Recently in a few different conversations that I’ve had with Vietnamese friends the topic of wet rice agriculture and respect for women has come up.
Today there is a widely-held belief in Vietnam that an important characteristic of Vietnamese culture is a tradition of respecting women (Truyền thống trọng phụ nữ trong văn hóa Việt Nam), and that this is somehow related to wet rice agriculture and the worship of female spirits.
Any time I hear someone talking about such a tradition, I can immediately detect “essentialism” (bản chất luận) and nationalism. This is because I know that all societies change over time, and that it only became possible to share ideas at a national level in the modern era, after the development of modern educational systems and modern forms of communication (starting with newspapers, and then radio, tv and now the Internet).
Therefore, I know that there are no “traditions” that last for centuries (or millennia, as is the claim in the case of the tradition of respecting women in Vietnam).
So when I hear someone talk about a “tradition of respecting women in Vietnam,” my first reaction is to ask: Where does that idea come from?
It’s actually very easy to find out, so let’s go see.
Question: Did anyone prior to the twentieth century say anything about a tradition of respecting women? Does it say that, for instance, in the Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư or the Đại Nam thực lục?
Answer: No.
Question: Ok, then how about in reformist writings by people like Phan Bội Châu or Phan Chu Trinh or other intellectuals who started to come into contact with Western ideas in the early twentieth century?
Answer: Nope. People like Phan Bội Châu said a little bit about women. People of this generation where the first ones to talk about the Western concept of the nation, and I think I recall Phan Bội Châu mentioning that women are important for the nation. However, people at that time did not talk about any “tradition of respecting women in Vietnam.”
Question: Maybe the French said something about that? Anything in French colonial-era writings about the “Tradition annamite de respect des femmes”?
Answer: No, but French writings about the women’s movement in the West did become known to some Vietnamese. The above image is of pages from a book on the international women’s movement that was published in 1928 and which contains information that was translated from French and Chinese.
Question: Ok, then how about in the many magazines, newspapers and books that were written in Vietnamese using the Romanized script (quốc ngữ) in the 1920s and 1930s?
Answer: I have not found anything that talks about a tradition of respecting women in Vietnam, but there were books on, for instance, the Socialist effort to “liberate women” that talked about the different ways that women were oppressed at different times in the past, and which argued that the Soviet Union had created a society where men and women were equal.
Question: I see. Well maybe this tradition of respecting women idea is one that was developed in South Vietnam before 1975, and then maybe was kept alive in the diaspora and has now made it back to Vietnam?
Answer: Good guess, but no, it’s not there either.
Question: Ok, then it has to be North Vietnam in the 1950s, during the time when scholars were introduced to Marxist scholarship!
Answer: Kind of. One idea that was written about at that time was the idea that Vietnam had once been a matriarchy. In Marxist historiography there is the idea that all societies go through the same stages of development (an idea that is no longer upheld by anyone, as far as I know), and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State about how he believed matriarchy was an early stage of human development.
This idea was written about in North Vietnam in the 1950s.
Question: I see, but that’s not a “tradition of respecting women” and it has nothing to do with wet rice agriculture. So for those ideas, there is only one possibility left: the post-Đổi Mới period.
Answer: EXACTLY!!! In the 1990s, people like the late Trần Quốc Vượng and Trần Ngọc Thêm both wrote about this topic.
To be fair, Trần Quốc Vượng had written in the early 1970s about a tradition of respecting women, however from what I can tell, Trần Quốc Vượng talked mainly about what he called a “mother principle” (nguyên lý mẹ của văn hóa Việt Nam) in Vietnamese culture. He did not connect together respect for women, agriculture and the worship of female spirits.
That was the work of Trần Ngọc Thêm in the 1990s.
So is Trần Ngọc Thêm correct?
There is an easy way to test that. All we have to do is to compare what Trần Ngọc Thêm has said about Vietnam with what we know about other places.
Question: Are there other countries that engage in wet rice agriculture?
Answer: Yes! China, India, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia. . . the list goes on and on.
Question: Are there other countries where people worship female spirits?
Answer: Yes! China, India, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia. . . the list goes on and on.
Question: Do those places say that the existence of wet rice agriculture and the worship of female spirits is evidence of a “tradition of respecting women?”
Answer: No. . .
Ok, so now we have a problem. If this is something that is “true” then why is it that it is only in Vietnam that people have made this claim when the exact same conditions exist in other countries?
To answer that question we have to examine the writings of Trần Ngọc Thêm (and Trần Quốc Vượng) and try to understand why they wrote what they did when they did.
The 1990s was a time when Vietnam was opening to the world, and it was also a time when Globalization was becoming more powerful. There were many people in Vietnam who felt nervous about the future, and who feared that international culture would overwhelm Vietnamese culture and society.
They therefore felt that they needed to strengthen Vietnamese culture to prevent that from happening.
How could they do that? Prior to Đổi Mới, Socialist ideology had been used to try to hold Vietnamese society together, but with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, etc., Socialism lost a lot of its appeal.
So in Vietnam, people turned to “traditional” culture, and tried to promote “traditional” values as a way to strengthen society (the exact same thing happened in the PRC at that time as well).
As this happened, the term “bản sắc” (characteristic/essence) started to be written about A LOT.
Writers wrote about the “bản sắc” of Vietnam, of Vietnamese culture, of Vietnamese everything.
It is in this context that this idea of the “tradition of respecting women” was developed.
It is an idea that, as the above passage from a writing by Trần Quốc Vượng in the 1990s demonstrates, would not have made much sense prior to that time. In the 1970s Trần Quốc Vượng tried to publish a small book on the “tradition of respecting women in Vietnam,” and its publication was held up by a female cadre who said, “If there was a tradition of respecting women, then why the heck did we have to set the problem of ‘liberating women’?”
So why did this idea make sense in the 1990s? Why did someone like Trần Ngọc Thêm combine together wet rice agriculture, the worshipping of female deities and respect for women and say that this is a timeless characteristic of Vietnamese culture?
Again, one would have to examine the writings of Trần Ngọc Thêm, and interview him and others, to try to determine why he promoted that idea at that time.
What is extremely clear, however, is that the “tradition of respecting women” in Vietnam is a NEW idea, and that it is an INVENTED idea. What is more, when it is described as a “bản sắc” (a timeless characteristic) of Vietnam, it becomes an ESSENTIALIZED idea.
New ideas are not “traditions.” They are “invented traditions.” And nothing has a “bản sắc” or essential characteristic that remains unchanged for centuries.
So again, when I hear about a “tradition of respecting women” in Vietnam (or anywhere), I can tell right away that it’s an essentialized idea. It’s not “true.” What’s “true” is that someone at some point in time felt that it was important to promote that idea and that s/he did so for some specific purpose.
