ABSTRACT
THE VIETNAMESE MEDIA's FOCUS ON THE MORAL CONSEQUENCES OF market reform has tended to obscure the mundane pressures and hardships that women face in the post-subsidy economy. Journalists and editors have eagerly exposed the plight of village girls turned prostitutes, of “left on the shelf” (“e roi”) women seeking to bear children out-of-wedlock, and of poor female college students driven to elderly male ‘patrons.’ Yet they have generally confined their depictions of women's everyday struggles for household subsistence and improvement to tabloid tales of domestic strife or nostalgic portrayals of ‘heroic’ sacrifice. Many Hanoi women I spoke to insisted that the newspapers “exaggerate” the faults of women in order “to teach women who have done wrong.” The priorities of governmental entertainment have contributed to the persistent gap between public cultural discourse on female character and the realities of most women's lives.
