Vietnamese women have always had a place in the struggle for independence

Interview with Phượng Bùi Trân

A historian specializing in the history of colonization, Phượng Bùi Trân was the first professor to teach a history of women in Việt Nam. Very active in the academic world, she has been weaving partnerships and academic cooperation between France and Việt Nam for many years .

She is a guest at the annual Francophone Worlds Chair. This was created in partnership with the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie.

Your relationship with the French language and culture got off to a rocky start. Before you entered high school, you associated French with the language of the invader..

Phượng Bùi Trân : I was born in 1950, so the atmosphere was not at all Francophile, but I grew up in southern Việt Nam, the Republic of Việt Nam, where French readings remained compulsory in public schools for many years. My family was French-speaking and very steeped in French culture, particularly the republican values of liberty and equality. It was precisely for these values that my father joined the anti-colonial resistance. As a child, I didn't like French lectures at all. Then, as luck would have it, I went to the French lycée, and it was a love affair with French lectures and French culture. I discovered completely different relationships between teachers and students, more democratic, freer. What really impressed me was the encouragement to read and the availability of the library for students.

This year, you've been invited to the Collège de France to hold the Francophone Worlds chair. What does this mean to you ?

As a researcher, you know that each publication, each lecture is always a provisional state of your research, and that nothing is ever definitive. Incidentally, the French-speaking world is very dear to me. In 1991, along with other colleagues, I helped set up a private non-profit school, which later became Hoa Sen University. The Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie was a great help during this twenty-five-year journey. It facilitated the creation of this pilot school, and thanks to this status we had a lot of room to maneuver in a very restrictive environment. I spent seventeen years as a professor and head of the History of Việt Namdepartment at the University of Pedagogy in Ho Chi Minh City. Very few colleagues invest themselves in this profession, as it is particularly complicated in Việt Nam. Eventually, I gave up. In Hoa Sen, on the other hand, we were able to experiment with many things and develop the French language, but adapted to the South Asian context, i.e. a part of the world where English is spoken in business. We defended the idea of creating Vietnamese-speaking streams, with English and French as compulsory foreign languages. We were keen to enable students to integrate immediately into the world of work, thanks to English, and to introduce them to multiculturalism with French, showing them that internationalization doesn't necessarily mean Americanization. We've always said that the French-speaking world favors diversity. I hope to be able to make a small Vietnamese contribution to the knowledge of Francophone Worlds.

Over the course of your academic career, you've taken a keen interest in Vietnamese women and the history of their emancipation..

When I was at the University of Pedagogy, I chose the History of Việt Namdepartment , because I naively thought I had the means to work on this subject. I had a lot of setbacks with the higher authorities and realized that it wasn't possible. I gave up being a teacher of Việt Nam history , but I wanted to continue in history. A friend of mine, who founded the Open University of Ho Chi Minh City, had the idea of creating the first Department of Women's Studies in Việt Nam there , and she put me in charge of teaching history. So I started teaching Vietnamese women's history and found myself in a virtual desert of resources. There was nothing but hagiographic treatises on women-heroines. I wanted to do more research in this field, and I discovered just how rich the subject was.

How did you find sources on the place and role women had in building modernViệt Nam ?

In official and classic sources, such as archives and the official history of Việt Nam, women are virtually absent. You have to look elsewhere, in autobiographies, women's biographies which are often written by women from a later era, folklore, religious practices such as the worship of mother goddesses, literary sources... Classical historians rarely consider fiction but, at heart, it's full of representations of real men and women. I was also helped by the French experience : the historian of Việt Nam, Daniel Hémery, having heard that I was to teach the history of Vietnamese women and that I found myself without resources, recommended l'Histoire des femmes en Occident, directed by Michelle Perrot, where I was able to find a shared history and a methodological initiation.

In the description of your lectures, you mention a period, the ^15th century, which saw the consolidation of the State and the loss, for women, of political prerogatives..

This is a little-known aspect, even in Việt Nam, because the official history taught in schools places great emphasis on the thousand years of Chinese domination. And then there were another thousand years when the Vietnamese, of their own free will, strove to learn Chinese culture because it represented civilization and we had to show the Chinese that we were as civilized as they were, so that they would no longer invade us, or at least no longer pretend to dominate us in order to civilize us. But Chinese culture is, in particular, Confucianism, which is very patriarchal. A common misconception in Việt Nam is that the country was very oppressive towards women before the arrival of the West. However, the country has a much longer history than these 1,000 years of domination and is part of the South Asian civilization, which is very varied and often matrilineal. In simple terms, rice cultivation is widespread, and requires a larger and more meticulous workforce than wheat, for example. As a result, female labor is indispensable. Women play an important role in production, trade and beliefs. What's more, matrilineality meant that alliances between large families were made through women. They therefore had a political role to play, and had to be reckoned with, particularly in times of transition and change of reign... This was not lost until the ^15th  century, with the monopoly of Confucianism. They then made up for it in culture and even education, for although Confucianism excluded women from competitive examinations, they could be teachers. Women were therefore not allowed to take part in competitive examinations, but some of them - the most talented and persevering - helped men to prepare for them.

You have worked extensively on the history of French colonization in Việt Nam and the changes it brought about in society..

From the time of French colonization, from the middle of the ^19th century in the South (ex-Cochinchina), and then throughout the country, women went to school like men.I place the first wave of Vietnamese feminism in 1918, because that's when a whole generation of intellectuals trained in French schools emerged. Before then, writing was based on Chinese characters, and was very elitist and difficult. The Latin alphabet and romanized writing made it easy for many people to become literate, and led to the development of a press and a new literature.

When these new intellectual elites turned against colonial domination, girls were included in revolutionary schools and women in resistance meetings. How do you explain this ?

There's an old Vietnamese proverb that goes : " When the enemy arrives at the threshold of the house, even women must fight ". Vietnamese women have always had a place in the struggle for independence, so the fact that they took part in the anti-colonial struggle is not surprising. It was after victory that things changed.Wars make upheavals possible, and women take part in the effort in different ways, but afterwards we " put things back in order ". Indeed, Minh Khai, a pioneering communist leader and feminist of the time, said that the feminist struggle should continue after the victory of the communist revolution.

After its independence in 1945, Việt Nam still experienced many conflicts. Did this set back feminist advances ?

Yes, there was a lot of sexual abuse of women during this long period of war. This had disastrous consequences, which can be seen in today's domestic violence. Combatants returned home traumatized. These were wars of independence, of course, but they were also civil wars. And this is something that Việt Nam has never looked in the face or treated seriously.

What challenges do young Vietnamese women face today ? Are there still many inequalities in the workplace ? Do they still have little access to education in the most remote regions of the country ?

Yes, there are these challenges and others, such as the vestiges of patriarchal Confucianism that still weigh heavily. There are also the pressures of age-old heritages such as the debt of gratitude to one's parents, as well as contemporary realities such as unbridled capitalism and poverty. There are many different and contradictory realities coexisting today in the same space-time. Many women find themselves having to work abroad, in illegal working conditions... And on the other hand, there are many women running businesses or active in the cultural sphere, even if their activity still needs financial support. There's a profusion of feminist organizations and activities, but unlike the first wave of Vietnamese feminism, there's no convergence to make their voices louder. They are micro-organizations that try to be as discreet as possible. However, I can see that they are trying to connect.

There's a Women's Museum in Hanoi. What do you think of the memory work done there ?

The museum focuses on patriotic or communist heroines, but not on feminism or even women's history. There's an ideology in power that imposes a lot of constraints, and this doesn't at all encourage Vietnamese to take up the humanities or history. What counterbalances this is civil society : many circles and clubs are springing up to discuss and disseminate information and knowledge on education, history, youth, the family, women, gender... The idea is to propose alternatives to official information and education, which are deficient.

Do today's feminist movements refer to what you call " the first wave " ?

Young Vietnamese women don't know about it. I'm asked to give training to their organizations so that they can learn about what happened before. Young people often think that it's thanks to their studies abroad that they've acquired new knowledge and a critical mind that enables them to question things that are "   " traditional. I try to remind them that traditions are not as one-sided as they think, and that there have been breaks in history.

Interview by Marie Mougin