Ever since the Trung sisters rallied tribal chieftains and raised an army of female generals to drive out the Chinese in A.D. 40, women have shared the fighting and dying throughout Vietnam’s 2,000-year struggle for independence.
The heroism of Trung Nhi and her sister, Trung Trac, in one of Vietnam’s most famous rebellions is celebrated here every spring.
It has become the rallying cry for women who are demanding more equality in a communist country that now marches to the tune of free-market capitalism.
But many see it as an uphill battle in a society which still expects women to display the Confucian ideals of cong, dung, ngon and hanh-diligence, beauty, grace and virtue-while men continue to wield power and accumulate wealth in Southeast Asia’s newest economic dynamo.
And if the weight of Confucian teachings weren’t enough to dampen their hopes for greater equality, Vietnamese women outnumber men in a society that values husbands, brothers and sons above wives, sisters and daughters.
Women account for 52 percent of Vietnam’s 72 million citizens, an imbalance blamed on three decades of war with France and the United States.
Still, some women who fought the French as communist Viet Minh soldiers and the United States as Viet Cong guerrillas have made it to top government jobs and are using their power to advance the cause of their generally impoverished sisters.
“The Trungs left a profound imprint on Vietnamese women,” Vice President Nguyen Thi Binh, the country’s highest-ranking woman, said during an interview in the presidential palace.
It once housed the French governor-general but was eschewed because of its opulence by Ho Chi Minh, the founder of modern Vietnam.
“Women have always had an important role in our society because of their contributions to national defense and reconstruction after our wars,” said Binh, a prim 67-year-old who wears the ao dai, silk pants and tunic, traditional costume of Vietnamese women.
“But that role is not yet commensurate with our profound contributions because of thousands of years of feudalism.”
Binh was jailed by the French as a revolutionary in 1951. But she went on to become foreign minister of the Viet Cong guerrillas, squaring off with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other American diplomats at the Paris peace talks that eventually led to the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops in 1973.
She blames Vietnam’s crushing poverty and international isolation since the end of the Indochina war in 1975 for keeping women in menial, low-paying jobs or at home.
The country’s per capita income remains about $250 a year despite a record $7 billion in foreign investment in 1993, while the malnourished population explodes at an average rate of 2.8 percent a year.
Women make up more than 70 percent of Vietnam’s commercial work force, 67 percent of its teachers, 63 percent of its doctors and 50 percent of its farm laborers.
They hold 29 percent of high-paying management jobs and 73 seats in the 395-member National Assembly, higher numbers than in the United States.
But percentages can be misleading.
“In an underdeveloped economy like ours,” Binh said, “it is very difficult for women to be both mothers and constructive members of society.
For every venture capitalist such as Nguyen Thi Anh Nhan, president of Hanoi’s booming South East Asia Brewery, millions of undereducated young women face a bleak future selling everything from food to fireworks as street vendors or toiling in the country’s vast rice fields.
Even worse, prostitution has returned with a vengeance to Vietnamese cities after a 20-year hiatus.
Women’s rights activists have mounted a two-pronged campaign, to improve the lives of Vietnamese mothers and their children through better medical care, nutrition and extensive family-planning programs and to provide low-interest loans to women to start businesses.
On this year’s 1,954th anniversary of the Trung sisters’ uprising, the Vietnam Women’s Union announced that it had created 370,000 new jobs for women at 24 training centers since the economic reforms known as doi moi took hold in the late 1980s.
Last year the union, which claims 40 percent of Vietnamese women as members, lent $32 million to female entrepreneurs, most of them poor.
“We have a lot of heroines in our 4,000-year history,” said Nguyen Kim Cuc, a spokeswoman for the Women’s Union in Hanoi.
“But the Trung sisters are only remembered as part of history.
“There is a street in every town named for them, but that doesn’t fill the gap between rich and poor, especially in rural areas.”
Most Vietnamese families couldn’t survive without women earning an income, said Cuc.
But men almost exclusively head banks, companies and all-powerful families that nurture startup businesses, resulting in what she calls “significantly high underemployment” for women.
“So far,” Cuc said, “most women have missed out in Vietnam’s conversion to a market-oriented economy.”
Cuc’s boss is Truong My Hoa, 47, the powerful secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee and president of the Vietnam Women’s Union.
Imprisoned by the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government between 1964 and 1975 for her role as a student protest leader, Hoa said her current mission is to battle for women’s rights, create jobs and prevent the spread of AIDS.
“A woman’s reproductive function is still seen as a national asset,” she said, even though government policy is to lower the birth rate to 1.7 percent through intensive family-planning campaigns, especially in rural areas, where 80 percent of Vietnamese live.
“People still want sons, not daughters, and they keep having children until they get a son who can inherit property.”
In the meantime, Hoa said, many women in boom towns such as Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, and Hanoi are victims of growing social evils such as prostitution, drug addiction and HIV infections.
In an eerie echo of what already has happened in nearby Thailand, Vietnam has gone from a single known HIV case in 1990 to more than 1,000 reported cases last year.
Recalling the late President Ho Chi Minh’s list of Vietnam’s three enemies-illiteracy, hunger and foreign domination-Hoa said: “Although our constitution and law talk about women’s rights, we have a long way to go to defeat two of those enemies.”
