Virginia Morris & Clive Hills
A unique study of the female spies who undermined the American offensive in Vietnam, complete with previously unpublished maps showing former safe-houses, secret army camps, and routes taken across Indochina.
The Vietnam War is one of the most documented conflicts in recent history but one of the forgotten aspects of the war is the vast underground network of the Vietcong which ran from each American base straight to the war rooms of Hanoi. This book concentrates on the women who carried out this exceedingly dangerous work—known as giao lien, translated as « communications and guides. » The giao lien were a mass underground organization linking military nerve-centers to grassroots Communist Party cells. Some were guerrilla fighters, others were spies or links between individual agents. Their aim was to join Communist cells across Indochina directly to General Giap’s general headquarters in Hanoi.
Using personal diaries, battle plans, and the help of Vietnamese veteran associations, the authors tell the stories of these brave fighters : the woman who blew up a Boeing 707 in Honolulu in 1962 leading to America thinking that Vietnam would invade them on their soil, the woman who guided soldiers during the Tet offensive and who for the first time reveals the official battle plans for it, and the now Vice Prime Minister of Vietnam who spent nine months in a « tiger cage » torture cell.
Virginia Morris is the author of A History of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, The Road to Freedom, and Laos, Hidden Power Hidden Lives. Clive Hills began his career as a professional photographer in 1985, covering the war in Afghanistan. He is the photographer for A History of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Forthcoming, December 2012
Vanessa Fargnoli
L’Harmattan, coll. Questions contemporaines, 264 p.
Le « viol comme arme de guerre », affirmation alors incroyable, devient une actualité visible dans les années 1990. Phénomène alarmant et revêtant la forme d’un spectre génocidaire, il semble avoir franchi, à un moment donné, un seuil de sensibilité. A travers la reconnaissance d’une stratégie guerrière systématique, les victimes des viols font l’objet d’une sollicitation juridique et humanitaire de première importance. Des professionnel-le-s entrent en scène, des actions sont déployées, des lois constituées, des termes associés qui donnent un nouveau sens au viol. Non plus une problématique locale, le viol apparaît désormais comme une menace globalisée où l’intolérable du nombre semble primer sur l’intolérable de l’acte.
Comment le viol a-t-il été qualifié d’arme de guerre et construit dans la catégorie de crime contre l’humanité ? Telle est la question qui guide notre réflexion tout au long de cet ouvrage. Il s’agira en l’occurrence d’analyser cette forme de mobilisation autour du viol afin de mieux cerner les tensions qu’elles suscitent et qui les traversent.
Le viol stigmatise la victime plutôt que l’auteur du crime. Les femmes « victimes » sont confinées dans des catégories, utiles pour une assistance, mais qui les desservent en tant qu’actrices et sujets.
Cet ouvrage tente de traiter du viol comme une problématique qui va au-delà d’un simple contexte de guerre en y intégrant une dimension supplémentaire, une dimension morale.
Maria Botchkareva
On la surnomma « la Jeanne d’Arc russe » du XXe siècle. Paysanne illettrée et femme d’exception, Maria Botchkareva, surnommée Yashka, intégra l’armée russe au début de la 1re Guerre mondiale. Elle prit la tête en juillet 1917 du Bataillon féminin de la mort composé de 300 femmes. A la demande du ministre de la Guerre, cette combattante hors norme partit au front pour parer à la désertion des soldats et pour redonner de la vigueur à l’engagement militaire russe dans le conflit mondial.
Malgré un très grand courage, mis à mal par les moqueries et le scepticisme des soldats, et une incroyable force physique, Maria Botchkareva ne réussira pas à sauver son pays. Arrêtée en 1919 alors qu’elle était en exil, elle sera condamnée par le tribunal militaire révolutionnaire comme « élément contre-révolutionnaire particulièrement endurci et incorrigible » puis exécutée par la Tcheka.
Son histoire, Maria Botchkareva, dit Yashka, la racontera à un jeune journaliste américain, Isaac Don Levine en juillet 1918. The Metropolitan Magazine publiera alors sous forme de feuilleton ses Mémoires, Yachka. My life as Peasant, Exile and Soldier. (Présentation de l’éditeur)
Cette édition est présentée par Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, directeur de recherches à l’EHESS, et Nicolas Werth, directeur de recherche à l’IHTP (Institut d’histoire du temps présent).
Lire l’interview de Stéphane Audoin–Rouzeau et Nicolas Werth
José Cubero
La guerre n’est pas qu’une affaire d’hommes, et les femmes ont toujours subi dans leur chair les outrages commis par des soldats aux pulsions déchaînées. De simple butin, vécu par le guerrier comme une juste gratification de son ardeur au combat, à l’arme de guerre entrant dans une stratégie délibérée, le saccage du corps féminin constitue une tragique permanence de l’Histoire.
Guerre de Cent Ans, campagnes d’Italie au siècle de l’humanisme, dévastation du Palatinat, occupation de l’Espagne par les armées de Napoléon, sac de Nankin, sévices franquistes, drame algérien ou, plus récemment, purification ethnique en Bosnie et génocide rwandais…, tous ces conflits et bien d’autres ont livré la femme à une brutalité sexuelle incontrôlée. Dans cet ouvrage pionnier, selon les époques et les lieux, et les comportements différents des commandements, José Cubero dresse une typologie de ces terribles ravages. Aujourd’hui, le viol est considéré comme un crime de guerre, et parfois même comme un crime contre l’humanité, puni par le droit international. Une légitime reconnaissance qui ne saurait pourtant réparer les vies brisées, et qui se heurte encore trop souvent à la honte et au silence des victimes ainsi profanées
José Cubero est agrégé d’histoire et professeur à Tarbes.
Source : http://www.editions-imago.fr/listea....
Raphaëlle Branche & Fabrice Virgili
Raphaëlle Branche et Fabrice Virgili, Paris, Editions Payot, Histoire Payot, 2011
Ce livre pionnier éclaire la place et le sens des viols en temps de guerre. Parce que les victimes étaient majoritairement des civils et des femmes, les viols furent longtemps relégués au second plan, à la marge du champ de bataille. Ils étaient pensés entre butin et repos du guerrier, sans effet sur le cours de la guerre, marquant l’assouvissement de la pulsion sexuelle masculine. Vingt auteurs se penchent ici sur les différents conflits du XXe siècle, des guerres mondiales aux guerres civiles, de la Colombie à la Tchétchénie. Pour la première fois, ils tracent l’histoire de cette violence, en soulignent la complexité et l’ampleur, présentent la diversité des situations, le poids des imaginaires, les conséquences sociales et politiques, mais aussi intimes et émotionnelles.
Avec les contributions de Raphaëlle Branche, Isabelle Delpla, Anne Godfroid, John Horne, Adediran Daniel Ikuomola, Maud Joly, Pieter Lagrou, Nayanika Mookherjee, Regina Mülhaüser, Mariana G. Muravyeva, Norman M. Naimark, Tal Nitsan, Daniel Palmieri, Nadine Puechguirbal, Amandine Regamey, Antoine Rivière, Alexandre Soucaille, Katherine Stefatos, Natalia Suarez Bonilla, Fabrice Virgili.
Source : http://www.payot-rivages.net/livre_...
Eliane Gubin, Valérie Piette, Madeleine Frédéric, Sophie Milquet
La guerre est habituellement considérée comme une affaire d’hommes, où les femmes n’occuperaient que des rôles secondaires. Bien qu’actrices et témoins de l’histoire, elles voient en permanence leur expérience dévalorisée.
Pourtant, face à l’ampleur des conflits des XIXe et XXe siècles, c’est l’ensemble de la population qui a été touché. Les femmes s’étant mobilisées de diverses manières, il apparaît important de promouvoir une lecture du phénomène guerrier selon le prisme du genre. Cet ouvrage s’inscrit dans cette perspective. En rassemblant des contributions d’historiens et de littéraires, il décrit tant la complexité des expériences féminines de guerre que leurs représentations dans la littérature.
Gubin Eliane, Piette Valérie, Frédéric Madeleine, Milquet Sophie, Collection Sextant, Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2011, 128 p.
Marion Trévisi & Philippe Nivet (dir.)
Actes du colloque d’Amiens (15-16 novembre 2007)
Si les femmes ne semblent pas à première vue les plus concernées par les guerres, sauf en tant que victimes, l’historiographie a montré depuis une dizaine d’années, qu’en réalité les femmes n’étaient pas absentes des armées, ni des pays ou villes en guerre. Si leur participation aux faits de guerre est moins évidente que celle des hommes, cela ne signifie pas qu’elles soient totalement écartées des conflits. C’est pour combler une lacune dans l’historiographie française des guerres que le Centre d’Histoire des sociétés, des sciences et des conflits de l’Université de Picardie a organisé un colloque à Amiens en novembre 2007 sur le rôle et l’implication des femmes dans les guerres depuis l’Antiquité jusqu’à 1918.
Grâce à une vingtaine de contributions s’attachant aussi bien aux représentations qu’aux réalités des femmes dans les guerres, trois axes d’analyse sont apparus : le premier est celui de la participation active des femmes aux conflits comme combattantes (réelles ou fantasmées) ; le second, s’attache à cerner les femmes aux « marges » des conflits (espionnes, intermédiaires ou suiveuses d’armées), et enfin le dernier décrit les femmes subissant les conséquences des guerres.
Source : http://www.eyrolles.com/Loisirs/Liv...
Doan Cam Thi
Au Vietnam, la guerre, l’amour et l’écriture forment souvent un seul acte.
Cet essai propose un voyage littéraire dans l’ancien bastion du communisme en Asie du Sud-Est et tout nouveau membre de l’OMC. Comment subvertir l’idéologie de la « grandiose lutte patriotique » dans une société d’après-guerre pétrie d’autoglorification ? Comment représenter les hommes, les femmes et leurs corps quand le romantisme révolutionnaire conçoit l’amour comme une simple figure de propagande ? Comment écrire « je » lorsque les doctrines dominantes privilégient la masse, la classe, la nation ? Comment passer du réalisme socialiste au postmodernisme dans une culture profondément rurale ? L’ouvrage prend le risque de montrer une littérature en train de se faire, ses ambitions et ses orientations.
La littérature vietnamienne est indissociable de son contexte. Tenter sa lecture, c’est accepter l’étude de ses compromis, résistances et affrontements avec le pouvoir.
Doan Cam Thi
Maître de conférences à l’Institut national de langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco), Doan Cam Thi a publié de nombreux articles et ouvrages dont Poétique de la mobilité. Les lieux dans Histoire de ma vie de George Sand (Rodopi, 2000) et Au rez-de chaussée du paradis. Récits vietnamiens 1991-2003 (Philippe Picquier, 2005). Elle a traduit en vietnamien La Douleur de Marguerite Duras (Hanoi, Les Éditions des Femmes, 1999), en français L’Embarcadère des femmes sans mari de Duong Huong (Aube, 2002) et Chinatown de Thuân (Le Seuil, 2009). Doan Cam Thi est lauréate du prix « Le mot d’or de la traduction 2005 » (Unesco – AIF – Société française des traducteurs).
Source : http://pups.paris-sorbonne.fr/pages...
Carol Mann
Carol Mann, Femmes dans la guerre 1914-1945, Paris, Pygmalion, 384 p., 29,90 euros. ISBN : 978-2-7564-0289-5
Voici une histoire critique de la diversité des destins, rôles et comportements des femmes durant les deux derniers grands conflits mondiaux en Europe et aux États-Unis. Celles-ci y ont endossé tous les rôles pour le meilleur et pour le pire : militaires, espionnes, agents, munitionettes, résistantes, gardiennes de camps, mères de famille, infirmières dans des villes assiégées, bombardées ou occupées, de Londres à Leningrad, en passant par Paris et Berlin. Dans le même temps, la mode, la cuisine et la vie quotidienne ont dû être réinventées sous la pression des restrictions, faisant surgir des passions de façon souvent inattendue.
Jamais le rôle des femmes n’y a dupliqué celui des hommes. Car elles durent se battre simultanément sur deux fronts : en premier lieu, l’ennemi de la patrie, clairement identifié, mais aussi, à un niveau moindre, la machine de l’État qui exerça une surveillance accrue sur le corps féminin, en particulier dans l’Allemagne nazie. Les stratégies de refus, de négociation et de résistance qu’elles déployèrent à l’arrière des fronts ou dans les camps de la mort furent autant de tentatives pour affirmer une notion d’être civilisé à des époques caractérisées par une déshumanisation totale.
Enfin, pour la première fois en France, ce livre évoque le combat spécifique des femmes pendant la Shoah. Pour réussir cette synthèse magistrale, Carol Mann s’est appuyée sur des documents inexplorés jusqu’ici : chroniques et journaux de femmes dans le Paris de la Première Guerre mondiale et du Ghetto de Varsovie ainsi que la presse féminine de tous les pays en guerre.
Gina Marie Weaver
Rape has long been a part of war, and recent conflicts in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur demonstrate that it may be becoming an even more integral strategy of modern warfare. In contrast to the media attention to sexual violence against women in these recent conflicts, however, the incidence and consequences of rape in the Vietnam War have been largely overlooked. Using testimony, oral accounts, literature, and film, Ideologies of Forgetting focuses on the rape and sexual abuse of Vietnamese women by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War, and argues that the erasure and elision of these practices of sexual violence in the U.S. popular imagination perpetuate the violent masculinity central to contemporary U.S. military culture. Gina Marie Weaver claims that recognition of this violence is important not just for an accurate historical record, but also to truly understand the Vietnam veteran’s trauma, which often stems from his aggression rather than his victimization.
“This is exactly the moment to take a new hard hook at the incidents of rape in the U.S. war in Vietnam—and its extended consequences for both the victims and the perpetrators of those rapes.” — Cynthia Enloe, author of Globalization and Militarism : Feminists Make the Link
“At a time when the phrase ‘support our troops’ has become a national mantra, recognition of how that support was enabled and narrativized becomes even more important.” — Susan Jeffords, author of The Remasculinization of America : Gender and the Vietnam War
Gina Marie Weaver is Assistant Professor of English at Southern Nazarene University.
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, Memory Is Another Country : Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora, Santa Barbara, California : Praeger, 2009. pp. xii, 212 ; photographs, bibliogr., index.
Reviewed by Laura Chirot.
In his memoir Perfume Dreams, Vietnamese-American writer Andrew Lam recalls his initial impressions of the United States as an eleven year old refugee. The son of a general in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam who fled Saigon with his parents in 1975, Lam wondered at the insularity of his American classmates’ lives. He remembers thinking, “There were times… when I was very envious of you. History happened to others on TV and you—you who grew up where everyone else wanted to live—could always change the channel. Other times I felt sorry for you. Your immunity from history robs you of the awe and appreciation of seeing how its powerful flow and surge can change everyone, near or far” (1). In twentieth-century Vietnam, as in wartime Europe and other societies rent by war, nobody was immune to the powerful flow and surge of history, which seared people’s private lives.
In Memory is Another Country : Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora, Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen tells the stories of dozens of Vietnamese women in Australia whose lives were shaped by war, revolution and exodus. Nguyen’s narrators discuss their childhoods, families, marriages, careers, losses and refugee experiences.
The book’s haunting postwar images are familiar in the literature of the Vietnamese diaspora : “re-education” expected to last ten days but stretching into a nightmare of months and years ; entire families drowning at sea ; the corrosive effects of forced exile on family life ; and the ever present yearning for an irrevocably lost homeland.
What makes this book remarkable is the number of stories that it collects—the author interviewed forty-two women over the course of a three year oral history project—and its focus on women. Despite the abundant documentation of the Vietnamese refugee experience, Nguyen points out, narratives from the women of South Vietnam are largely absent from the record. Cultural constraints, the pressure to provide for their families in countries of resettlement, the lack of public fora, and the impulse to bury past sorrows under silence are all factors that have kept women from telling their stories.
Nguyen sets out to remedy this absence, in detail and with compassion. She organizes her narrators’ stories into thematic chapters on loss, sisterhood, female soldiers, war, marriage to foreigners and return to Vietnam. Each chapter highlights between two and four women. Nguyen lets her narrators—identified only by first name—speak for themselves, using long, uninterrupted blocks of quotation. Their narratives are bracketed by Nguyen’s commentary on historical contexts and common themes, and overlaid with theories of trauma and memory. The theoretical aspect of the book focuses on the construction of memory after traumatic experiences, and the emotional, cultural and gendered aspects of making memory. Against this background, the book’s title takes on two meanings : memory is another country, the lost homeland of South Vietnam, but memory is also a country in itself, where the “memoryscape” is peopled with living and dead relatives and contoured with villages and city boulevards frozen in the past. [Read more :] http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newma...
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen
‘You must write your life story !’ The man drew a last whiff of smoke from his burning cigarette-end, threw it on the dusty floor, then angrily crushed it under the toe of his sandal and disappeared. And I recalled my life.
– Nam Phuong
With these words, Nam Phuong undertakes to reconstruct and retell her life story – and the succession of events that led to her first failed attempt to escape from the newly created Socialist Republic of Vietnam as a ‘boat-person’ in 1977, an attempt that resulted in imprisonment and interrogation by the Vietnamese authorities. The fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 formed the prelude to one of the largest and most visible diasporas in the late twentieth century. Approximately two million Vietnamese left their homeland as refugees and migrants and made new lives for themselves overseas, principally in the four major countries of resettlement in the West : the United States, Australia, Canada and France. The extent of the post-1975 Vietnamese diaspora is a new phenomenon in Vietnamese history. Until then, Vietnamese communities overseas, such as the one in France, had represented a very small, if influential, minority. Although war and political unrest had resulted in widespread internal displacements within Vietnam, most notably following partition in 1954, the country had not previously seen anything resembling the mass exodus of the late 1970s and the 1980s. This exodus has in turn led to a body of literature by Vietnamese in the West.[1] Vietnamese women, in particular, have produced a growing number of diasporic narratives in English and in French,[2] in which they have articulated their experience of war and loss, trauma and survival, as well as the process of deculturation and acculturation in a new land.
The women’s narratives portray former lives in Vietnam during the French colonial period and later post-colonial years, as well as the devastating consequences of war. Trauma for these women encompasses not only the suffering experienced during wartime, it is also overwhelmingly linked with loss—loss of family and loved ones, home, country, and what James Freeman terms ‘meaningful sources of identity.’[3] Women experience not only displacement within their homeland because of war and political instability, but much more dramatically and traumatically, displacement to a foreign country. In a collection of essays entitled Loss : The Politics of Mourning, David Eng and David Kazanjian note that ‘if loss is known only by what remains of it, then the politics and ethics of mourning lie in the interpretation of what remains – how remains are produced and animated, how they are read and sustained.’[4] Vietnamese women of the diaspora translate this process of loss and grieving, of remembering and commemorating a world that ‘exists now only in memory’[5] by recreating it in their accounts. Writing their narratives provides them with a means of coming to terms with the tragedies and losses of their earlier lives, and of dealing with their present condition as refugees and migrants. ‘In the telling,’ as Judith Lewis Herman suggests, ‘the trauma story becomes a testimony.’[6] The women’s life stories not only elucidate the circumstances that led to their eventual exile from Vietnam but also bring to life again an entire social and familial framework that fell apart with the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. They bear witness to the past, and become in this way not only testimonies to individual experience, but collectively testimonies to a lost way of life and a lost country. [Read more :] http://intersections.anu.edu.au/iss...
Intersections : Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 11, August 2005
Sandra C. Taylor
For as long as the Vietnamese people fought against foreign enemies, women were a vital part of that struggle. The victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu is said to have involved hundreds of thousands of women, and many of the names in Viet Cong unit rosters were female. These women were living out the ancient saying of their country, « When war comes, even women have to fight. »
Women from Hanoi and the countryside fought alongside their male counterparts in both the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese military in their wars against the South Vietnamese government and its French and American allies from 1945 to 1975. Sandra Taylor now draws on interviews with many of these women and on an array of newly opened archives to illuminate their motivations, experiences, and contributions—presenting not cold facts but real people.
These women were the wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters of men recruited into military service ; and because the war lasted so long, women from more than one generation of the same family often participated in the struggle. Some learned to fire weapons and lay traps, or to serve as village patrol guards and intelligence agents ; others were propagandists and recruiters or helped keep the supply lines flowing.
Taylor relates how this war for liberation from foreign oppressors also liberated Vietnamese women from centuries of Confucian influence that had made them second-class citizens. She reveals that Communism’s promise of freedom from those strictures influenced their involvement in the war, and also shares the irony that their sex gave them an advantage in battle or subterfuge over Western opponents blinded by gender stereotypes.
As their country continues to modernize, Vietnamese Women at War preserves the stories of the « long-haired warriers » while they remain alive and before the war fades from memory. By showing that they were not victims of war but active participants, it offers a wholly unique perspective on that conflict. This rare study reveals much about gender roles and cultural differences and reminds us of the ever-present human dimension of war.
“Taylor greatly enhances our understanding of the contributions of Vietnam’s women, providing vivid accounts of training, deployment, strategy and tactics, propaganda activities, support services, imprisonment and torture, and other aspects of their involvement in the war. Recommended for all levels.”—Choice
« From the ’long-haired army’ that carried provisions through the jungles at Dien Bien Phu to the female ’tunnel rats’ at Cu Chi in the South, women were the unsung heroes of Vietnam’s war of national liberation. Here, in this sympathetic and sometimes gripping account, is their untold story. Recommended. »—William J. Duiker, author of Sacred War : Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam
« It was common knowledge among American soldiers in Vietnam that women were sometimes brave and even ferocious fighters for the North. Now at last in Sandra Taylor’s fascinating Vietnamese Women at War this story has been told in depth. This book is a necessary piece in the complex puzzle of the Vietnam War. »—Robert Olen Butler, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
« I am pleased to see more voices from Vietnamese women telling their own stories. As Sandra Taylor reveals, we don’t see ourselves as victims but rather as victors and survivors, following in the footsteps of our ancestors and honoring a tradition that is 4,000 years old. »—Le Ly Hayslip, author of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Child of War, Woman of Peace
« A thorough and thought-provoking account of one of the least-known chapters of the Viet Nam War. Taylor’s study of the ’long haired warriors’ is an essential introduction for students and promises to set the standard for years to come. »—Robert Brigham, author of The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War
« A very valuable book for courses on the Vietnam War and in women’s studies. »-Marilyn B. Young, author of The Vietnam War, 1945–1990
Source : http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/tayvi...
Karen G. Turner, Phan Thanh Hao
Reviewed by Ginger R. Davis (Temple University) Published on H-Minerva (November, 1998)
When War Strikes Close to Home
The literature available on the Vietnam War can be overwhelming : libraries and archives list hundreds of sources that appear to cover nearly every aspect of the war. The most elusive topics, however, are those from the Vietnamese perspective. Few of the books considered standards on the war reflect the North Vietnamese perspective, except as seen by American military officials. Thus Karen Turner makes a welcome contribution not only to gender studies, but also to the literature on the North Vietnamese, with Even the Women Must Fight.
Turner, an East Asia and comparative law scholar, traveled throughout Vietnam during a three year period. With the assistance of Phan Thanh Hao, an interpreter and journalist from Hanoi, Turner studied the role of North Vietnamese women as soldiers during the Vietnam War. She conducted interviews with many of the participants and their comrades and reading diaries and literature from the period, as well as army reports housed in Saigon at the Combined Document Exploitation Center (CDEC).
The author correctly notes the prevalence of female leaders in Vietnamese history, exemplified by such heroines as the Trung sisters and Thi Xuan, yet asserts that they « never enjoyed for long the fruits of their struggles or challenged seriously the dominant patriarchal culture » (p. 28). According to Turner, although the government established museums and exhibits devoted to the women’s role, the memoirs and heroines of the Vietnam War suggest that women should have « courage in battle without losing their womanly virtues » (p. 37). She also indicates that the present Vietnamese government tries to emphasize the fighting spirit of the women warriors, while downplaying their actual combat skills. Turner also discovered that the position of Vietnamese females warriors underwent a post-war marginalization in Vietnam, as society focused nearly exclusively on the sacrifices of their male counterparts.
One of the most interesting aspects of Turner’s inquiry was the complicated relationship between a society bound by Confucian ideals of motherhood and the subservient female role and the very real position of women who are former combatants who have returned to their homes. Turner seeks to empower the Vietnamese woman by revealing their role in the war, discussing the effects of their presence on society, and adding what Turner calls « important insight into timeless moral and philosophical questions about the war » (p. 22). How the women and their communities dealt with such issues engaged much of the author’s attention.
Turner asserts that many of the female fighters who survived now face poverty and neglect, either having missed their opportunity to marry while engaged in combat, or having become ill, or been exposed to chemicals such as Agent Orange (which prevent them from bearing healthy children). The author identified the paradox : the war’s participants see the efforts of these women as invaluable, yet with no children or families, Vietnamese traditional society views them as pitiable.
Turner identifies a number of major topics that warrant further investigation, such as how women faced the challenges of combat and how traditional Vietnamese society dealt with them as returning soldiers. Unfortunately the book only touches on many of the author’s questions and a number of the topics could benefit from a more singular approach and uninterrupted attention. Doubtless Turner’s work is an invaluable addition to the historiography on Vietnam and on women and war. Her work would make a good reader for an introductory Vietnam War course or even as a supplement to graduate study. The author provides a new and approachable alternative to the standard assigned texts because it gives not only a female viewpoint, but also insight into the North Vietnamese perspective.
This review was commissioned by Reina Pennington for H-Minerva. Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net and Minerva : Quarterly Report on Women and the Military.
Source : http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showre...