Title Bùi Khánh Minh - Yale University - Book Review_Final Draft.docx ✅

Bùi Khánh Minh Book Review 1 Pettus, Ashley. Between Sacrifice and Desire: National Identity and the Governing of Femininity in Vietnam. New York: Routledge, 2003. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203491300 . Conducted in the 1990s and published in 2003, Ashley Pettus’s Between Sacrifice and Desire investigates how the Vietnamese Communist Party’s decision in 1986 to pursue a market-oriented economy to replace centralized economic planning within the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) generated a new ideal femininity that suited these new changes during a period more popularly known as the Đổi Mới [Renovation] era. Instead of excelling as socialist workers who prioritized the collective benefit, women now were expected to become savvy in managing home economics and enthusiastic in preserving national traditions to build gia đình văn minh [‘civil’ families].  Although the research’s major focus is on the aftermath of Đổi Mới, Pettus does not treat the failed socialist planning before 1986 like a foregone conclusion, but rather an era full of contingency that formed the historical roles that the VMU and state-controlled newspapers had held in shaping the socialist- feminist apparatus for women in urban northern Vietnam. The book is divided into two parts: “Media and Governmentality'', following the history of the VMU (VMU), public press, and their commitment to generating modern Vietnamese womanhood since 1954 until 1990s; and “Mediated Struggle”, presenting Pettus’s ethnographic research in the responses of local women belonging to two different neighborhoods in Hanoi in 1990s — a former working class rural village and an emergent merchant district. It argues that economic and moral demands from the state did not account for the daily struggles experienced by women during the SRV’s transition to capitalism. In educational training sessions, cultural activities, and state newspapers, as well as in conversations between neighbors and personal interviews, unhappy marital situations pointed to women’s behaviors and attitudes in trades and self-preservation against social evils. 1 While Hanoian women were striving to achieve economic prosperity for their families in the wake of failed socialist planning, discussions and representations of ideal womanhood promoted “modernizing” home economic knowledge as well as “traditional” characteristics that older 1 Ashley Pettus, Between Sacrifice and Desire: National Identity and the Governing of Femininity in Vietnam (New York: Routledge, 2003), 85, 93, 102, 118–19, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203491300.
Bùi Khánh Minh Book Review 1 generations of women who had survived the war carried. Self-sacrifice was often evoked, not to rekindle socialist aspirations, but rather to suggest that women in the market-driven era lacked the necessary selflessness to keep family’s happiness intact and build “civil families”. Women in trades, especially those who had become the nouveau riche, in trying to improve home economies, were then often reduced to deviant women who were prone to promiscuity, greed, and independence from matrimonial reunions. 2 On the one hand, the book is successful in delivering a microhistorical study of Communism in Vietnam after 1975. Examinations of Vietnamese language public texts, such as emulation materials and journalistic articles on socialist womanhood, reveal that the Communist state attempted to educate women about not only the eminence of socialism or the evils of capitalism, but also homemaking techniques, public appearance, and choice of companionship—all of which counted toward women’s socialist duties. 3 Pettus’s analysis of newspapers before 1986 suggests that the portrayal of women in private trades as traitors the socialist state’s ideals of society, family, womanhood to have been a well-established convention during the era of socialist market. 4 Moreover, the book offers personal testimonies from Hanoian women about the reality of poverty caused by collectivization and constant displacement caused by the war against the Republic of Vietnam until 1975, which prompted the seemingly defiant participation in capitalism until liberalization. 5 This close analysis of the “high socialist” era lays down the groundwork to understand the cultural sphere that the VMU and newspapers created for women after Đổi Mới, in particular how efforts to promote economic prosperity in the household complemented a new insistence on women to build “civil families” as dual responsibilities to the nation. By doing so, this work anchors the policing of womanhood of Đổi Mới and the reactions from local Hanoian women to the tangible and intangible legacies of socialist buildings and wartime efforts, and provides the contingent limits of economic liberalization in the everyday struggles. 2 Pettus, 19, 119, 124, 135, 159, 190. 3 Pettus, 37–38. 4 Pettus, 51–52. 5 Pettus, 70-74.
Bùi Khánh Minh Book Review 1 Despite these important interventions, this book still has a few limitations in terms of sources and methodologies. Although Pettus makes extensive use of Vietnamese-language newspapers, she does not make use of available archival material to demonstrate the historical efforts of the VMU in policing femininity in Hanoi. While newspapers transform official campaigns and rhetoric into subjects of discourses and another component of everyday politics in the socialist state, they do not reveal the inner-working of the VMU, as well as its relationship with other branches of government, in particular departments of public health, labor, education, or social affairs. The absence of archival work makes the VMU appear to be a rather ominous and monolithic entity, and therefore it is difficult to identify specific public officials who participated in designing the state’s initiatives, especially at the national and municipal level. Moreover, although choosing Hanoi to be the main setting of the study allows for an in-depth study of the population’s postwar psyche after over thirty years of high socialism, there is something left to be desired in the book’s analysis of Hanoi’s counterpart—Saigon (renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 by the SRV), as the city became one of many former capitalistic and urban spaces to undergo a socialist transformation. 6 While the author notes some considerably affluent merchant women’ personal comparisons of womanhood in the two cities, the governance of women in Saigon receives little analytical attention, which could further problematize of the effects of the 1954 partition, postwar organization as well as the aspirations of Đổi Mới womanhood on a national scale. In conclusion, researchers of Vietnam since 1975 and the social history of the global Cold War will appreciate the book’s exploration of the longer history of the Communist government in its inconsistent adjustment of limits for female agency in Vietnam, through the special case study of Hanoi. And although the work is limited in its choices of sources as well as scope of research, its detailed study of campaigns, public texts, and responses in the 1990s provide a more contemporary reflection from interviewees that historians of postwar Vietnam and the ending year of the global Cold War can confer to. 6 Pettus, 200–204.