ABSTRACT
THIS BOOK HAS EXPLORED THE VARIOUS WAYS IN WHICH WOMEN AND THE family have become the critical site for resolving and articulating the relationship between the state, the market and society in Vietnam's transition from socialism to capitalism. I have examined the specific governmental channels—both official and popular—through which the goals, dilemmas, and anxieties of market liberalization and global integration have worked to produce the modern middle class family as the cultural standard and the disciplinary core of society. I have argued that the dual priorities of national economic development and cultural strengthening in the current transition era have placed the Vietnamese woman—and the middle-class aspirant in particular—at the intersection of conflicting moral injunctions, which compound the terms of feminine domestic service as they limit the parameters of acceptable female agency.
