass in a museum, pressing the gov-
ernment to recruit more women into a still-prioritized military or pushing
for a genuinely demilitarized society in which neither military needs nor
masculinized presumptions determine job opportunities or public status.

POST-WAR ECONOMIC RECONSTRUCTION: WHERE ARE THE

WOMEN?

Museums, divorces, demobilization- each of these are crucial realms for

making sense of women's and men's differer\t experiences of post-war
312 Women After Wars: Puzzles and Warnings
society. But probably the area that most citizens concentrate their attention
on is economic reconstruction.
Precisely because post-war economic construction occurs in most coun-
tries amid physical destruction and severe financial constraints, it is a
process that demands choices. In an environment of shortages choices are
especially likely to have pronounced gendered consequences.

• Who should get the sort of training that requires the most expensive
equipment?
• Who should be hired for the first big construction projects?
• Whose aspirations to manage foreign-capitalized firms should be
listened to most carefully?
• Whose unpaid work should remain unpaid in order to stretch scarce
post-war dollars or dong the furthest?
• Whose sexuality should be the principal target of population control
programmes in the attempts to reduce the pressures on food resources
and on the fragile labour market?

Each of these questions must be addressed by citizens in any society

who are trying to rebuild their country after a prolonged war fought on its
soil. The post-war rebuilding process can widen the gap between the
economies of men and the economies of women, sending out gendered
ripple effects far into the future, into a time when the merely physical
damages of war have been repaired. When, with the help of the World
Bank and foreign companies, the bridges along Vietnam's famous Route 1
have been rebuilt, when the Ho Chi Minh City airport's runways have
been repaved, when the Mekong and Red river irrigation networks have
been restored and new energy stations are constructed, the more subtle
inequalities between Vietnamese women and men may be deeper than
they were just before the economic reconstruction began because each of
these reconstruction projects carries the risk of gendered implementation. 16
If men are considered the 'natural' employees on transportation and
energy projects, and if construction workers are presumed to be skilled
workers deserving of better pay than, for instance, pig farmers or garment
factory workers, then every construction project and pig raising effort and
garment factory investment will rebuild postwar Vietnam in a fashion that
widens the gap between men's and women's wages- even if Vietnam's
current laws guaranteeing equal pay for equal work are enforced.
Precisely because economic reconstruction infuses so much new capital
into a society, it is a process that needs to be monitored with a sharp eye as
to its gendered dynamics. Yet there is a natural inclination to push gender
 Cynthia Enloe 313
concerns aside. Women as well as men are eager to repair roads and com-
munications networks, to increase agricultural output, to catch up with the
rest of the world which has been spared devastating wartime destruction.
In the name of this national goal, women usually are asked to put their
hopes on 'the back burner'. They are often made to feel as though they are
being unreasonable, even selfish and unpatriotic, if they raise questions
about whether as many women as men will be trained for the highest-
paying jobs being generated by reconstruction funds. 'Later', women are
often told. Later, after this urgent campaign of economic reconstruction is
completed, women's access to the skilled construction jobs, the manufac-
turing management positions, the administrative policy-making posts will
be addressed. But by waiting until after reconstruction - that is, until the
post post-war period- women are likely to lose opportunities for training
and income that will set them back for decades.

CONCLUSION

The post-war era in any country is a time fraught with gendered decisions.
Memories are being fashioned in museums out of selected images.
Lessons are being set in reports and school books out of presumptions
about masculinity and femininity. Militaries and labour forces are being
reconstituted according to officials' gendered anxieties and popular
gender-inattentive impatience.
It is precisely in these years when the sounds of guns and helicopters have
been replaced by the sounds of farm animals and construction machinery
that women and men could diverge, could be nudged along paths that lead
them in quite different directions. Policies about men are always made
dependent on policies about women. Policies about women are always built
on policies about men. But this sort of mutual dependency does not guaran-
tee that post-war decisions will ensure that real equality emerges when
wartime flows into peacetime. The post-war era is a time that calls for acute
gender awareness by researchers and policy-makers alike.
314 Women After Wars: Puzzles and Warnings

Notes

1. I had the good fortune to be part of a small group guided through the
women's museum in January 1993, thanks to arrangements made by
Dr Kim Quy, director of the Women's Studies Research Center of the Ho
Chi Minh City Social Science Research Institute.
2. I have tried to think more about what adding a brothel display would do to a
military museum's message about women's relationships to soldiers in 'It
Takes Two', in Saundra Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, Let The Good
Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia, New York: The New
Press, 1992, pp. 22-29.
3. Among the most detailed and interesting accounts of efforts to weave pre-
war conventions of femininity into women's new wartime roles are: Lois
Browne, Girls of Summer: In Their Own League, New York: Harper
Collins, 1992; Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender
and Propaganda during World War II, Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1984; Leisa D. Meyer, 'Creating G.l. Jane: The
Regulation of Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in the Women's Army Corps
during World War II', Feminist Studies 18, no. 2 (Falll992), pp. 581-602;
Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and
Lesbians in World War II, New York: Plume, 1991; Ruth Roach Pierson,
'They're Still Women After All', The Second World War and Canadian
Womanhood, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986; Claudia Koonz,
Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics, New
York: St Martin's Press, 1987; Irene Staunton (ed.), Mothers of the
Revolution: The War Experiences of Thirty Zimbabwean Women,
Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991; Sita Ranchod-Nilsson,
'Women and Democratization in Southern Africa: The Legacy of
Zimbabwe's Liberation War for Women's Politics After Independence',
paper presented at the International Studies Association- Midwest Meeting,
Michigan State University, November 20-21, 1992 Karen Kampwirth, 'The
Mother of the Nicaraguans: Dona Violeta and the UNO's Gender Agenda',
paper presented at the Conference of the Latin American Studies
Association, Los Angeles, CA, September 24-27, 1992 Mary Ann Tetreault,
'Democratization and Women in Kuwait', paper presented at the
International Studies Association - Midwest, Michigan State University,
November 20-21, 1992.
4. I am grateful to Clark University historian Sarah Deutsch, herself a
researcher on women of several racial groups whose actions together helped
create what is now thought of as the American West, for sharing with me
some of the ideas that are being discussed in the planning for this new
museum. For more information, contact: Women of the West Museum,
250 Bristlecone Way, Boulder, Colorado, 80304, USA.
5. For a description of the debates about the nature of the family among
Vietnamese male and female nationalists during the 1920s and 1930s, see:
Hue-Tam Ho-Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese
Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. I have tried
to think through the relationships between nationalism and notions of
 Cynthia Enloe 315
womanhood and masculinity in several countries in: Cynthia Enloe,
Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
6. D' Ann Campbell, Women at War with America: Private Lives in a Patriotic
Era, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984; Sarah Fishman,
We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War, 1940-1945, New Haven,
Yale University Press, 1991.
7. Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith, Since You Went Away: World War
11 Letters from American Women on the Home Front, New York, Oxford
University Press, 1991.
8. Thai Thi Ngoc Du, 'The Situation of Divorce and Its Influences on Women
and Families in Ho Chi Minh City', paper presented at the Seminar on
Women and the Family, Ho Chi Minh City, January, 1993. A revised
version of this paper appears in this volume.
9. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War
Era, New York: Basic Books, 1988, p. 185.
10. Loc. cit.
II. The following discussion is based on a number of new feminist studies of
World War II women industrial workers: Honey, op. cit.; Miriam Frank,
Marilyn Ziebarth, and Connie Field, The Life and Times of Rosie the
Riveter, Emeryville, California: Clarity Educational Productions, 1982;
Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and
Social Change, New York: Penguin Books, 1988; Studs Terkel, 'The Good
War'; An Oral History of World War Two, New York: Ballantine Books,
1984.
12. One example of research so motivated, but focusing on American women
who went into more professionalized, white-collar war jobs is: Adelaide
Sherer Bennett, 'War Stories: Upper Middle Class Women in Worcester,
Massachusetts', unpublished Master's thesis, College of Professional and
Continuing Education, Clark University, Worcester, MA, 1992.
13. I have discussed this practice of ethnically defined mobilization at length in
Ethnic Soldiers: State Security in Divided Societies, London and Athens,
GA: Penguin Books and University of Georgia Press, 1980.
14. Irene Staunton (ed.), Mothers of the Revolution; Sita Ranchod-Nilsson,
'Gender Politics and National Liberation: Women's Participation in the
Liberation of Zimbabwe', unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern
University, 1992.
15. I have discussed this process at greater length in: The Morning After: Sexual
Politics at the End of the Cold War, Berkeley and London: University of
California Press, 1993.
16. Murray Hiebert and Susumu Awanohara, 'Ready to Help: Agencies Prepare
their Menus of Projects', Far Eastern Economic Review (April 22, 1993),
p. 71.
Appendix
DOCUMENTS ON STATE POLICIES WITH REGARD TO WOMEN

1992 Constitution of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

Article 63
Citizens, female and male, enjoy equal rights in all fields: political, economic,
cultural, social and inside the family.
All acts of discrimination against women, hurting women's human dignity are
strictly forbidden.
Women and men who are doing the same work should enjoy equal pay. Female
labourers have right to maternity leave. Women who are State employees and
wage earners are entitled to paid maternity leave before and after childbirth
according to legal regulations.
The State and the Society create conditions for women to improve their knowl-
edge level in all fields, to constantly bring into full play their role in society; the State
and the Society care for the development of maternity wards, paediatric departments,
creches and other social welfare establishments, to create good conditions for women
to produce, work, study, cure their diseases, rest and fulfil their motherhood duties.

Article 64
The family is the cell of the Society. The State protects marriages and families.
Marriages are based on the principles of free consent, progress, monogamy, equal-
ity between wife and husband.
Parents have the duty to bring up their children into good citizens.
Children have the duty to respect and care for their parents and grandparents.
The State and the Society do not admit any discrimination between children.

Article 65
Children are protected, cared for and educated by the Family, the State, and the
Society.
Reprinted from Vietnam Social Science, 1992.

STATE LAW ON 'LABOUR SAFETY'

Promulgated by the State Council (September 10, 1991)

Article 19
It is forbidden to use female labourers in very strenuous or noxious works, com-
pelling them to get into touch directly with toxic chemicals, insecticides, de-
foliants, substances to poison rats which can affect their motherhood duties.

317
318 Documents on State Policies
People under 18 years old should not be used in works which can badly affect
their physical and intellectual development.
The list of jobs where it is forbidden to use female labourers and people under
18 will be worked out by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labour.

LAW ON MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY

(December 29, 1986) (Excerpts)

Chapter I
General Stipulations
Article 1: The State guarantees the implementation of a matrimonial regime
based on free consent progress, monogamy, equality between the spouses, and
designed to promote a democratic, harmonious, happy and solid family.
Marriages between Vietnam citizens of different ethnic groups or religions,
between religious and nonreligious people, shall be respected and protected.
Article 2: The spouses have the duty to practice family planning. The parents
have the duty to bring up their children into citizens useful for society.
The children have the duty to respect and care for the living of their parents.
Article 3: The State and the society protect mothers and children and help
mothers to achieve a good performance of their noble maternal function.
Article 4: It is prohibited to practice early marriage, forced marriage, to hinder
marriage based on free consent and progress, to demand for riches on the occasion
of marriage and betrothal, to impose divorce under constraint. A married person is
forbidden to contract a new marriage or to cohabit with another person. It is pro-
hibited to ill-treat and persecute one's parents, wife or husband and children.

Chapter II
Marriage
Article 5: Man of 20 years upwards and woman of 18 years upwards shall be
allowed to marry.
Article 6: Marriage is contracted according to the free will of the people con-
cerned, neither side is allowed to use constraint against the other, no third person is
allowed to use constraint or to cause hindrance.

Chapter III
Duties and Rights of the Spouses
Article 10: The spouses have equal duties and rights in all respects in the family.
Article 11: The spouses are duty-bound to be faithful to each other, to Jove and
esteem each other, to care for each other, to help each other make progress, to
practice together family planning.
The husband is duty-bound to create for his wife favorable conditions for a good
performance of her maternal function.
[ ... ]
 Documents on State Policies 319
Article 15: The common property is used to meet the common needs of the
family.
The spouses have equal obligations and rights regarding the common property.
Purchases, sales, exchanges, donations, loans borrowings and other transactions
involving property of great value require an agreement between the spouses.

Chapter IV
Duties and Rights of Parents and Children
Article 19: The parents are duty-bound to love and care for the living, study and
wholesome development of their children physically, intellectually and morally.
The parents must practice no discrimination among their children. The parents
must set good examples to their children in all respects and coordinate action with
schools and social organizations in the education of their children.
[ ... ]
Article 21: Children have equal duties and rights in the family. Children have
the duty to respect and care for the living of their parents. They have to listen
attentively to the latter's advice.
[ ... ]

Chapter VII
Divorce
Article 40: When the wife or the husband, or both have an application for
divorce, the People's Tribunal shall proceed to an investigation and make an
attempt for reconciliation[ ... ] If the reconciliation effort does not succeed, the
people's tribunal shall judge the affair. If the situation is considered to be serious,
common life cannot continue, the purpose of marriage cannot be attained, the tri-
bunal shall pronounce a divorce.
Article 41: In case the wife is with child, the husband can ask for a divorce only
one year after the wife has delivered the child.
This restriction does not apply in case it is the wife who asks for a divorce.
Article 42:[ ... ] In case of divorce, the common property of the spouses is divided
into two parts, due account being taken of the state of property, the concrete situation
of the family and the contribution made by each party to the acquiring thereof.
[... ]
The household work is regarded as a productive one.
In the sharing of property, the interests of the wife and minor children, the legit-
imate interests of production and the profession must be protected.
[ ... ]
Article 44: The divorced spouses continue to have all rights and duties with
regard to their common children.
Article 45: In case of divorce, the problem of entrusting minor children to which
person to look after, care for and bring up must be solved in taking into account of
the children's interests in all respects; in principle, unweaned babies shall be
entrusted to the care of the mother.
320 Documents on State Policies
The person who does not keep the children has the duty and the right to pay visit
to, and care for them, and must contribute to expenses occasioned by their
upbringing and education. In case of delay or refusal to make contribution to
tribunal shall decide to deduct from the income of the failing party or compel it
to pay those charges.
Index
abandoned wives 68, 70,149,227
see also absentee husbands
abortion 93-109, 134, 141, 143
by age 98, 100
complications 104-{i
and desired family size 100-1
education 98-9
family planning 93-4
fear 106, 107
gestational age 96
influence and support 106-7
interview bias 97
issue 94-6
material and methods: communes
96
occupation and economic levels
97-8
rate 107-8
ratio to live births 95
religion 98
sample selection and method 97
unwanted pregnancy, reason for
101-4
absentee husbands 66-71 , 79-80,
227,229,232,233,234
abstinence after delivery 103
Aburdene, Patricia 162
accidents 200, 201, 204
adoption 278
adultery 80, 83, 268, 270
see also concubines; polygamy;
prostitution
Africa 126, 128, 141
Agarwal, Bina 258
agrarian to industrial economy
transition 280
agriculture 246-52
feminization 44
land capital and credit, access to
250-1
mechanization 119
new technologies 247-50
rural households 251-2
see also rural
321
AIDS 144, 145, 151, 162
Allman, James 123, 129, 130, 134,
138
allocation of time 110-22
allowances 177, 188
Anh, Tran Thi Van 214-25, 250-1
anti-colonialism 38-9
arranged marriages 154
artificial insemination 256
Asia 149, 151, 152, 163, 165
agriculture 251, 252
education 126
forests 253, 254, 255
polygamy 159
prostitution 155
see also South-East
association-run units 187
August Revolution 264
Australia 145, 153,251
award systems 170, 172
Bangladesh 219, 251
'bank for the poor' 189
Barry, Kathleen 1-18, 144-56
'battered woman syndrome' 288
Belgium 276
Ben Tre uprising 47, 48
Berry, Mary Frances 118
birth rate 94
Bond, Michael Harris 22
Boserup, Ester 251
breastfeeding 103, 127, 132, 141,
201
Britain 30, 52, 276, 311
Buddhism 27, 28, 29, 31, 32,42
Burgess, Ann Wolbert 276
Bums, Lee 120
Buruma, Ian 27
Cambodia 144
demobilization 308, 310
museums 301
war with Vietnam 111
Cao Dai 45
322
capital 241
access to 250-1
borrowing 240-1
see also loans
Capital Aid Fund 189
Catholic church 41-2,52
and abortion 96, 98, 99
Centers for Research on Women 120
Central Bank 223
Central Women's Association 242
Centre for Women's Studies 295
child care 117, 118, 119, 165
and employment combination 128
and working conditions 222-3
child spacing 101,103,107
childbearing
and employment 203, 204
support 113
childlessness 72
children
demand for I 25, 126
and domestic violence 271, 272
and homelessness 182
Children of the People strategy 46-7
China 26, 146, 177
Confucianism 22-5
demobilization 308
museums 301
and prostitution 144
Revolution 51, 288
status, decline of 21, 27-37
passim, 53
war with Vietnam Ill
Chu Khac 116
City's People Committee 189, 190
City's Trade Union 189
City's Women Association 244
Civil Rights Act 1964 113
class 310
'classes of love' 240
Clinton, Bill 309
Cochrane, Susan H. 125-6
Colombia 124
colonialism 41, 51
commodity economy 120, 233, 240,
241,263
communes 96
Communist Party 45
community organizations 208
Index
competition movement 170
concubines 268-9
condoms 95, 102, 104, 137
Confucianism 21-37,51,56,263-4,
292,301
China 22-5
gender and revolution 38
Japan 26-8
Korea 28-30
and rape 277
Vietnam 30-3
see also nco-Confucianism
consciousness-raising 288
contraception 94, 97, 127, 137, 141,
142
alternative methods 108
breast-feeding 103
costs 101-2
and education 134, 135
failure 102, 103
forestry workers 231
and homelessness 183
injectables 137
methods 95, 103, 135
Norplant implant 137
pills 95, 102, 108
rhythm method 102, 103, 135, 142
withdrawal 135, 142
see also condoms; family planning;
IUD; sterilization; vasectomy
Coontz, Stephanie 13
counselling 108
credit, access to 250-1
Crimmins, Eileen M. 125
culture 163, 189, 200, 269-70, 273
Dang Cong labour battalions 41
Dang Thanh Le, Professor 194
Dankelman, Irene 254
Daoism 32
Dau, Lady 31
Davidson, Joan 254
death of spouse see widowhood
decentralization 43
deforestation 252-4
demobilization 308-11
Democratic Republic of Vietnam 39,
41, 42, 43, 50, 52
demographic imbalance 112
 Index 323

density of Vietnam 94 punishment 273, 294

Diem, Ngo Dinh 42,44-5,47, 52 solutions 271-4
Dinh Cong Hung 178 systematic wife abuse 292
Dinh, Nguyen Thi 45-6,47,48, 56 visible 266-70
diseases 183, 202 cultural and social background
occupational 200 269-70
divorce 62, 67-70 passim, 74-86, economic causes 267-8
165,319-20 educational standard 268-9
annual divorces granted by age health causes 270
group 78 see also domestic violence in
causes 81-3 Vietnam and United States
differences in modes of living or below
outlook on life 81-2 domestic violence in Vietnam and
economic differences 82 United States 287-96
external factors 82-3 contemporary women's movement
characteristics of petitioners 77-9 287-8
and childless women 72 implications 291-5
children, effects on 84 policy 292-5
consequences 83-4 systematic abuse and intermittent
and domestic violence 266-7, 269, violence 291-2
292,294,296 sociological perspectives 289-91
evolution 76-7 family violence perspective
with foreigners 81 289-90
forestry workers 227, 234 feminist perspective 289
household labour 118 forms of violence 290-l
Law of Marriage and Family 84-5 double standard and sexual assault
mothers, effects on 83 283-4
petitions and reasons 79-81 DRVN see Democratic Republic of
population shift 75 Vietnam
post-war 75-6, 306-7, 308, 311, Duong Thi Cuong, Dr 137
315 Duong Thoa 257
prohibition 113 Duyen, Duong Thi 56
rural areas 212
seven reasons 33 East Asia 21-37
society, effects on 84 China 22-5
war and effects 74-5 Japan 26-8
Doan Thi Diem 32 Korea 28-30
doi moi (renovation) 113, 114, 124, Easterlin, Richard A. 124-5, 126,
137, 144, 167-78, 179 130, 134, 138
conditions for learning 176-8 Eastern bloc 119
labour objectives 186, 189 Eastern Europe 161, 180, 187
and loans 220 economic
production and business activities change 25
168-74 development see industrialization
working conditions 174-6 equality 41
domestic violence 263-74 function 61, 231-2
effect on lives 270-1 levels 97-8
intermittent 292 reconstruction 311-13
invisible 263-6 reform 115
324
education 38,51,165
abortion 98-9
attainment 126-7, 136
college to university level 192,
193, 194
compulsory 192
conditions for 176-8
domestic violence 266, 268-9,
272,292-4,295
family 233-5
and fertility 128, 130, 131, 132,
134, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143
forestry workers 231
gender preference 114
gender relations 113
and health protection 204
homelessness 183
and infant and child mortality 141
levels 193
andloans 215
multiple effects 125
prostitutes 184
rural areas 211,212,213
school fees exemption 192
women in paid employment 119
Egypt 30
Eisen, Arlene 47,48
Eisler, Riane 22
El Salvador 311
Elimination of Discrimination against
Women Convention 113
employment
and childbearing 203
conditions 164-5
creation 161-2, 240
and education relationship 132,
134
and family, equal importance to
161
and fertility 130, 132, 139
and homelessness 179
paid 117, 118
and process of change 160
status 137, 141, 143
women in business 162-3
Enloe, Cynthia 10-11, 299-315
equalpay 114,312
Equal Pay Act 1963 113
equal rights Ill, 112
Index
Equal Rights Amendment 112
equality 161, 166
and domestic violence 264
employment 162
home and workplace 119
labour objectives 190
political 41
sexual assault 279
social conditions impact 282
and techno-scientific field 196
Europe 25, 145, 153, 177
see also Eastern; Western
Evans, Grant 22
examination system 30
export oriented industrialization 145
export processing zones 113, 121,
152
export-import 172, 177
extended families 25, 65, 147, 215
extramarital affair see adultery
Fairbank, John K. 28
family 39-48, 165
complete 66
concept 62-3
disputes 181
education 233-5
enlarged 82
functions and position 61-2
generations 227
happiness 119,227,278,282
labour see household employment
relationships 45
size 63-6, 100-1,229,230
structure 63-6
traditional 62
wage jobs 112
see also extended; family feudalism;
family planning; nuclear; single
parent
family feudalism 25, 159, 161
and domestic violence 268
and prostitution 146-8, 154, 155
and rape 277
and sexual assault 283
family planning 97, 165
and abortion 93-4, 96, I 00, I 04,
108
centres 231
 Index 325

forestry workers 229, 230 museums 301, 305

and homelessness 183 post-wars 299
opposition 72, 127 rape 276
policy 278 Revolution 51,52
rural areas 212 see also French occupation
services 13 7 freedom of choice 212
and Total Fertility Rate 134 French occupation 38, 41, Ill, 192,
violations 176 194
and working conditions 176 polygamy 40
see also contraception; fertility; two traditional roles for women 277-8
child policy Frenier, Mariam Darce 21-37
feminism 289, 290-1 fringe benefits 169, 176
feminization of agriculture 44
fertility Gates, Hill 23
curbs 203 gender
decline 134-9 awareness 299,304,306,310
disincentives 138-9 blindness 279
and education relationship 125-6 equality 71-3
and employment relationship 127-8 gendered ripple effects 312
and family planning 124-34 and revolution 38-57
high 123 family 39-48
and homelessness 183 substance and status 49-50
incentives 138-9 symbols and status 48-9
regulation costs 125, 126 generational replacement 212
see also total fertility rate genetic factors 125
filial piety (hieu) 147, 149, 273 Germany 167,310
Fitzgerald, Frances 45 Ghansyam Raturi 253
Flanagan, Timothy 276 Gian, Lady 31
foreign currency 171, 172, 173 Giap, Vo Nguyen 44
foreign investment 137, 188 god-dominated religions 22
Foreign Trade Bank 172, 173 Goodstein, Lynne 275-86
forestry workers 226-35 government-run organizations 186-7
forests 252-6 Great Society anti-poverty programme
deforestation 252-4 112
gender differences 254-5 Green revolution 247-8, 249-50
reforestation 255-6 growth rate of Vietnam 94
former Soviet Union 116, 119, 161, GVN 46,55
187
demobilization 309, 311 Ha Thi Phuong Tien 199-204, 247
homelessness 180 Haines, David H. 33
marriage and divorce post-war 307 Haiti 311
Revolution 51 Halberstam, David 42
Foster Mothers' Associations 46 handicrafts 208,209, 210, 211, 212
Fox, Mary Frank 282 Hayslip, Le Ly 149, 150, 284
France 39, 146 health
anti-French nationalist movements care system 141
303 concerns 248,249,256-7
demobilization 310 and domestic violence 270
feminism 307 protection 199-204
326 Index

Heber Jones, George 29 income 165

Hesse Biber, Sharlene 282 increase 203
Hima Devi 253-4 per capita 207
hired labourers 182 India 124
Ho Chi Minh City Museum (Hanoi) Chipko movement 253-4
305,308 Working Women's Forum 251
Ho Xuan Huong 31, 90 Indochinese Communist Party
HoaHao 45 40
Hoang Thi Khanh 185-90 industrialization 43, ll9, 120, 160
Hoang Thi Lich 191-8 and economic development
Hochschild, Arlie 118 144-56
Holmstrom, Lynn Lytle 276 prostitution 146-53
home-based enterprises 115 sexual assault 283
see also handicrafts infant and child mortality 132, 133,
homeless and street-women 179-84 140-1, 142
exodus of rural women 180-1 institutional changes in rural areas
life and activities 182-3 207-13
proposals and projection 183-4 Mekong Delta 207-13
Hong Kong 177 International Monetary Fund 114
household International Whores Congresses in
concept 63 Amsterdam 153
employment 195-6, 200 IUD 94-6, 103, 104, 108, 137, 142,
labour 117, 118, 273 176
size 115 forestry workers 229
see also family; household
economy Jameison, Neil 149
household economy 233, 236-45 Japan 145, 151, 177
borrowing capital 240-1 and agriculture 251
making of 187 Confucianism 26-8
participation measures in hunger and doi moi (renovation) 167
poverty alleviation 242-3 gender and revolution 40
proposals 245 post-wars 299
VAC model (garden/pond/sty) and status, decline of 22, 28, 29, 30,
multi-branch business 243-5 31,32,35,36
women's role 241-2 Jiggins, Janice 248-9
housing conditions 233 job information centre 189-90
Hue-Tam Ho Tai 9, 10 job segregation by sex 114
hunger 237, 238 Johansson, Annika 93-109
alleviation 242-3 Johnson, Michael P. 287
Huynh Sanh Thong 146
Huynh Thi Hoa 173 Kempf, Elizabeth 252
hygiene 200 Kim Quy, Bui Thi 2, 3, 9, 159-66,
see also sanitation 278,285
Korea 146
Confucianism 28-30
ICP see Indochinese Communist forests 254
Party and prostitution 149
Imperial War Museum 301 status, decline of 22, 27, 36
incest 154, 285 Kuwait 314
 Index
labour 230, 241
objectives 185-90
distribution 186
female status 186--8
measures to be taken 188-90
productivity 195,203
Labour Safety State Law 317-18
labour-saving devices 120
LaMarr Kopp, Deputy Vice President
3 forced or forbidden 212
land
access to 250-1
reform policy 45
use allocation 114, 115
Latin America 126
Latourette, Kenneth Scott 24
Le Tan Danh 47
Le Thi 3, 5, 8, 15, 61-73, 114, 127,
247,256,287
Le Thi Chieu Nghi 236--45, 250
LeThiNhamTuyet 31,93-109,116
LeThiQuy,Professor 31,44, 144,
179-84,263-74,285,292,294
Lebra, Joyce 27
leisure time 116-17, 264-6
Liberia 248-9
Lipton, Michael 248
live births 99-100
loans of capital 214-25, 242-3, 244
difficulties 220-3
responsibility and system of
bonus 220-1
training and drilling 221-2
working conditions 222-3
opportunities 214-20
borrowing procedures 216--18
paying debt 219-20
reception of information 215-16
useofcapital 218-19
solutions 223-4
lonely families see single parent
families
Mac Duong, Professor 2, 3, 5
MacKinnon, Catharine 281
Maguire, Kathleen 276
Mai Thi Tu 31
Malaysia 277
management work 173, 174
327
Mancini, Kimberly 21-37
manual work 199
manufacturing 186, 187, 188
marital breakdown 181 , 182
see also divorce; separation
market economy 160-2, 263
Marr, David 9-10
marriage 77
and abortion 99
post-wars 306--7
under age 204
Marriage and Family law 84-5, 159,
318-20
Marxism 10, 11, 38, 116
mass media 223
maternity leave 113, 141, 161, 176
and domestic violence 272, 273
and sexual assault 279
matriarchal society 22, 23, 26, 28, 33
matrilineal society 22, 23, 31
matrilocal society 26, 31
Mekong Delta 207-13
Middle East 180
migration 65, 152, 184
and agriculture 252
forestry workers 256
and homelessness 180-1
Mikiso Hane 26
ministries 223
modernization 170, 186
monogamy 154,226
morality 67, 71, 80
mortality see infant and child
multi-branch business 243-5
Murasaki Shikibu 31
museums 300-6, 311
and femininity 302-3, 304, 305
masculinized 300-1, 305,306
Naisbitt, John 162
National Liberation Front 45-7,49,
55,56,57
natural disasters 237
neo-Confucianism 9, 24, 25, 28, 29,
30,32,34
gender and revolution 39
Nepal 254
Netherlands 153
328
newly industrializing economies 145,
152, 153
Ngo Chi Lan 32
Ngoc Phuong, Dr 137
Nguyen Du: Tale of Kieu 146-8,
155,287
Nguyen Khoa Dieu Hong 41
Nguyen Le Minh 169, 173
Nguyen Phuoc Dai 174
Nguyen Quang Vinh 207-13, 246,
249,251
Nguyen Thanh Tam 87-92
Nguyen The Lap 93-109
Nguyen Thi Bau, Mrs 196
Nguyen Thi Binh 50
Nguyen Thi Din 45-6,47, 48, 56
Nguyen Thi Dong 173, 174, 178
Nguyen Thi Hoa 138, 167-78
Nguyen Thi Khoa 226-35
Nguyen Thi Minh Khai 40
Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong 6-7, 137,
257
Nguyen Van Luong 47
Nguyen Van Sua 174
Nguyen Van Tri 174
Nguyet, Le Minh 173
Nhu, Madame 4 2, 52
Nigeria 309
NLF see National Liberation Front
non-governmental economic units 187
nuclear families 25, 64, 65
and divorce 82
forestry workers 228
andloans 215
and prostitution 153
nutrition 201
occupation 97-8, 142
Pacific countries 163
Pan Chao 31
Paramilitary Girls 42
passive resistance 45
patriarchy 23, 25, 31, 51, 52, 53
and agriculture 251-2
and domestic violence 265, 272,
293
forestry workers 235
gender and revolution 39
Index
and museums 305
and polygamy 159
and prostitution 145
and rape 277
sexual assault 278
social conditions impact 282
and violence 289, 291, 292
patrilineal society 26, 28, 29, 32, 33
pay-by-the-day system 168
Peasant Association 223
Pelzer, Kristin 14
People's Liberation Armed Forces 47
People's Revolutionary Government
47,50
People's War 42, 43
Phan Thi Phoung 173
Phan Thi Phu 174
Philippines 144, 146, 148
agriculture 249
and prostitution 149, 151
physical strength 199, 201, 203
piece work 170, 172
PLAF see People's Liberation
Armed Forces
poisoning 201
see also toxic chemicals
political equality 41
political mobilization see Women's
Union
polygamy 66-7
abolition 52, 68, 84, 159
legal 39-40
and prostitution 148, 152, 154
polygyny 226,235
population 75, 94, 123
Population Council 137
pornography 145,146,154,281
post-wars 299-315
adjustments and difficulties 75-6
demobilization 308-11
economic reconstruction 311-13
marriage and divorce 306-7
museums 300-6
poverty
alleviation 242-3
and prostitution 145
see also homeless and
street-women
pregnancy 99-100,201
 Index 329

and domestic violence 273 by acquaintances 275-6,282, 283,

termination see abortion 284,285
PRO see People's Revolutionary by intimates 275-6, 283, 285
Government by strangers 275-7, 282, 283, 284,
privatization of economy 120 285
process of change 159-66 -free societies 281
future needs 164-6 -prone cultures 281
market economy 160-2 victims 149
women workers today 162-4 reforestation 255-6
production 241 religion
and business activities 168-74 abortion 98
and consumption 231-2,233 see also Buddhism; Catholic church;
investment 173 Confucianism; Daoism;
productive labour 234, 235 shamanism
professional itinerants 181 remarriage 67, 68, 76, 83
propaganda 204 renovation see doi moi
prostitution 146-53, 162 Robins-Mowry, Dorothy 27
and domestic violence 271 Rodda, Annabel 257
elimination 190 Roh Chang Shub 28
family feudalism and trafficking in 'Rosie the Riveter' 308, 309
women 146-8 rural
forced 148, 149, 150, 155 areas and sexual assault 284
free 148, 149, 150, 155 households 251-2
and health protection 203 women 246-59
and homelessness 182, 183, agriculture 246-52
184 forests 252-6
increase 188 toxic chemicals and health
military 149-51 concerns 256-7
museums 305 Russia see former Soviet Union
normalization 153 Ruth, Sheila 282
prohibition 155 Rutnin, Mojdara Mattani 152
protection of women from 145
reduction 144 Sachs, Carolyn 246-59
sex industrialization and economic salary 188, 197
development 151-3 sale of children into prostitution 53
social conditions impact 281 Sanday,PeggyReeves 275,281,282
traditional roles for women 277, sanitation 202
278 scholarships 240
see also concubines; sale of science see techno-scientific field
children Self-Balanced Production and
Protection from Abuse Orders 288, Recovery of Hard Currency
294 policy 171, 172
public welfare projects 204 separation 67,68,69, 76, 77,85,165
services industry 187-8, 208, 209
quality of life 166, 203 sex
quality of women's work 163-4 imbalance 89-90
industrialization and economic
Rand Corporation 55 development 151-3
rape 154,275,276-7,285-6,288 segregation 29-30
330
sexual assault in Vietnam and United
States 275-86
agrarian to industrial economy
transition 280
defining and reporting 283-5
gender awareness 285-6
rape 276-7,285-6
social conditions impact 281-3
Socialist egalitarian agenda
278-80
traditional roles for women 277-8
sexual harassment 154, 281
in the workplace 277,278
shamanism 29-30
Shapiro, David 123--43
shelter movement 288, 294, 295
Shelton, Beth Anne 117-18
Shima Matsuhiko 28
Shiva, Vandana 253, 254
single parent families 62, 64, 87-92,
227,234
economic subsidies 91
andloans 215
recognition by law 91
rights 91
social prejudice and individual
happiness 87-9
see also abandoned wives
single women 77, 99, 256
skills 163
Sko~pol, Theda 51
Smith, Arthur H. 22
social change 25
Socialist egalitarian agenda 278-80
sociological perspectives and violence
289-91
South Africa 310, 311, 314
South Korea 177
South Vietnam Women's Museum
300-6,308
South-East Asia 177
Sri Lanka 124, 277
State Council 172
state policy documents with regard to
women 317
status 159, 161
decline of 21-37
raising 165
social conditions impact 282, 283
Index
and substance 49-50
and symbols 48-9
upgrading 211
sterilization 95, 104, 108, 137, 138.
142, 176
Stone, Merlin 22
street-women see homeless
'struggle' movements 41
substance and status 49-50
suicide 212
symbols and status 48-9
Ta Van Tai 32
Taiwan 24, 124, 129
Techno-scientific Association, Union
of 197, 198
techno-scientific field 191-2
achievements 194-5
duties 195-6
problems 192--4
recommendations 196-7
technology 212
temporary itinerants 181
Tetreault, Mary Ann 15, 38-57
TFR see total fertility rate
Thai Thi Ngoc Du 74-86,291-2,
294,307
Thailand 144,277
prostitution 151, 152, 153, 156
Third World 153
three-generation family see extended
Tocqueville, Alexis de 51
Tokugawa Iemetsu 27
total fertility rate 123, 129, 130, 134,
141-2
toxic chemicals 248, 249,256-7
traditional roles for women 277-8
trafficking in women 146-8
training 197, 203
courses and programmes 189,
210
and domestic violence 273
andloans 215,222,223
rural areas 211
Trang, Truong Nhu 48, 49, 57
Trieu Au 39
Trieu Da 31
Trung Nhi 31
 Index
Trung Sisters 31, 39
Truong My Hoa 3
Tuong,Lady 31
two child policy 108, 115, 123, 138
penalties 100, 101, 108
two-generation families see nuclear
family
unemployment 309
UNFPA see United Nations Fund for
Population Activities
United Nations 50, Ill, 121, 141, 299
and domestic violence 296
Fund for Population Activities 137
General Assembly 1967 113
and prostitution 154
violence 287
United States 21, 49, 74
and agriculture 45
allocation of time 110, 111
anti-American nationalist
movements 303
bases 56
bombing of north 43, 44
commoditization 120
deforestation 252
demobilization 308,309,310,311
doi moi (renovation) 167, 169
Elimination of Discrimination
against Women Convention
113
feminism 306-7
fertility and familiy planning 124
forces 46 · time
leisure time 117
military aid 42
museums 301, 302, .305
paid employment 118
and prostitution 145, 146, 149,
150, 151, 152, 153
toxic chemicals and health concerns
256
trade embargo 119
traditional roles for women 278
war 112,119
Women of the West Museum
303-4,314
women in work force 114
see also sexual assault
331
unmarried see single
urbanization process 65
VAC model (garden/pond/sty) 243-5
vasectomy 104
VBA see Vietnamese Bank of
Agriculture
veterans 310
Viet Minh 40-1,42,44, 45,46
Vietnamese Bank of Agriculture 214,
216-21 passim, 223, 250
violence
in the family 72
forestry workers 235
and prostitution 145
see also domestic
VNDHS 142
Vo Van Kiet, Premier 4
wage-occupational structure 229
war and effects 74-5
Warner, Jayne 14
Western Europe 28, 187
White, Christine 120-1
Whyte, R. 0. and P. 30
widowhood 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 76,
77,84
and abortion 99
forestry workers 226, 227
post-wars 306
and prostitution 149
and single parent families 90
women in industry see allocation of
Women of the West Museum 303-4,
314
Women's Advocates 288
women's movement, contemporary
287-8
Women's Solidarity Movement 42
Women's Union 40, 48, 51,56
abortion 107
allocation of time 111, 113, 120
domestic violence 293, 294, 295
education and jobs 114
labour objectives 187
loans 219, 223
rape 285
sexual assault 279
332 Index

Women's Union contd. Yao, Esther S. Lee 23

social conditions impact 282 Yarr, Linda J. 110-22
start-up capital 115 Yin-yang 24
techno-scientific field 194, youth groups 170
197 Youth Union 223
toxic chemicals and health concerns Yoyori Matsui 151
257 Yu Insun 32, 33
Woodside, Alexander B. 33 Yugoslavia 251, 310
working conditions 174-6, 200, 201, Yukichi, Fukuzaw 21
222-3
World Bank 114,247,254,312 Zaire 310
Zau,Lady 31
Xenos, Peter 139 Zimbabwe 142,299,302,314, 315