Women's Status in Medieval Vietnam
Opportunities for Women in Annam and Champa
Women in southern Vietnam have historically had more opportunities and freedoms than those in Chinese-dominated northern Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh’s victorious Long-Haired Army is one of the more famous examples of women fighting in a war of modern history. The subsequent history of Vietnamese women and their apparent equality with men in the Communist system suggests that equality of the genders in Vietnam was a genuine phenomenon. To some extent, this is true. Whenever a state increases its power and its control over disbursement of economic activities takes place, it improves the quality of life that women can enjoy. For example, the Communist Vietnamese Government organised public health programs, child care programs and care for elderly people – which are all areas which women are traditionally expected to take the lead. As the government has moved to a more capitalist economic system, it has reduced the scale of these programs so that, at the same time that women have more opportunities to enter the labour market, they have more duties to hold them back. So, it is young, single, educated women who tend to benefit from new opportunities while others are less able to do so.
To some extent, this has been true throughout history; those women who have made an impact on Vietnamese history are those who have had the status and the ability to avoid domestic care, at least for some period of their lives. The Trung Sisters, who are famous for leading a rebellion against the occupying Chinese, were able to do so by virtue of their noble birth; the poet Ho Xuan Huong, who is perhaps most famous for her verse comparing her body to the jack fruit, enjoyed periods of economic freedom and relief from domestic cares, while still acknowledging how close those forces came to impacting on her life. In other cases, women were restricted from participating in public life by the legal system which, for example, established the examination system allowing any suitable scholar to join the imperial civil service, no matter what their social status. It was often the case that those aspirants wishing to take the exam could only do so because of the labour of women who supported the young men, busy with their study.
However, even though some laws and customs from China were imported to northern Vietnam (also known as Dai Viet or Annam), the people of southern Vietnam (Champa) enjoyed more of the freedoms associated with the social systems of mainland Southeast Asia. Chinese visitors were amazed at the sight of Cham women riding around on horses and supporting themselves by working freely at markets. These freedoms have remained to women in all the centuries since, especially outside the main urban areas.
John Walsh, Shinawatra University, March 2007
John Walsh, Shinawatra University, March 2007
