War, Motherhood, and Memory in Vietnam

I will explore how notions about the relation between motherhood and war shape the ways Vietnamese women veterans remember their experiences and how the Vietnamese  belief that motherhood represents a woman's natural right has offered women agency in the post-war era. In oral histories taken thirty years after women volunteered, women testify that they went to war in 1965 to save the future for a peaceful place to realize their ultimate destiny:  to marry and bear children. Propelled out of family and village life into a militarized world of men and bloodshed, many women recall that they remained true to their feminine dreams even after years in the field. But wartime sources bespeak another view, one that does not link war with dreams of motherhood but instead shows that heroic ideals, opportunities to display competence in a man's world, and realistic appraisals of the freedom offered by living in jungles far from families and communities also motivated women.
            However, once they returned home, as the ideal of the female warrior was replaced by the image of the moral mother, as the devastated country began to rebuild and repopulate the nation, these brave women became marginalized because they could not marry and bear children. But they have parlayed this cultural belief that motherhood is a woman's natural right to challenge the patriarchal family by bearing children without marriage. The state legitimated their children in 1986 and so these women have called upon a language of sacrifice and natural rights to gain agency and personal fulfillment.   This suggests why Western feminist notions that essentialist ideas oppress women need to be reevaluated depending on historical contexts and why post-war oral histories and wartime sources do not necessarily square when we look at the Vietnamese case.