Description

In China and Vietnam, early revolutionaries believed in the synergy between the struggle for national liberation and for the emancipation of women. In Vietnam, the 1920s debates around the “women’s question” have been portrayed in generational terms and young people’s embrace of revolutionary ideals as arising from their wish to free themselves from the oppressiveness of the patriarchal family. Through the story of Bao Luong and the women she recruited into the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League, I propose to revisit the question of gender in Vietnam in the 1920s and the role of family dynamics in the early phase of the revolutionary process.

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Hue-Tam Ho Tai is the Kenneth T. Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History at Harvard where she has taught since 1980. She holds a B.A. in politics from Brandeis University and a M.A. in Regional Studies-East Asia and a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University.
She is the author of Millenarianism and Peasant Politics in Vietnam (Harvard, 1983) and Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Harvard 1992) and Passion, Betrayal and Revolution in Colonial Saigon (California, 2010) She is also the editor of The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (California, 2001) and of a forthcoming volume on property and property rights in Vietnam.