The Vietnam Women's Union and Global Feminism

During the U.S. War in Viet Nam, the Vietnam Women's Unions (VWU) of North Viet Nam and its counterpart in South Viet Nam played integral roles in fostering a global women's antiwar movement.  Through meetings and correspondence, i.e. through civic forms of diplomacy, the VWU actively nurtured U.S. women's interest in U.S. policy and military activity in Southeast Asia.  Furthermore, the VWU fostered U.S. women's activism in the global arena by fueling their sense of moral outrage and providing models of female engagement in local, national, and international political processes.  This paper examines the diplomatic efforts of the VWU in developing personal and political relationships with various groups of American women's activists, including those who identified as "traditional" maternalist peace advocates, second wave feminists, and "third world" revolutionaries based in racialized communities in the U.S.  

This study offers a different framework for understanding global feminism during the "long decade" of the 1960s.  Existing scholarship has pointed to the short-comings of western women who embraced the ideology of international sisterhood but whose practice fell far short due to their inabilities to look beyond their own priorities and viewpoints.  In contrast, this work will begin with the perspectives and agency of Vietnamese women as they sought to expand the political vision and activism of women in the U.S.  These international forms of sisterhood were not free of conflict or misunderstanding.  However, this Asia-centered perspective offers the opportunity to frame western women's peace activism as part of a global movement that emerged through dialogue and negotiation, not just through projection and domination.