Week4_Raylph Evangelista_ASA150E

This weeks reading was interesting to me because even though it was still about the war in Vietnam, we got to learn more about what was going on behind the scenes and what people, who weren't fighting physically or politically, were doing to help stop it. In Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu talks about female activists who were heavily contributing to the battle of stopping the war in general. From the reading, it seemed that their impact was a lot larger than what people or schools care to cover. It's weird to me that this role, that thousands of women took up during the war, is never really talked about; even though multiple SEA feminist organizations were formed and there were multiple conferences  held to talk about it. It was even mentioned that western women who did want to see the other side's viewpoint would go to these conferences and come back to the west with a changed view on the entire thing. 

An example of this is when an American participant went and came back from one of these said conferences: she shared that once "you are faced with 'the enemy' and realize that American sons and husbands are killing them-it's too much to bear" (Wu, 198). I feel as though this is important because these women actually took the time to understand the other side and that these SEA people were just like them. They were people that had lives and had families. They weren't the animals that their government made them out to be. This relates today because there are still many female organizations that still go against the war and there are still people who go to these conferences and find that what they are told at their home isn't always the case. The one thing that is upsetting is that I had to find out about SEA women' contributions to the war so late into my academic career. I feel like even now, SEA women don't have as much a voice as the male counterparts because that's how people write them off to be. It sucks because it's clear that they had just as much contribution to going against the war as the people who were fighting.

Question: What can we do to shine more light towards the works of SEA women during the war in Vietnam and even now?

Sources

Wu, Tzu-Chun Judy. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism During the Vietnam Era. 2013.

Image: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/09/27/647989652/if-we-called-ourselves-yellow