ABSTRACT
Drawing on stories of young Hmong women and men who married at mid or late teens, this study describes young women’s lives after marriage and their powerful agency to negotiate with the patriarchy. It then examines how these stories are embedded in their gender and social contexts of upland small-scale agriculture. The case study was conducted in a village in Dien Bien province, Vietnam, where farmers mainly grow coffee, maize and local fruits. The conceptual framework was drawn from social theories of gender relations and feminist theories of technology. The findings show that young women’s positions as a wife and daughter-in-law make it very complex for them to negotiate with their families over their labour and decision-making for domestic and agricultural work. Young women often engage in the most time-consuming manual labour work but their priority for labour-saving technology is not recognized by their husbands and in-laws. However, young women have strong power and agency to change, although it is often subtle and implicit. Agricultural interventions that fail to consider gendered youth situations risk undermining opportunities for scaling up agricultural technology in the context of ethnic minorities in northern Vietnam.
