ABSTRACT
The roots of the gender order that I observed in my visits to Quang xã after the initiation of 1xi MSi reforms go back much further in its history and are essential to understanding more recent changes. Gender and familial discourses were a key element in the origins and development of the anticolonial movement against the French, a legacy that influenced the Communist revolutionary movement. As discussed in this chapter, revolutionary nationalist discourses viewed women as a significant resource in the struggle against the French, and the idea of gender equality was first developed as a function of national liberation. Anti-colonial activists urged women to
emulate patriotic models and disseminated the idea that women and their maternal functions symbolized the essence of the national community. The Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), founded in 1930 under Hi Chí Minh, also stressed statist values of revolutionary womanhoods and familialism. With the birth of an independent state under communist rule in 1945, as we shall see, gender and familial discourses were used to promote and justify state policies and reforms that led to both greater participation for women in the public sphere and their continuing secondary status within the family.
