Vietnamese Women\u27s Movement for the Right to Live: The Constructive Nexus Between Nationalism and Feminism in the Vietnam War, 1970-1975

This thesis examines the historical roles of the Vietnamese Women\u27s Movement for the Right to Live (VWMRL, or the Movement) as a leading women\u27s urban antiwar movement that belonged to the politically neutral Third Force in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. In studying the Movement\u27s political efforts from 1970 to April 1975, the thesis seeks to accomplish three tasks. First, it reveals the detrimental effects of American military strategies and foreign policies on South Vietnamese women, who consequently opposed and fought to end the war through political action. Specifically, while various American pacification programs, including forced urbanization and the hasty use of chemical defoliants, helped engender widespread starvation, diseases, and social dislocation, search-and-destroy operations and the overwhelming prevalence of sexual violence, perpetrated by American troops against Vietnamese women, produced profound physical and psychological sufferings among the latter. Second, the thesis explores the ways in which nationalism and feminism, as two powerful historical forces, aided one another in the VWMRL\u27s struggle for both Vietnamese national independence and the liberation of Vietnamese women from the imminent impact of the war. Under the leadership of Mrs. Ngo Ba Thanh, a Western-trained lawyer and intellectual, the Movement organized various political programs and social events to denounce both American aggression and the authoritarian, corrupted regime of Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon. To this end, the thesis\u27 analysis of the political prisoners’ situation in South Vietnam illuminates both the United States\u27 unending commitment to supporting Thieu and winning the war, and the VWMRL\u27s relentless efforts to liberate Vietnam and its female citizens. Finally, the thesis\u27 study of the VWMRL dismantles assumptions of cultural essentialism that portray Third World women in general, and Vietnamese women in particular, as tradition-bound, inherently submissive, and politically naive. In contrast to these assumptions, many women in formerly colonized countries, such as Vietnam, historically emerged as politically aware and sophisticated antiwar advocates. In sum, this thesis contributes to Vietnamese women\u27s historiography, as well as the historiography of the Vietnam War, by reconstructing South Vietnamese women, who were neither Communist fighters nor faceless victims, as important elements and active participants in the history of the conflict. Significantly, the thesis serves as a reminder of the colossal and poignant impact of colonialism and imperialism on shaping Third World nationalist and feminist struggles. Exposing and understanding the history of such struggles, in turn, offers present and future advocates invaluable political and ideological tools to stage and win their own fights for women\u27s liberation, especially in countries where democratic liberties remain poignantly scarce