Women, Resistance and Revolution (35 page)

The following year the Union of Women for the Liberation of South Vietnam was formed and schoolgirls, college students, along with women workers and intellectuals, joined. Not only have women been fighting alongside men, they themselves have been responsible for liberating villages and setting up new administrations in border areas. Some women have also taken on the leadership of mixed units. For example Nguyen Thi Dinh is the first woman deputy commander-in-chief of the army, as well as president of the Women’s Union. Mme Binh is not just an exception.

The totalizing effects of the war continue to make it impossible to distinguish the liberation of women from national liberation. The long-haired army experiences the American presence most intimately. In a population of five million women, 400,000 are now prostitutes,
and young girls between 12 and 14 are quite commonly raped. South Vietnamese women learn about the value which western capitalism sets on human life, not only from the bombs that fall on their children at school, from the massacres in which none are spared, but from the toxic gases which wipe out vegetation, and have caused since 1961 an abnormally high percentage of miscarriages, stillbirths and deformed children, born with large heads and small brains. When you carry your child nine months in your womb, bear it in labour with death all around you, only to find the monstrous weapons of imperial technology have assaulted you even there, you carry the war deep inside you.

At a meeting with members of the women’s liberation movement in December 1970, Ma Thi-Chu, an executive member of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, described various ways in which women became identified with the national liberation struggle.
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They are involved as guerrillas in sabotage and ambush as well as liaison work. Members of the Women’s Union go into areas when the enemy is advancing to get young women to form units to fight. Although the young women take the uniforms away it is invariably old women who return wearing them. They say: ‘Why should our daughters be raped by American soldiers; let us old women have a go.’ The political side of the liberation movement is also important. Many previously uncommitted women have joined in as the horrors of the war have escalated. Recently women took the bodies of people killed by bombing and chemicals to the heads of provinces. One man became very embarrassed and said it was the fault of the Americans. When one of the women asked him who gave them the right to be there, he had no answer.

In 1970 a particularly flagrant and horrible case of rape drove a group of women in Saigon, who had not been part of the national liberation struggle, to form a Committee of Women fighting for the right to live and the dignity of Vietnamese women. The assertion of the Saigon authorities that the women (a mother and daughter-in-law attacked by American soldiers while they were working in the fields) had died of exhaustion, infuriated the women. As a result they organized a conference demanding the withdrawal of American troops. These are both relatively immediate and spontaneous responses, but the peasant women have an ingenious underground system of long-term organizing.

Ma Thi-Chu told us how they come into town expecting to demonstrate. They arrive imperceptibly in little groups as if they were going to markets, with their scarves round their heads and the older women hobbling along with sticks. Then suddenly they all converge on one spot. In an instant their scarves turn into banners and reveal slogans like ‘American Imperialist out of South Vietnam’. The old women’s sticks serve as poles. The women divide quickly into groups; one goes to the Head of the Province, another to government representatives, others to various heads of religious bodies. If one group gets their petition through they have to collect all the others. Frequently large numbers of women are arrested and secretly the town population has to be alerted and reinforcements of women brought in from the countryside. If the women aren’t released, great crowds of women just stay in the town for days and days. They bring their babies and children and camp outside official buildings making almost continuous noise and chaos – a combination of slogan-chanting and howling children. The South Vietnamese officials quite often give in, receive their petitions and release the prisoners because they don’t know how to deal with all these angry women and children.

The Women’s Union unites women of quite varied political and religious views and acts as a means of coordinating this kind of political demonstration, though the initiative remains with the women locally. It also tackles ‘problems which specifically affect women, like how to build up confidence and initiative when you have been taught to be diffident and submissive’.
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It also organizes help for those whom the war has left without relations or resources. Its members are very conscious that the kind of liberation which comes through the war is important, but that the task of liberating women once the Americans have gone is an immense and quite different problem. Ma Thi-Chu said that:

At the last congress members of the Women’s Union discussed the importance of making sure that women did fully benefit when victory is eventually won; and the congress determined to avoid the unfortunate experience of Algerian women, who helped in the fight for independence from the French but were unable to achieve their own emancipation.
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One of the women delegates in Paris with Mme Binh expressed a similar position to American members of women’s liberation:

She said she was sorry that we did not have time to talk about the United States’ ‘women’s struggle’. She went on to say that women in the South had been taking power, and that they know that there is another struggle when the war is over and are quite prepared for it. She expressed great solidarity with the women in the U.S. in their struggles.
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The American women did not find that women in the north felt conscious of the need for women to struggle as women after the war was won. This is probably partly because of the nature of the war: women have taken over the administration of the villages, but they don’t fight at the front; partly because the party organization is more cohesive and women have therefore taken action through it; and finally because the Communist Party has achieved very substantial improvements in women’s conditions, so the women feel a general commitment to the party, although they are not prominent in leadership positions.

As in China land reform was very important. From 1950 women could own equal allotments of land and receive equal wages paid to them rather than to the head of the family. The Constitution guarantees equal rights and equal pay, and maternity leave. The Labour Insurance regulations and other trade union laws provide further protection for women at work. But in practice great problems have arisen in securing the most basic equality for women. Despite official support women were hampered by their own lack of education and their own sense of inferiority and inadequacy. Regardless of party directives women continued to participate in work and politics in a secondary capacity. A few taught in the schools, but they did not run them. In the early fifties, it was still thought that education was actually harmful for a young girl. People said that if young girls learned to write they would spend the time making up love letters. Now, however, nearly all the women can at least read and write and since 1960 there has been an emphasis on higher education. It was very difficult for the older women, some of whom had nine children, to benefit from this, but the young girls have gone on and become trained in engineering and other technical subjects as well as the arts. Factories sometimes have their own song and dance troupes. A young spinner, Tran Bich Dao, after attending a course at the school of Theatrical Arts in Hanoi in 1963, returned to produce a play for the workers in her factory about the first textile strike in 1930. She is
interested in Stanislavsky, Brecht and Shakespeare. In the old days people looked down on actresses as immoral; now this has completely changed. Girls like Tran Bich Dao are seen simply as workers with a special skill.

The appearance of skilled women workers is relatively new. In 1954 there were only a few hundred women in industry and all of them unskilled. There were no forewomen or managers. The older women had been in the factories since they were twelve; their health impaired by bad conditions, they found it difficult to learn because their eyes were weak and they were not very strong, and their spirits were very crushed. Now women make up fifty per cent of the labour force but are still behind men in terms of skills. Gradually, as more of the young girls come into industry with a much better education this is evening out.

Within the structure of the party the same problems are reflected. Sometimes women who were appointed to responsible positions resigned because they were overwhelmed with the strain of the new tasks on top of housework and looking after children. In some cases their lack of confidence was not helped by men who made up the leading cadres in the area. They looked on the appointment of women as a threat and were scornful of their ability. The continuation of the war, however, forced even diehards to recognize the necessity for women taking over from the men who were away fighting. By 1960 it was apparent that the ‘Five Equals Plan’ – equality in fighting, in labour, in party leadership and administration, in management of the society, and in the family – needed to be made more practical. Women’s liberation was stressed at the Party Congress in September 1960, as was the need to ‘wage a persistent struggle against oppression of and contempt for women which are the last vestiges of the old ideology’.
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Last vestiges cling tenaciously however and there was opposition to the formation of special women’s groups because the men did not like the idea of women meeting on any terms. In one district called Thanhthuy, to counter the scorn of the men it was suggested that there should be an investigation of the work women were doing in various communes. This inquiry revealed that the women did more work days than men, knew as much about the situation in the fields, received less help, and had much less chance to learn. Then the real reasons for the men’s opposition came out into the open. ‘With the
women at the helm it will be the end of everything,’
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one party member complained. Resistance was only overcome by a great upheaval in local party democracy. A meeting was held which 540 women attended to describe their difficulties. In the course of this they criticized some leading party officials who had set ideas about the role of women. As a result many women were elected to run co-ops and communes, and self-criticism meetings were held in which the women voiced their complaints.

It is apparent that the combined force of the military situation and the commitment of the Communist Party have both pushed emancipation further, but that much has still to be done. Members of the Women’s Union in the north told Charlotte Bunch-Weeks that there were three areas in which they felt the women’s revolution was not yet complete: self-image (many women still felt themselves to be inferior to men); participation in politics (positions of responsibility in the government and administration are predominantly held by men); and finally equality in the family. The nuclear family characteristic of western capitalism has never existed in Vietnam, but polygamy was only outlawed by the marriage law of 1960. Until then in the countryside polygamy and child marriage were quite accepted and women weren’t allowed to divorce men. Not surprisingly the old attitudes linger on.

Ho Chi Minh introduced the law cautiously and explained its aims in a careful homely way:

There are people who think that as a bachelor I may not have a perfect knowledge of this question. Though I have no family of my own, yet I have a very big family – the working class throughout the world and the Vietnamese people. From that broad family I can judge and imagine the small one.
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He justified the new law on several grounds: the need to involve women in production, the need for harmony between husbands and wives, the need to liberate ‘half of society’, in order to build socialism. He was obviously wary of alienating the men but committed to women carrying out their own liberation. ‘The emancipation of the women must be carried out simultaneously with the extirpation of feudal and bourgeois thinking in men. As for themselves, women should not wait until the directives of the Government and the Party free them but they must rely upon themselves and struggle.’

In some ways the war has created a basis for women’s liberation, but in other ways it acts as a limit on what can be achieved. This is well illustrated in welfare facilities which affect women. Possibilities for communal canteens, child care, home services, and nurseries are restricted because military needs have to take priority. But even so under continual bombing nursery facilities exist for fifty per cent of the children in the north, and voluntary cooperative groups called the ‘three look-afters’ care for the children, cook the rice and shop for other women. In the towns service teams help working women with cooking and sewing. It is difficult to develop these nurseries and kindergartens educationally because they have to be evacuated and moved around all the time to avoid the bombs. It is also impossible for the young men to share this work with the women because they are needed at the front.

Scarcity affects medical services and birth-control methods available. There are very few mechanical devices like diaphragms and the coil, the pill is not available, and though the Women’s Union gives out information, the rhythm method is still the most common. Moral persuasion has to be the substitute for contraception. Members of the Women’s Union urge girls not to marry until the mid-twenties, and not to have more than five children, though traditional ideas about the value of large families, and concern to keep the population up because of the war, combine to undermine the full force of this propaganda. In the north the women do not seem to feel it necessary to try to break down sexual role distinction. They expect that after the war women will return to light work; in the kindergarten they are unconcerned that the girls sing and dance and the boys fight. Quite often in posters and films women are presented in supportive roles, doing embroidery for their husbands at the front. The contradiction does not seem to be apparent to them.