Women's Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era

Jessica M. Frazier

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469631806
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In 1965, fed up with President Lyndon Johnson's refusal to make serious diplomatic efforts to end the Vietnam War, a group of female American peace activists decided to take matters into their own hands by meeting with Vietnamese women to discuss how to end U.S. intervention. While other attempts at women's international cooperation and transnational feminism have led to cultural imperialism or imposition of American ways on others, Jessica M.Frazier reveals an instance when American women crossed geopolitical boundaries to criticize American Cold War culture, not promote it. The American women Frazier studies not only solicited Vietnamese women's opinions and advice on how to end the war but also viewed them as paragons of a new womanhood by which American women could rework their ideas of gender, revolution, and social justice during an era of reinvigorated feminist agitation. Unlike the many histories of the Vietnam War that end with an explanation of why the memory of the war still divides U.S. society, by focusing on linkages across national boundaries, Frazier illuminates a significant moment in history when women formed effective transnational relationships on genuinely cooperative terms.

CHAPTER ONE

Mothers as Experts, 1965–1967

Mary Clarke was no stranger to being on the “wrong” side of the Cold War divide. In fact, Clarke had first come to the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the early 1950s because of her affiliation with the Communist Party. In the late 1950s, she had also traveled to the Eastern Bloc and to international peace conferences sympathetic to the Soviet view of the Cold War. In light of her past, her May 1965 trip to Moscow and on to North Viet Nam was not that extraordinary. Even so, the trip may have surprised some of Clarke’s fellow WSP members, a fact that likely led Clarke and her travel companion, Lorraine Gordon, to conceal their brief stay in Hanoi.

Nevertheless, Clarke and Gordon knew that WSP members would support their efforts to contact North Vietnamese. At the third annual WSP conference, in 1964, WSP members identified the Viet Nam conflict as a potential seedbed for nuclear war and decided to seek an opportunity to speak with Vietnamese women and officials.1 WSP leaders, like Clarke, distrusted the U.S. government’s portrayal of the situation and wanted their own say in U.S. foreign policy. When Clarke and Gordon met with VWU members in Hanoi, they began to make arrangements for a conference between WSP, the VWU, and the WUL, to take place in Djakarta, Indonesia, later that summer. In Djakarta, WSP members asked Vietnamese women about the history of the conflict as well as the desired outcome for Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese wanted to know what the American public thought of the war.2 Thus began an alliance based on exchanging information between women in the two nations.

Given the anticommunist climate of the United States in the 1960s, WSP members needed a strategy to avoid the likely red-baiting their entrance into foreign policy debates would engender. The group had dealt with such tactics before, when, in 1962, the House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed some of its national leaders to testify to the possible infiltration of communists into the organization. During the hearing, WSP founder Dagmar Wilson successfully deflected Cold War criticisms, in part through maternalist rhetoric—a tool many women’s organizations had used over the years.3 At the turn of the twentieth century, female activists often expressed maternal concerns to argue against war and for women’s involvement in international and municipal debates.4 According to WSP historian Amy Swerdlow, none of the first WSP leaders in the early 1960s had any awareness of this history of women’s peace activism and chose maternalist rhetoric because so many WSP members were in fact mothers.5 Although the portrayal of WSP members as apolitical mothers succeeded in keeping the press from vilifying them generally, it did not convince everyone of the group’s innocuousness. Indeed, even some WSP members questioned its actions. Some members and their husbands regularly informed the FBI of the possibly illegal and subversive activities of other WSP members.6 One leader recalled being appalled when she received her FBI report years later and found that someone had told agents about intimate WSP gatherings at which she thought she could trust every woman in attendance.7 Clearly, maternalism had not protected her from internal, not to mention government, scrutiny. Nevertheless, WSP leaders relied on maternalist rhetoric and depicted their Vietnamese counterparts in terms similar to those they used to describe themselves.

These portrayals mirrored those of VWU and WUL members, who also represented themselves as a body of mothers for the consumption of international audiences. They wrote open letters to American mothers, stressing their shared anguish over needless death and destruction. Quoting statistics on U.S. bombing and stating its consequences, particularly in terms of children’s lives lost, VWU and WUL members provided both quantitative and qualitative evidence of the appalling effects of the war in North and South Viet Nam. In one letter, VWU member Bui Thi Cam identified numerous provinces where the U.S. military had “poured … tons of bombs, napalm bombs included, and fired phosphorous bullets” (emphasis in original).8 Going on to describe the physical effects of the chemicals, Cam stressed that U.S. bombing killed and injured children. Telling the reader “you are mothers and love children,” she chose the emotions that American women were to feel as she also listed the number of GIs killed, wounded, or missing, further identifying her American audience as mothers of soldiers.9 The portrayal of women on both sides of the war as first and foremost mothers was a mutual endeavor.

Even so, Vietnamese women challenged WSP’s depictions of mothers as inherently peaceful and apolitical by promoting women’s entrance into the military and politics. One narrative, titled “A Fighting Mother,” chronicled the travails of a woman and her husband, both of whom valiantly fought for the revolution in the South. With references to the woman “carrying her baby in her arms” as she faced enemy soldiers, the story highlighted her roles as both a mother and a warrior as being central to her character.10 This woman’s motherhood enhanced her heroism, as the births of six children rarely kept her from fighting and strategizing for the NLF—her dedication to both family and country shone through. This kind of story of the people became popular in Vietnamese socialist propaganda in the 1960s. Making an example of an “average” person helped to build the illusion that the people, not the intelligentsia or diplomats, were behind the revolution.11 Although WSP members tended to ignore stories of women’s violence, through the repeated exposure to these alternative versions of motherhood, some WSP members developed new perspectives on women’s roles.

WSP’s characterization of Vietnamese women as sharing maternal sympathies began with Clarke and Gordon in the weeks preceding the July 1965 Djakarta conference. In an internal memo explaining the purpose of meeting VWU and WUL members, Clarke and Gordon described Vietnamese women as victims of American bombing “whose children [were] being killed.”12 According to Clarke and Gordon, Vietnamese women needed WSP members to publicize their plight in order to convince U.S. government officials to end the war. Through a face-to-face exchange with Vietnamese women, WSP could gain the leverage needed to “force a change in administration policy,” Clarke and Gordon argued.13 They also claimed that the fate of American women was “tied to that of Vietnamese women” because the conflict in Viet Nam “could erupt into nuclear war,” a key concern for WSP members.14 Taking this approach, Clarke and Gordon made U.S. intervention in Viet Nam a much larger issue that had the potential of directly affecting the lives of all American women, their families, and indeed the entire world. Women, however, could be in the vanguard to prevent such a catastrophe.

At the conference in Djakarta, ten American women met with six VWU members and three WUL members for four and a half days to show that women from warring nations could meet peaceably to discuss solutions. WSP decided who should attend the meeting based on who had the most potential to garner media attention after the event and who could afford to go. Of the ten American women, seven had participated in WSP actions in the past, and all could fundraise or pay the estimated $1,400 for the trip to Djakarta. Margaret Russell, a white founding member of WSP and chair of WSP’s Committee on the Vietnam Problem in Washington, D.C., led the American delegation, which also included Mary Clarke.15 Le Chan Phuong, secretary-general of the VWU, headed the VWU delegation and had met Clarke and Gordon in Hanoi in May.16 Nguyen Thi Binh, vice chair of the WUL, led the WUL delegation (see Figure 2).17 South Vietnamese women who supported the RVN administration could not attend the conference because the South Vietnamese government had made it a capital offense to confer with the enemy (members of the NLF or citizens of the DRV). Some WSP members questioned the significance of a meeting between American and Vietnamese women if RVN citizens were not present, but WSP leaders decided the conference would attract important attention regardless.18

FIGURE 2 Left to right: Le Chan Phuong, Le Thi Cao, and Nguyen Thi Binh at Djakarta conference. Photograph Collection, Box “Dated Images/Billboards, etc.,” Women Strike for Peace Records, Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

Indeed, the Djakarta meeting did draw international interest and provided women the opportunity to get to know one another in a more intimate setting. The sessions generally ran from eight in the morning until noon and from three in the afternoon until seven in the evening. Between formal discussions, the American and Vietnamese women talked in smaller groups about their families, culture, and fashion. In the evenings, the delegates attended cultural events, prepared for the next day, and, on one occasion, had dinner with President Sukarno of Indonesia.

To begin the conference, the delegations decided to inform one another of their current and previous political work before moving on to discuss the war and its possible solutions. The American delegation began, taking one and a half hours to report on their domestic activism and on the political climate in the United States. Then, for the rest of the first day and into the next morning’s session, the nine Vietnamese women introduced themselves, described the war’s impact on their lives, and argued that if it were not for U.S. support of the RVN administration, they would now be living happily with their husbands and children in a united Viet Nam. VWU and WUL members provided information on their families in order to show that the war had had deleterious effects on every aspect of their lives, including their ability to mother.

At first, WSP members found the recounting of the war tedious, but they soon realized the importance of Vietnamese women’s statements, which differed from the official U.S. version of the origin of the war and of the consequences of U.S. bombing on civilians. The American delegation also discerned the centrality of the war to Vietnamese women’s lives because the VWU and WUL members could not introduce themselves without immediately referring to it. For instance, in her greeting, Le Chan Phuong spoke not of her role in the VWU but of the whereabouts of her children, whose village the U.S. military had bombed the night before. Uncertain of her children’s fate, she evoked the sympathy of her American counterparts as she carried out her responsibilities as head of the VWU delegation. Like Phuong, each of the Vietnamese women at the Djakarta conference shared information about their families, including how many children they had and the locations of their children and husbands. They also listed family members wounded, jailed, or killed by the U.S. military or ARVN and described years of uncertainty as a result of the country’s division.19 These accounts exemplified the very real suffering of Vietnamese women while also serving as a tool for VWU and WUL members to secure U.S. women’s assistance.

After hearing Vietnamese women’s testimonies, WSP members appropriated these narratives to portray all Vietnamese women as mothers and victims. In a call to American women to join the antiwar effort, WSP stated, “We women shudder with the women of Vietnam, living under the constant horror of death from the skies, trying, often in vain, to protect their children.”20 With Johnson’s bombing campaign over North Viet Nam under way, WSP members drew attention to civilian casualties, particularly children, to elicit sympathy and to justify their own stance against U.S. foreign policy.

Similarly, a joint communiqué written by the American delegation, approved by the Vietnamese attendees, and broadly addressed to American women highlighted the victimization of the Vietnamese.21 The statement also stressed, however, the suffering of American mothers because of the war. That is, after describing the “break-up of tens of thousands of families” in Viet Nam and claiming that “nearly a million citizens have been jailed, maimed or tortured” in the South, the communiqué turned to the hardships of American women.22 It stated that the war also “meant the death of several thousands of American men and the suffering of American wives and mothers.”23 “American mothers,” it continued, “have not borne and brought up their sons to kill the innocent and to sacrifice themselves in an unjust cause.”24 Calling attention to the personal sacrifices Americans had to make to wage war, the WSP delegation asked American women to come out in opposition to U.S. intervention. As much as the statement was supposed to be about the afflictions of Vietnamese women, it was equally about the pain of American mothers. It implicitly suggested that American mothers would not sympathize with Vietnamese mothers unless their attention was drawn to the possibility of their own children’s deaths, even as it explicitly asserted that American women understood the plight of the Vietnamese because they knew that living in “constant danger of death … is a life of terror.”25

Although the VWU and WUL delegations approved this statement, it is likely that they wanted to include more information about women’s roles in the resistance movement to better illustrate their determination to gain liberation, not just peace. WUL leader Nguyen Thi Binh, for instance, mentioned to WSP members that as a teenager she joined the anticolonial struggle against the French. Working undercover in Saigon, she was eventually caught, imprisoned, and tortured. Released three years later, she returned to her undercover duties in Saigon just before the final victory against the French at Dien Bien Phu. Following the signing of the Geneva Agreement ending French rule, she regrouped in the North in the fall of 1954, where she and her longtime sweetheart wed and started a family. Even so, she remained active in opposing the newly established RVN government in the South, eventually joining the foreign affairs section of the NLF. In the summer of 1962, she attended her first international conference as a representative of the NLF in an effo...