Women of Viet Nam (Revised edition)
People’s Press first published Women of Viet Nam before the Vietnamese liberation movement drove the U.S. troops out of their country. This book, relied on extensive archival research, interviews, and travel in Viet Nam to show how the Vietnamese women challenged centuries of patriarchal and colonial oppression and played an essential, sometimes leading, role in Viet Nam’s wars to defeat, first France, then the United States. Women of Viet Nam so resonated with members of the women’s movements and anti-war movements in the 1970’s, that even with no commercial advertising, distribution or social media, Peoples’ Press sold more than 50,000 copies and editions in Spanish, French, Danish and Farsi were published.
San Francisco, CA, Peoples Press, 1975
Women and Revolution in Viet Nam
In her second book, Women and Revolution in Viet Nam, Eisen presents her findings from her next visit to Viet Nam six years after the victory and reunification of the country. In this book she repeatedly asks: “In peacetime, did the marriage between women’s liberation and national liberation continue to thrive or dissolve? “What progress had Vietnamese women made towards ‘giai phong phu nu’ (translated as “women’s emancipation”, “women’s liberation”, “women’s equality” interchangeably)? What was the political analysis and commitment of the socialist government to women’s emancipation and leadership? What could anti-imperialists in the West learn from the political theory and practice of the Viet Nam Women’s Union?
London: ZED Books, 1984 (Acquired by Bloomsbury).
From Women in Prison Here to
Women of Viet Nam, We Are Sisters
During the Viet Nam War, which the Vietnamese call the “American War,” the puppet regime that the U.S. tried to keep in power in the southern part of the country, became notorious for imprisoning tens of thousands of political prisoners in torturous conditions. Human rights and anti-war organizations directed their outrage at the tiger cages and barbaric treatment of thousands of women political prisoners. Anti-imperialist women in the U.S. managed to bring a slide show about Vietnamese women into California’s Women’s Prison at Frontera. Afterwards, some of those incarcerated women sent letters of solidarity to their counterparts in Viet Nam. This pamphlet reproduces those letters, the Vietnamese women’s response and an introduction by Arlene Eisen.