Abstract
Using Western-language sources, this chapter will suggest questions to be asked about the initial change in the status of Vietnamese women. This subject is especially intriguing as that status has been and remains higher than that of other East and South-East Asian women. Women’s status is best measured by comparing it with the status of the men in the women’s society, social class, race, and other appropriate groupings as well as in specific historic periods. Measures of status include examinations of women’s (and men’s) occupations and incomes, participation in government both formal and informal, position in law, participation in religion, and position in the family. In addition, religious and social attitudes comparing and contrasting women and men affect status. Finally, status remains difficult to measure, and examinations of women’s roles may be more effective: are women confined to domestic roles? which social and political roles are they allowed to fill?
When a great doctrine [Confucianism], even if it be false, lasts for tens and thousands of years it turns into reality itself. And people feel an automatic revulsion when a woman not conforming to the exact wording of the doctrine appears.
Fukuzaw Yukichi (1853–1901)1
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Notes
Kiyooka Eiichi (trans. and ed.), Fukuzawa Yukichi on Japanese Women: Selected Works, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1988, p. 26.
Usually, this refers to Neo-Confucianism. Most recently and proposed as useful for modern times, Neo-Confucian virtues and values are summarized by Tu Wei-ming as: loyalty to state, filial piety, purity of mind, selflessness, dedication, sacrifice (p. 750), brotherly affection, conjugal harmony, trust in friends, modesty, benevolence, learning (p. 756), moral rectitude (p. 757), political unity, and social harmony (p. 769). ‘The Search for Roots In Industrial East Asia: The Case of the Confucian Revival’, Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (ed.), Fundamentalisms Observed, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 740–81.
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Esther S. Lee Yao, Chinese Women Past and Present, Mesquite, Texas: Ide House, 1983, p. 6; also see S. Y. Teng, ‘The Role of the Family in the Chinese Legal System’, Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 11–12, 1977, p. 120–55, p. 123n.
Yao and Hill Gates, ‘The Commoditization of Chinese Women’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 14, No. 41, 1989, pp. 799–832. See for a critique of this position, J. Holmgren, ‘Myth, Fantasy or Scholarship: Images of the Status of Women in Traditional China’, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 6, 1981, pp. 147–70.
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For example: Nakane Chie, Kinship and Economic Organization in Rural Japan, New York.: Humanities Press, Inc., 1967, p. 25.
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© 1996 Mariam Darce Frenier and Kimberly Mancini
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Frenier, M.D., Mancini, K. (1996). Vietnamese Women in a Confucian Setting: The Causes of the Initial Decline in the Status of East Asian Women. In: Barry, K. (eds) Vietnam’s Women in Transition. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24611-3_2
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