#literally every problem I find with radical feminism is addressed in these points

[asiaberkeley]

Vietnamese and Chinese Feminist Journalists of the 1930s: Writings Reflect Disparate Approaches To The “Woman’s Problem”

*I wrote this paper at UC Berkeley but I never received any feedback from my professors after turning it in at the end of the semester.*

By Natalie Ornell

Introduction

Scholars of Southeast Asia are weary of efforts to convey Vietnamese history through a Chinese lens.  With too much attention paid to these countries’ longstanding relations, comparison efforts risk overlooking Vietnam’s development as a nation moved by a set of unique domestic circumstances (Zinoman Lecture, Spring 2013).  Existing scholarship does not portray China as a leader and teacher of Vietnam in every arena, however.  As historian Shawn McHale points out in his 1995 study of Vietnamese feminist writings, “Students of Vietnamese history are familiar with the cliché that Vietnamese women enjoyed more power than their Chinese counterparts” (Taylor and Whitmore 173).  Though its origins are uncertain, this cliché has been brought up by scholars including Oliver Wolters in History, Culture, and Region and also historian Nhung Tuyet Tran (Interview McHale).  According to McHale’s article, however, research on colonial feminism in Vietnam remains scarce: “Scholars have analyzed few texts written on or by women in the colonial period and produced few historical studies of Vietnamese women” (Taylor and Whitmore 173). He recently added that even after more than fifteen years after the publication of his 1995 article on women’s writing during the Vietnamese colonial period, the dearth of scholarship persists (E-mail Interview, McHale).

Given that only few scholars have analyzed the writings of Vietnamese colonial women before and even after 1995, it appears relevant to give context to the “cliché” than Vietnamese women have historically enjoyed more power than Chinese women (Taylor and Whitmore 173).   This paper attempts to deconstruct this “cliché” by comparing the writings of Vietnamese feminists and Chinese feminists during the colonial period in Vietnam in the context of the time period.   By doing so, this brief study will challenge the notion that Vietnamese women were more “powerful” than their Chinese counterparts.  

This paper posits that Vietnamese women did not necessarily experience more “power” than Chinese women during the Colonial period in Vietnam.  Rather, the women at the forefront of the colonial Vietnamese feminist movement eventually adopted a more hands-on Marxist approach to solving Vietnam’s domestic problems, and in particular, the economic disparities plaguing what they saw as the masses of powerless women in the countryside.  On the other hand,  their Chinese counterparts took a more intellectual and hands-off approach as they fixated on internationalism and theories of feminism during a time of tense political warfare that also likely stifled their means of dissent.  Therefore, it is difficult to fully endorse the notion that Vietnamese women possessed greater power during the colonial period because feminists in China and Vietnam faced unique dynamics on the home front that impacted modes of expressing feminist ideas.

Thus, as a result of specific circumstances in Vietnam, women, especially in the 1930s,  were able to take an active role in remedying the gender inequalities they saw on the home front.  They displayed a greater inclination than Chinese women to improve women’s rights by using the press as a means of political and economic mobilization, while Chinese feminists, facing a separate set of historical circumstances during the time, were set back from taking action, evident in writings that emphasized feminist theory rather than practice.   Following a tradition of forced comparison between China and Vietnam, on the most surface level, Vietnamese women may have exerted more “power” than Chinese women.  However, claiming that Vietnamese women were simply more powerful than Chinese women appeals only to the generalist of Vietnamese feminist history.   Such a statement pays little tribute to the historically dissimilar situations feminists, and particularly feminist writers, faced in each country during Vietnam’s colonial period.  Examining these feminist agendas individually sheds light on the efforts women in both countries made given the historical circumstances they faced.  Comparing them side by side reveals how women in each country were moved and empowered by disparate factors as they and their fellow citizens would begin to embark on reforms that sowed the seeds for Communist revolutions.

Part One: Vietnamese Feminism in the 1930s: Phu Nu Tan Van

More important, Vietnam was developing a “print culture” autonomous from the colonial state, and many of the newly appropriated Sino-Vietnamese words proved to be useful in public discourse.  Writers filled the Phu nu tan van with articles in clear prose that discussed equal rights and the role of women in society.  Ten years earlier, readers (and listeners) would have found its essays obscure --Shawn McHale in Essays into Vietnamese Pasts, p. 176.

Research on the premier Vietnamese feminist colonial women’s newspaper, the Phu Nu Tan Van, is key to understanding the efforts of feminist writers during colonial Vietnam.  Unfortunately,  information about its readership is contested and somewhat muddied by a lack of reliable survey data from the time period.  However, scholar David Marr’s Vietnamese Tradition on Trial characterizes the Phu Nu Tan Van as  “highly successful,”  “read avidly by both sexes,” “a testing ground for new ideas” and that most importantly, no “female operated journal had risen to take its place in the intervening decade” (Marr 220, 231).  He asserts that the women’s newspaper reached not just a small elite but rather the “tens of thousands of functionally literate young women and men emerging from between three and six years of schooling,” with “8,500” copies a week until it shut down in 1934 after a gradual decrease in publication due to domestic circumstances (Marr 220).  Thus, for a newspaper geared at women’s issues during the colonial period, the emergence of the Phu Nu Tan Van was not only historically significant but also, perhaps, ahead of its time given its impressive readership among both sexes and its relatively long-lasting publication history in spite of a repressive French colonial rule that contributed to its shut down.

Marr’s theories regarding the readership of the Phu Nu Tan Van are not universally agreed upon, however.  McHale notes, for example, that while is difficult to account for how many readers really read the Phu Nu Tan Van in the countryside, that Marr may have overlooked readership of the paper outside of elite urban circles.  At the same, however, McHale casts doubt on historian Ngo Vinh Long’s claim in the opposite direction, that there was a circulation of 10,000 copies and that peasant women became so involved that they even contested the bourgeois nature of the Phu Nu Tan Van in print (Interview McHale, Ngo).   To balance Marr’s viewpoint that the paper was limited to city readers and Ngo’s viewpoint that countryside women became completely engrossed in the paper, McHale points to the importance of reading between the lines of Vietnamese literacy rates in the South, where the Phu Nu Tan Van was centered (Interview McHale).  Reassessing the importance of these literacy rates to better understand the readership should still be accompanied by a degree of skepticism, however, given that the French were “poor at such surveys” (Interview McHale).  

A more grounded hypothesis regarding the readership of the Phu Nu Tan Van in terms of its rural-urban outreach is McHale’s proposition that in the end, the Phu Nu Tan Van  “reached a literate educated class, men and women, in the south” and that its influence reached rural areas in a variety of ways, evident in the fact that “one can find repeated letters, etc(sic) from women outside of Saigon” and also that “newspapers can reach many people through reading,” especially in Vietnam, where newspapers were often read aloud to others” (E-mail Interview McHale).  In his 1995 article on the feminist press he also described the importance of quoc ngu and how it made women’s writing accessible to those who had received less education through alternative means;  McHale noted, for example, that while few Vietnamese were fluent readers of quoc ngu, many were exposed to it through “recording land transactions,” by “hearing documents and newspapers read out loud,” and through its “growing use by the Cao Dao and Buddhists” (Taylor and Whitmore 146).  Thus, despite Marr’s ideas that the Phu Nu Tan Van was restricted to women in the city, McHale offers convincing reasons that suggest the paper’s potentially larger outreach.  McHale goes so far as to say that we must “take with a grain of salt those authors who imply that since so few Vietnamese were literate, quoc ngu could not have significantly affected Vietnamese society until the literacy campaigns carried out in the late 1930s and 1946” (Taylor and Whitmore 146).  Thus,  despite uncertainties regarding the exact readership of the Phu Nu Van Tan, there are historical indicators that suggest that the paper, though it may have attracted a largely urban and educated urban readership, was not necessarily bound to the city as a result of the documented literacy of its educated readers.

As for the paper’s content, while the Phu Nu Tan Van addressed many fashionable issues, over the course of the Phu Nu Tan Van’s publication history, there occurred a significant shift in the attitudes of its feminist writers that led to an enhanced level of grassroots activism.  Their ideas increasingly began to reflect Marxist and anti-colonial influences which shaped the nature of their feminist activities. Towards the end of the Phu Nu Tan Van’s publication history, the woman who managed the paper, Mme Nguyen Duc Nhuan, apparently “permitted the young radicals to seize the initiative” for reasons not completely “clear” (Marr 224). Marr suggests that “she was simply willing to go along with the intellectual mood of the day and see what the French censors would do” (Marr 224).  Furthermore, according to Marr, starting in the latter half of 1932 the paper began to be taken over by a number of younger, more radical women “who were thus able to assert themselves in print,”  representing a strong shift in Phu Nu Tan Van editorial guidelines (Marr 224).  Marr ascribed this shift to a new emphasis on “penetrating journalist encounters with individuals of all classes, forthright sociological discussions of prostitution, religious escapism and faith healing, attacks on fascism, and critiques of bourgeoise feminism” (Marr 224).  He added that “faith in formal education vanished, and occupational independence came to be seen as the prerogative of only a tiny minority of women... the mass of poor Vietnamese women became the primary ideological concern of Phu Nu Tan Van” (Marr 226).

Despite this radical shift, however, Marr remained skeptical about the women’s encounters with women from poorer class backgrounds in the countryside.  He even noted that education became such a dividing force between elite women and rural women that those women with an education became despised;  readers were “warning about the tendency of females with any schooling or financial means to separate themselves from their sisters to become not a worthy vanguard but individualist, self-seeking parasites on the backs of others” (Marr 226).  This tendency was given the “pejorative label” of “feminism” “(phu nu chi nghia)”, “a specifically bourgeois phenomenon to be resisted steadfastly” (Marr 226).  Based on the reader’s perceptions he cites, he adds skeptically that, “Even in its last year of publication, however, Phu Nu Tan Van was hardly a vehicle for lower-class women to express themselves directly, much less an organ of socialist struggle.  It remained essentially one means for the Vietnamese inteligentsia to better understand themselves and perhaps alter behavior” (Marr 226).

Despite Marr’s emphasis on readers who regarded the Phu Nu Tan Van journalists as self-seeking individualists and even “parasites on the backs of others,” other historical sources show that women involved in the later years of the Phu Nu Tan Van hardly resembled “self-seeking parasites”; rather, they used their education and writing not just to “better understand themselves” but to address class divides as they participated in fundraisers to help poorer women cope with not only natural disasters but also the burdens of childcare: “In the summer of 1932 another concerted campaign was launched for Nghe-Tinh provinces, in which Women’s Herald and Women’s News both played leading roles...This fair, organized mainly by Women’s News, aimed to raise money for the subsistence crisis in Nghe-Tinh and to help Women’s News establish a day-care center for poor children...Through the pages of Women’s Herald and Women’s News, it is clear that upper and middle class Vietnamese women enthusiastically participated and even led the way in disaster relief (Marr 226, Ngyuen Marshall 87). In this way, Vietnamese feminists involved in news publications like the Phu Nu Tan Van and the Women’s Herald, all publications for women, used their writing efforts to address local problems directly by raising money and caring for children.   Such efforts appear as a far cry from notions that these women were a group of “parasitic self-seekers” only interested in self-growth (Marr 226).  While some of the paper’s published articles reflected a concern with becoming Western in that they focused on Western childrearing methods and even “Montessori Education,” it is clear that the women journalists took an active role in remedying the national problems Vietnamese women faced at the time by using their writing as a springboard for action (Ngyuen Marshall 90).  Thus, Marr’s claims that the Phu Nu Tan Van was hardly a vehicle for lower-class women to express themselves directly would be balanced by historical evidence that shows these women writer’s efforts to aid women in the country directly through grassroots activism (Marr 226).

Reporters from Phu Nu Tan Van did not only participate in relief efforts and charity to aid rural women who lacked their educational backgrounds.  Historian Ngo Vinh Long asserts that Phu Nu Tan Van reporters also went directly to the countryside to write articles on the plight of country women and that “contact with women of other classes changed the perspective of reporters on Phu Nu Tan Van from the magazine’s first days...” (Ngo 19).  Such an account that portrays these women’s efforts to meet with women in the country from day one appear inconsistent with records that point the newspaper’s radicalization in only its last few years, however, and that portray the Phu Nu Tan Van as concerned with other more fashionable topics in its earlier years.  However, Ngo’s account does provide some evidence to support the claim that “by the end of the magazine’s career it was publishing interviews in which peasant women directly criticized and corrected the bourgeoise orientation of the magazine” (Ngo 19, 20).  To support this claim Ngo cites an August 1934 published interview by the Phu Nu Tan Van’s “most famous reporter,” Miss Nguyen thi Kiem.  In this interview, Ngo explains that peasant women “stressed that the real problem they faced was extreme poverty, not sexual inequality or polygamy” (Ngo 17).  He adds that they were especially interested in teaching professions to petit-bourgeoise women; they thought this would lead to economic liberation (Ngo 17).  

The idea of education as a pathway for economic liberation appeared to evolve during the years the Phu Nu Tan Van published women’s writings, but Marr’s notions that all faith was lost in education are doubtful (Marr 226).   During the colonial period, regarding the statistics on the prevalence of educational attainment for women, Ngo claims that by the year the Phu Nu Tan Van closed, 1934, “several hundred women in each of Vietnam’s three regions had preparatory primary school degrees [Diplome].  A smaller number had superior primary school degrees [Brevet Elmentaire].  Only a few dozens had junior high school degrees {Brevet Supererieur] (Ngo 15).  He adds that of these women, “two thirds of these women were teachers and headmistresses in district and provincial schools” and the rest were “midwives, nurses, and secretaries in the various business firms” (Ngo 15).  He notes too that as for higher education, in 1930, there were “only 26 women out of a total of 193 medical students” and “three women out of 49 students in the teacher’s college” (Ngo 15).  However, that 26 students represented a group of 193 medical students, 13% of the class size, appears rather progressive considering the time and place.  Ngyuyen Marshall’s account attests to the importance of education in the context of the Phu Nu Tan Van,  “Using the language of Social Darwinism, Women’s News writers maintained that women must be educated so that they could participate in the public sphere and contribute to the strengthening of the nation.  Among non radicals, therefore, the quest for women’s rights was a part of the larger quest for national independence” (80 Nguyen-Marshall).  Thus, despite Marr’s depictions of a woman’s education as something that became considered parasitic and that led to the development of self-centered women, appears inconsistent with statistics and secondary sources that depict the women as drawn to teaching careers and who used education as a means to work towards Vietnam’s independence.

In sum, while the extent of the readership is disputed, the Phu Nu Tan Van writers began to see their education and their writing efforts as mechanism to solve real problems affecting women in the nation, especially close to time that the newspaper was forced to shut down.  They focused on problems of women’s economic inequality, and as journalists, took active steps to improve the situations facing poorer women in the countryside.   As McHale put it:  “The writers for Phu Nu Tan Van fought for women’s liberation, but not in its ‘bourgeois’ guise (Taylor and Whitmore 193).  Thus, Vietnam’s historical situation gave rise to a group of women who uniquely looked towards solving the economic problems facing women in the countryside.  At the same time,  however, feminism in China took on a more international and theoretical outlook that could be seen through a “bourgeois guise” (Taylor and Whitmore 193).  Vietnamese women called for political and economic change in an attempt to solve problems through practical methods, most notably in efforts of fundraisers for national disaster and childcare.

Part Two: Chinese Feminism in the 1930s

In Vietnamese Communism, 1920-1945, Huynh Kim Khanh argues that the radicalism of colonized Vietnam “more closely resembled that of other societies subjected to foreign dominations such as China and Indonesia (Huynh 32).  With regards to feminism, Hue-Tam Ho Tai in Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution similarly relates the Vietnamese women’s struggles to the struggles of other women facing a national revolution:  “The connection between feminism and revolution is not unique to the Vietnamese context.  Indeed, it can be found in so many other revolutionary settings as to appear organic.  Is the link between feminism and communism coincidental or is it made inevitable by some inherent revolutionary logic?  The tensions and contradictions between communism and feminism in the Soviet Union and in China have been the subject of a substantial body of scholarship” (Tai 89).  Thus, even the preeminent scholars of Vietnam have continued to frame Vietnamese feminism as an offshoot of Chinese or Soviet feminism in the context of a Communist revolution.   Here, Tai equates the relationship between feminism and revolution in China with the relationship of feminism and revolution in Vietnam without observing their distinct features.  Feminism in China and Vietnam are not “organic” due to the fact that both countries would undergo Communist revolutions.  Women in both countries expressed unique modes of feminism due to independent nationalist circumstances.  Tai misses the complexities in women’s movements by dismissing and grouping together feminist movements in multiple countries as if they were a natural outgrowth of a Communist revolution.   She misses the mark on the divergent modes of expression that women in China and Vietnam found before the revolution.  This section will argue that Vietnamese feminist radicalism during the colonial and pre-revolutionary period did not mirror Chinese feminist radicalism at the same time.  This paper finds that Chinese feminism of the 1930s concerned itself with topics removed from what has been discussed with regards to the Phu Nu Tan Van writers in part one of this essay.  These Chinese feminists of the colonial period have expressed their beliefs in ways that mildly resemble those Vietnamese feminists of the later publication years of the Phu Nu Tan Van.

Chinese feminists in the 1930s were overwhelmingly concerned with theories of feminism rather than with collective action to solve women’s problems of poverty.  While both Chinese and Vietnamese women may have seen women’s liberation as part of the national revolution to gain independence, the Chinese feminists saw this discourse in a much more abstract way: “Progressive Chinese feminism was progressive because it presumed species evolution, arguing that once artificial social barriers to female subjectivity had been lifted, overall human development would accelerate.  It was a kind of feminism because it held that national evolutionary progress required the emancipation of women into citizenship (Barlow 65).  In this way, Chinese feminism concerned itself with larger ideals and evolutionary theories that had little focus on the present struggles of women outside of feminist circles.  Furthermore, unlike the writers involved and in charge of  women’s newspapers in Vietnam, much of the feminist discourse during this period in China was led by men, not women: “theoretical feminism in colonial modern China engaged people, mostly but not exclusively male” (Barlow 66).

One of China’s comparable magazines at the time, the funu shibao, hardly resembled Vietnam’s Phu Nu Tan Van.  According to Tani Barlow, an expert on Chinese feminist movements, this magazine featured mainly international figures including “the Queen of Spain,” “an American woman balloonist,” “Turkish women,” and in doing so it apparently “presumed [...] Chinese women’s claim to womanhood” while never really addressing Chinese women (Barlow 69).  She argues that the magazine actually had to include “women of the world at large” and that the journal held American women in the highest esteem, all indicative that the Chinese woman’s struggle was obfuscated by a hodgepodge of writings on other women of the world (Barlow 69).  Thus, Chinese women depicted in the magazine adhered to constant standards of internationalism so that they became an “internationalized subject” (Barlow 71).  According to Barlow, “The predicate Chinese women in Chinese feminism seems to have begun life as an international subject, but not in the explicit discourse of sexuality.  The recasting of the subject of Chinese feminism as a sexual subject occurred in the 1920s in an archive that was generically theoretical” (Barlow 71).  Thus, while Chinese feminists were philosophizing over sexuality, eugenic imperatives, nuxing identity, choosing a sexual partner for natural selection,  and Darwinist style eugenics, the Vietnamese feminists were writing about the steep social inequalities affecting Vietnamese women at home, especially in the mid 1930s (Barlow 90).  In this sense, Chinese feminist discourse did not color Vietnamese women writer’s domestic interests.  Indeed, according to the editors of Phu Nu Tan Van, “the solution to the women’s problem lay not in copying Western customs, or valuing the new for the sake of newness.   Women’s liberation would come when people attacked the economic bases of women’s inequality” (McHale 191).

The Chinese feminists of the 1930s apparently stemmed from a group of feminist anarchists who also had dismissed opportunities of political mobilization.  These feminists saw revolution as the answer to the woman’s problem but adopted a passive approach when it came to actually fighting for women’s liberation.  In concluding that they would achieve little by liberating a few women, they chose to theorize about revolution rather than to engage in grassroots efforts.  These Chinese feminist leaders believed that “if the essence of sexual inequality lay in the economic dependence of women on men, then raising the economic position of women offered some hope; on the other, if the natures of feudalism and capitalism were hierarchical, economic betterment could only affect a few” (Zarrow 810).  One of the key leaders of this movement, He Zhen, similarly looked to the West with admiration for “monogamy, civil marriage, divorce” and “co-education” before determining that the solution lay in “anarcho-communism” meaning that to “have a few women join the working class would not challenge sexual inequality (Zarrow 809).  In this sense, Chinese feminists gave up on mobilizing at the grassroots level with the assumption that they would not be able to make a difference unless a full-scale revolution took place.   With this attitude, Chinese feminists like He Zhen who “grounded her call for revolution in a transcendent sense of justice and sexual equality” did not undertake the same actions as Vietnamese women writers who uplifted the situations of those women they encountered in the working class.  These women chose to think and write rather than to find methods of making small-scale improvements.

A book on Chinese feminism published in 2013, “The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory,” (Columbia) focuses on the life of feminist He-Yin Zhen, editor of a feminist-anarchist journal, who the authors claim played a central role in the development of Chinese feminism.  However, these authors only add to the idea that Chinese feminists were far more interested in theory than practice.  A recent review of this book notes, “He-Yin Zhen was concerned less with China’s fate as a nation and more with the relationship among patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and gender subjugation as global and transhistorical problems” (http://warpweftandway.com/2013/03/12/new-book-on-chinese-feminism/). The Women’s Bell, another feminist publication in China that could be compared to the Phu Nu Tan Van was similarly concerned with theory and China’s past: Feminist Lin Zongsu (1878-1944) who wrote the preface for The Women’s Bell, “commend[ed] on it as an exemplary text on the historical oppression of women in China” (Liu, Karl, Ko 45). Another women who was a founding editor of the journal China’s New Woman’s World had a “strategic focus” to “often argue for the recovery of lost rights, rather than on the newness of the advocacy for women’s rights in the present” (Liu, Karl, Ko 45-46).  Thus, China’s feminists took an even more removed stance as they focused on theories, analyzed the past, and refrained from taking collective action to improve their present conditions.

In China, although the term and the concept derived from the Japanese, European, and U.S. models, the “new woman” was a “creature of the progressive, intellectual class’s political aspirations, and as a result, her utility for the feminist movement was limited” (Edwards 117).   Edwards argues that the Chinese woman’s efforts were easier spent on state building and these efforts lost their “potency” for solving problems inherent to the woman’s movement  (Edwards 117).  Further, Edwards argues that the idea of the “new woman” in China was mostly a “male invention” and that “discussions about her relate more to the concerns of this demographic than they do to any lived reality for the women of Republican China or the women’s movement of the time (Edwards 117).   Given that the women’s newspapers in Vietnam were run by women and that the vast majority of contributors were radical women, it appears that the feminist women writers in Vietnam had more freedom as a group of women separated from their male counterparts than the women in China whose notions of the new women stemmed from largely male intellectual thought.

However, what marked these women as feminists was rather “interest in social reform, education for women, nation building and politics”; in this regard they could be said to share a common vision with the writers of the Phu Nu Tan Van (Edwards 117).  Even as the term new woman was applied to them, however, “they did not invoke the label modern woman during their campaigns, nor did they attempt to mobilize women into feminist activity with reference to it”  (Edwards 118).  Thus, Chinese women accepted a label given to them by men but did little to build off of the idea of the new woman, or to gather other women into political activities that reflected their theoretical ideas on women’s liberation.  

However, it is important to understand the historical context behind the Chinese colonial women’s apparent lack of political action.  At the time when these women were writing in women’s magazines and newspapers,  domestic factors affecting China also influenced their abilities to express political beliefs.  For example, women in China at the time faced the “collapse of the GMD-CCP cooperation” which saw the onslaught of the White Terror movement in which “CCP sympathizers in politically active groups such as women’s organizations” were targeted (Edwards 118).  Given that feminists at the time had close ties to the Communist Party, it is likely that their feminist activities were muted due to the connections between these groups.  Edwards argues that this affected women directly in China stating that “the modern woman became a target for GMD rightists because she was perceived as a radical challenge to the fragile national order” and that this time period saw modern women “imprisoned, murdered, or tortured” because of their CCP support or because they were “simply nationalistic feminists (Edwards 118). According to Edwards, “over 1000 women leaders were killed in China in 1927 by KMT rightists” and that “many of them were not Communists but simply active participants in the women’s movement (Edwards 119).  Given that 1,000 women leaders were killed, it is likely that the women’s movement was expansive and reached beyond those women involved in the newspapers.  Thus, the danger of participating in feminist activities that would require travel and more exposure may have played a role in preventing the Chinese colonial feminists from engaging in similar activities as the Vietnamese feminist writers who traveled to the countryside.

As a result of the White Terror movement of 1927-1928, Chinese women feminists’ earlier political actions were “increasingly ignored as female modernity was equated with frivolous self-indulgence in the mid-1930s” (Edwards 120).  Thus, it easy to see that Chinese women faced a unique domestic situation that shaped and even stifled the expression of their feminism in the 1930s.  At the same time, that much of the discourse prior to the White Terror Movement was characterized by theorizing, internationalism, and reflections on China’s past may still indicate that Vietnamese women were more progressive and ready to act in the name of their cause. For “progressive Chinese feminism (and perhaps other traditions as well), the question was how to understand the truth of women and how to produce women (Barlow 78).  

Conclusion

While the Chinese feminists philosophized over theories, the Vietnamese feminists were writing of the steep social inequalities affecting Vietnamese women as “Marxist ideas had seeped into the discourse on women’s liberation” (McHale 191). Even as they were influenced by theory, however, their actions showed grassroots level work to improve the lives of women, even if on a small-scale.  Thus, they put their own hands into revolutionary work and did not only praise a revolutionary ideal with their pens.   As Marr writes of the journal Phu Nu Tan Van,  “From the beginning to end it was at once catalyst, conceptual testing ground, and disseminator of new ideas -- indeed, perhaps the best example of this type of journalism ever to emerge in Vietnam (Marr 226).  Marr distinguishes the Vietnamese journalists who were once characterized as “timid, note-bound matrons addressing politely bored friends” and then became “young women standing alone in front of mixed crowds and speaking impromptu (Marr 227).   He goes on to say that this period was even anachronistic as there were fewer thriving Vietnamese business women in 1945 “than there had been in 1930” (Marr 231).   The magazine’s success even saw the production of a drama which according to Marr, featured a Vietnamese heroine who “after guiding a newspaper through diverse obstacles and facing up to new political and social pressures, is finally forced to shut down by the authorities,” adding that the story’s similarity to the Phu Nu Tan Van’s experience was “obvious,” as was the fact that “no female operated journal had risen to take its place in the intervening decade” (Marr 231).   Even in light of domestic problems facing Chinese women during the 1930s, it appears that the Vietnamese feminists involved in the Phu Nu Tan Van, rose above theory and sought to make a difference in the lives of not women molded after Chinese women or European women, but Vietnamese women who fought hard to survive in the country.  As McHale notes Vietnamese women were not as taken with internationalist feminism as Chinese women, “...the debate over women’s issues had evolved from a puzzled interest in Western rights in the period of “Vietnamese French collaboration”  to a more critical appropriation of Western ideas in the 1930s” (McHale 190).

Works Cited

Barlow, Tani E. The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism. Durham [u.a.: Duke Univ., 2006. Print.

Edwards, L. "Policing the Modern Woman in Republican China." Modern China 26.2 (2000): 115-47. Print.

Huynh, Kim K. Vietnamese Communism: 1925-1945. Ithaca U.a.: Cornell Univ., 1982. Print.

Liu, Lydia He., Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2013. Print.

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Marr, David G. Vietnamese Tradition on Trial: 1920-1945 / David G. Marr. Berkeley: University of California, 1981. Print.

Nguyen-Marshall, Van. In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Print.

Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.

Taylor, Keith Weller., and John K. Whitmore. Essays into Vietnamese Pasts. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1995. Print.

Zarrow, Peter "He Zhen and Anarcho-Feminism in China," Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (November 1988 )

Zinoman, Peter. Nationalism in Vietnam and Indonesia. Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley, California. Spring, 2013. Lecture.

"Warp, Weft, and Way." Warp Weft and Way New Book on Chinese Feminism Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. May 2013. <http://warpweftandway.com/2013/03/12/new-book-on-chinese-feminism/>.

E-mail Interview with Professor Shawn McHale, 28-30 Apr. 2013