Journeys for Global Sisterhood
“We Met the ‘Enemy’—and They Are
Our Sisters”
In April 1971, approximately one thousand female activists from throughout North America gathered in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada, to attend the Indochinese Women’s Conferences (IWCs). The U.S. and Canadian women originated from large metropolitan centers, small towns, and even rural communities to meet a delegation of women from North and South Vietnam as well as Laos. Some North American antiwar protestors, like Bob Browne and members of the Eldridge Cleaver delegation, had traveled to Southeast Asia. Others learned through the movement and mainstream press about the sufferings and the heroism of Vietnamese people. The 1971 IWCs, however, represented the first opportunities for large numbers of North American women to have direct contact with their Asian “sisters.”1
The IWCs illuminate how women literally and symbolically crossed borders in order to build an international antiwar movement. As such, the organizing of the conferences and the experiences of those who attended shed light on the process of building “global sisterhood.” Critics of the idea have argued that the call for female international solidarity represents another form of Western domination, this time by well-intentioned champions of women’s rights who see themselves as the saviors of oppressed women in non-Western societies.2 The IWCs provide an opportunity to rethink global sisterhood in two ways.
First, the conferences highlight the political multiplicity of North American women and the complex process of negotiation that occurred to foster an international peace movement. There were three North American sponsors of the IWCs: “old friends” or more “traditional” women’s peace organizations; “new friends” or women’s liberation activists; and “Third World” women or women of color in North America.3 Within each group, the women ascribed to a variety of political viewpoints as well. Engaging in an international movement did not unify women in the West. In fact, the IWCs provided a forum to air and accentuate differences between North American women, particularly along the lines of ideology, race, sexuality, and nationality. Fractured by these differences, women from North America did not dominate the political agenda at the IWCs. Instead, they looked to women from Southeast Asia for leadership and inspiration. Thus, the IWCs reveal the political variety among women in the West and how these conflicts can ironically foster the growth of a global women’s antiwar movement.
Second, while critics of global sisterhood emphasize the power and misperceptions of Western women, a focus on the Southeast Asian women demonstrates how women from outside the West deployed female internationalism. During the U.S. war in Vietnam, the Women’s Union of North Vietnam and the Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam (collectively referred to in this work as the VWUs, Vietnam Women’s Unions) played integral roles in fostering a global women’s peace movement. Through meetings, correspondence, and the circulation of print as well as visual media, the VWUs actively nurtured American women’s interest in U.S. foreign policy and military activity in Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese believed that all human beings, and especially all women, could share a sense of commonality and purpose. To promote an international peace movement, Vietnamese women cultivated a belief in global sisterhood, projecting and cultivating a female universalism that simultaneously critiqued and transcended racial and cultural divides. It was not just an ideology imposed by the West but was promoted by women from the East as well.
The IWCs resulted from a longer history of North American and Southeast Asian women politically engaging with one another. They developed personal and political connections through face-to-face meetings that took place in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Cuba, Africa, Australia, and Canada. These conversations and partnerships in turn helped to shape the political content of Vietnamese antiwar appeals, which eventually circulated beyond the individuals involved to influence activist media portrayals of the U.S. war in Vietnam. In this campaign to promote a worldwide antiwar movement, the VWUs established relationships with individual women and with female organizations from a variety of political spectrums and backgrounds. The North American sponsors of the IWC—old friends, new friends, and Third World women—reveal the diversity of individuals engaged in fostering female internationalism.
The term “old friends” referred to the U.S.-based Women Strike for Peace (WSP), the Canadian Voice of Women (VOW), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), headquartered in Switzerland but with national sections throughout the world. These organizations were designated old not because of the age of their constituency, although all three did attract largely middle-aged to elderly women. Rather, the organizations were considered old friends because of the history of friendship that these North American women established with Vietnamese women. For example, WSP’s contact with the VWU extended back to 1965, when two WSP members were among the first Americans to visit Hanoi after the commencement of U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. That same year, a ten-person delegation from WSP met with representatives from North and South Vietnam in Jakarta, Indonesia, to affirm women’s unique abilities to cross Cold War barriers and foster peace.4 These political and personal relationships continued to develop as WSP sent international delegations to Europe, Canada, Cuba, and North Vietnam throughout the remainder of the war.
Although differences existed among WSP, VOW, and WILPF, they could be characterized as maternalist peace organizations. For example, WSP originated in 1961 from the efforts of predominantly middle-class and middle-aged white women to protect their families from nuclear annihilation. As historian and former WSP activist Amy Swerdlow explained:
On 1 November 1961 an estimated fifty thousand women walked out of their kitchens and off their jobs, in an unprecedented nationwide strike for peace. As a radioactive cloud from a series of Russian atom bomb tests passed over American cities and the United States threatened to retaliate with its own cycle of nuclear explosions, the striking women sent delegations to their elected officials. . . . They demanded that their local officials pressure President John Kennedy on behalf of all the world’s children, to end nuclear testing at once and begin negotiations for nuclear disarmament.5
Figure 12. Timeline of international meetings of Women Strike for Peace, on the cover of Memo 6, no. 8 (November–December 1968). Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA.
This initial strike eventually led committed women to form Women Strike for Peace. The members of the organization, as historian Andrea Estepa has argued, had “wide-ranging professional identities,” yet they chose to publicly identify themselves as “housewives and mothers.”6 These women proclaimed their right to condemn the threat of global and nuclear warfare based on the desire to protect their own and other people’s families. They embraced gender difference to define a special role for women on the global stage.
VOW, founded just a year before WSP in 1960, was similarly inspired by a belief in women’s unique abilities and responsibilities to foster peace. Following the failure of the 1960 Paris summit on disarmament between the United States and the Soviet Union, thousands of women across Canada decided to form VOW. They presented themselves as “respectable” and as maternal “protectors of the world’s children.”7 One of the founding members and an eventual president of the group, Muriel Duckworth, explained that “Voice of Women founders had the idea of women as lifegivers,” mothers who could not support acts of aggression and violence.8
The roots of this maternalist form of peace politics can be traced back to Victorian and Progressive era notions of gender difference as opposed to more modern beliefs in gender sameness. In fact, WILPF, the third organizational member among the old friends, was founded before American women achieved suffrage and in the context of World War I. Created under the leadership of Jane Addams, WILPF advocated for equal political rights for women because members believed that women had a propensity to promote peace. As suffragist and pacifist Carrie Chapman Catt explained, “War is in the blood of men”; inversely, peace was believed to be in the blood of women.9
This maternalist and gender essentialist justification for women’s engagement in international politics held particular significance in the early Cold War period. In the midst of the Red Scare, critics of U.S. foreign policies were easily dismissed and ridiculed as communist sympathizers and political ideologues. In fact, members of WSP, VOW, and WILPF all endured anticommunist attacks. By proclaiming the political responsibilities of motherhood, these women presented themselves as “common-sense” or nonideological activists.10 They sought to defuse global conflict and promote peace in order to protect “all the world’s children.”
With their similarities, the three organizations frequently collaborated with one another and shared ideas for promoting peace. Representatives of each group corresponded with one another and participated in each other’s conferences and activities. The organizations also overlapped in membership. In addition, for all three groups, traveling across geopolitical borders and having face-to-face meetings with their nations’ enemies were important strategies for their efforts to defuse global conflict. When Bob Browne revisited South Vietnam in 1965, two members of WILPF traveled as part of the clergy delegation that met with Thich Nhat Hanh. Representatives of WSP, following a series of exchanges with Vietnamese women, cosponsored with their Asian counterparts the historic Conference of Concerned Women to End the War.11 The conference was held in Paris in the spring of 1968, just a few weeks before the formal peace talks began. In attendance were representatives from countries involved in the war, including Japan, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, West Germany, and Canada.12 One American participant recalled the impact of the meeting: “I have always been convinced that the women who come in contact with the Vietnamese women come back home changed. They seem to march to the beat of another drummer. They have a new sense of urgency. Now I know why. It has happened to me. When you are actually faced with the ‘enemy’ and realize that American sons and husbands are killing them—it’s too much to bear.”13
After attending the emotionally charged Paris conference, Kay MacPherson, president of VOW, visited Hanoi for the first time. She did so with a sense of trepidation as well as determination. Aware that she would travel in the midst of an ongoing bombing campaign by the United States, MacPherson wrote, “In case I get to Hanoi and end up with a bomb on top of me I want to put down one or two thoughts before hand. . . . Not many people are invited to go to Hanoi, though many wish to go. To have earned the trust of the Vietnam women is a very great honour. . . . We cannot treat such an honour lightly, nor, however reluctant I felt, would I dream of refusing to go.”14 Following MacPherson’s journey to Southeast Asia, VOW sponsored a reciprocal visit by representatives of the North and South Vietnam Women’s Unions to Canada in the summer of 1969. Members of WSP, including Jane Spock—wife of Dr. Benjamin Spock—attended this gathering. In fact, they staged a protest against the war on the Fourth of July as they crossed the U.S.-Canada border at Niagara Falls.15 This 1969 exchange directly inspired the subsequent 1971 IWCs.
The members of WSP, VOW, and WILPF recognized the power of face-to-face communication with Vietnamese women and sought to provide similar opportunities for other individuals. Aware of their own demographic base, they made various attempts to involve younger and nonwhite activists. Cora Weiss, a leader in WSP as well as in the peace movement overall, played arguably the most central role in arranging American delegations to Hanoi during the U.S. war in Vietnam. Activism ran in Cora’s family. Her father, Sam Rubin, was known for his humanitarian philanthropy in Africa and Israel. Her mother, Vera Rubin, was an anthropologist “whose research and educational projects brought her to the Caribbean, where she supported anticolonialist scholars.”16 Cora protested against the Red Scare during her college years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. While in the home state of Senator Joe McCarthy, she petitioned for his recall of in a campaign called Joe Must Go. She also met her husband in college. Peter Weiss, a survivor of the Holocaust, joined with Cora as they participated in the civil rights movement and in support of African decolonization. During the war, Cora, who is fluent in French, went to Paris several times to meet with Vietnamese representatives. She also helped to organize the 1969 and 1971 women’s conferences in Canada. She traveled to Vietnam a total of five times, the first time in December 1969 after the first Canada conference and the last time in 1978 with her close friend Bob Browne.
Weiss traveled to North Vietnam and organized the trips of others because she believed in the power of “citizen diplomacy.” On her initial journey in 1969, she discussed with Vietnamese representatives the importance of facilitating communication between American POWs and their families. In keeping with the maternalist outlook of other old friends, Weiss was motivated by a sense of compassion for the soldiers and their families. In addition, she recognized the political impact such humanitarian gestures would have. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Nixon and the U.S. administration focused on American POWs and soldiers missing in action to justify extending the war.17 Weiss and other antiwar activists sought to defuse this issue by facilitating communication for and the release of U.S. POWs. After her first trip in 1969, Weiss established the Committee of Liaison with Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam, which organized monthly visits to Hanoi to serve as mail carriers for American POWs and their families. On her second trip to Hanoi in 1972, Weiss negotiated with the North Vietnamese to release three POWs as a gesture of goodwill. The regularly scheduled trips, sponsored by the Committee of Liaison, not only delivered mail and packages to U.S. soldiers but also provided an opportunity to expose dedicated peace activists to wartime conditions in Hanoi.18 In composing the membership of these monthly delegations, Weiss invited individuals from diverse racial, generational, and gender backgrounds to expand the range of people who otherwise would not have the opportunity to travel to North Vietnam. These journeys invariably reaffirmed and further motivated the travelers’ engagement in the antiwar movement.
The women from North and South Vietnam who cultivated and encouraged international contact with women from the West also articulated a unique gender role for women in the struggle for peace and national liberation. They represented women’s organizations in their respective regions. The Women’s Union of North Vietnam, based in Hanoi, traced its history back to the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. The Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam was founded in 1960, along with the National Liberation Front (NLF). The phrase “women’s liberation” in the Western context referred to activists who sought to identify and subvert the workings of patriarchy. The VWUs conceived of women’s liberation primarily through the lens of anticolonial struggles for national liberation. Because of the long history of political repression and anticolonial warfare, Vietnamese women had assumed a variety of political, military, economic and cultural roles. Consequently, they had a wider array of life experiences than did most of their Western counterparts. Yet, interestingly, the Vietnamese women also conveyed the arguments for peace in the name of protecting their families.
Nguyen Thi Binh, who was present at the 1965 Jakarta meeting with WSP as well as the 1968 Paris Women’s Conference, became one of the most recognizable Asian female figures in Western women’s political circles. Like WSP members, she came from a relatively elite and educated background. The granddaughter of nationalist leader Phan Chu Trinh and the daughter of a civil servant under the French, Binh became a political activist in the 1950s when she led a series of student protests against the French and the United States in Saigon.19 Imprisoned for three years for these activities, she helped to found the NLF and the Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam after her release. Unlike most WSP members, who were denied formal political power, Binh became an authorized leader as the foreign minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government. WSP historian Amy Swerdlow noted the unequal status of the American and Asian women who met at international gatherings. While WSP publicly identified itself as consisting of “nonprofessional housewives, . . . the women who represented North and South Vietnam presented themselves as workers, students, professionals, and artists.”20
Despite the disjuncture in status, Vietnamese women like Binh used a language of sisterhood and motherhood to establish a common connection with their old friends. In a fifteen-minute film produced in 1970 and intended for an American female audience, Binh explained:
I am so happy as a South Vietnamese woman and mother to have the opportunity to speak to you. . . . May I express my sincere thanks to the Women Strike for Peace for its contribution to the anti-war movements and its sympathy and support to our people, particularly the South Vietnamese women. . . . Our aspirations for peace are all the more ardent for over 25 consecutive years now, our compatriots, we women included, have never enjoyed a single day of peace. Let me tell you that in my own family, several members have been killed while some others are still jailed by the Saigon regime. I myself have had not much time to live with my husband and my children. The moments my son and daughter were allowed to be at my side have become so rare and therefore so precious to them.21
Figure 13. Patsy Mink (first congresswoman of color), Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, and Bella Abzug (WSP member and congressional representative) meet in Paris. From Memo 2, no. 3 (Spring 1972), p. 31. Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, PA.
Her emphasis on the destructive impact of warfare on family life reflected the actual experiences of women in Vietnam. Her appeal also resonated effectively with maternalist activists in the West who stressed the sanctity of motherhood and home life. Irma Zigas, who coordinated WSP’s national antidraft task force, recalled meeting Binh for the first time at the Paris Women’s conference: “Binh is a small woman with a gentle face, who speaks fluent French and who is desperately dedicated to bringing peace to her country. She had to wait 10 years before she married, because of the war, and now she is separated from her husband and children for months at a time.”22 Significantly, Zigas’s impressions centered not only on Binh’s personality, language skills, and political dedication but also on her forced separation from her family.
VWU initiated multiple international gatherings to facilitate personal contact with Western women. In addition, VWU circulated print materials to communicate how Vietnamese women both suffered from but also heroically resisted colonialism and military aggression. During the U.S. war in Vietnam, the VWU published a periodical in English and French titled Women of Viet Nam. They also shared copies of Vietnamese Studies no. 10, a booklet called Vietnamese Women (VW). This 1966 English-language publication was presented to U.S. visitors, both at international gatherings and during their travels to Vietnam. The portrayal of Vietnamese women in this work, numbering over three hundred pages, appealed to the political ideologies and sympathies of women from a variety of generations and backgrounds in the West.
VW consisted of eight sections, with chapters having titles such as “The Vietnamese Woman, Yesterday and Today,” as well as more intimate and localized portrayals of either individual women or women from particular villages or regions. The overall effect was to personalize and humanize women in North and South Vietnam by providing a narrative of personal and social uplift through four historical stages: (1) Vietnamese women’s lives under patriarchal as well as colonial oppression under French rule beginning in the mid- to late nineteenth century; (2) Vietnamese women’s efforts to challenge traditional gender roles through involvement in national liberation movements, first against the French and then against the United States; (3) the transformation of Vietnamese women’s lives through socialist reconstruction projects in the North after the end of the First Indochina War against the French in 1954; and (4) finally, how the opportunities for improving Vietnamese women’s lives continue to be threatened by American imperialism and the Second Indochina War, which was being fought against the United States and the South Vietnamese government. Somewhat predictably, the publication argued that the oppression of Vietnamese women, particularly for the vast majority who were members of the peasantry, was centrally connected to class and national oppression. For Vietnamese women to achieve liberation and equality, then, they had to struggle not only against patriarchal family and societal norms but also for national independence and socialist revolution. The way this political message was conveyed, particularly through intimate portraits, appealed to Western women in various ways.
For maternalist peace activists who subscribed to “traditional” gender roles and justified their political interventions as part of their responsibilities as mothers and housewives, the destructive impact of war on heteronormative family life in Vietnam resonated most strongly. Numerous stories in VW emphasize how war separates, sometimes permanently, husbands and wives as well as mothers and children. The tragedy of war, then, was conveyed through heteronormative and maternal loss. One folksong quoted in VW expressed this longing of a young woman in North Vietnam and her fiancé who had departed to fight in the South: “Our destinies are bound together, I will wait for you / Even if I should have to wait a thousand years.”23
Protecting their families and loved ones against colonialism and war required Vietnamese women to engage in or support acts of rebellion and violence. In their publications and in face-to-face meetings, they frequently quoted the traditional saying, “When the enemy comes, even the women must fight.” They also cited historic examples of Vietnamese women who battled against foreign invasion, such as the Trung sisters, credited with leading the first national liberation struggle against Chinese domination in 40 AD. This Vietnamese female warrior tradition, which could be regarded as a transgression of traditional gender roles, was framed as a heteronormative or maternalist act of agency. For example, the publication VW featured a poem by Minh Khai, a famous revolutionary against the French who wrote on her prison cell before she was executed:
A rosy-cheeked woman, here I am fighting side by side with you men!
On my shoulders, weighs that hatred which is common to us.
The prison is my school, its mates my friends.
The sword is my child, the gun my husband.24
In this poem, instruments of violence are equated with members of a heteronormative family. The evocation of the sword as a child and the gun as a husband justifies the embrace of these objects as a means to fulfill traditional familial responsibilities. Given colonial and wartime conditions that do not allow for peaceful existence of kinship units, the female warrior bears the responsibility of defending her home and homeland in order to become a wife and mother.
Embracing familial roles provided practical as well as ideological support in the context of war. Mary Ann Tetreault cites Frances Fitzgerald to argue that the NLF adopted a “Children of the People” strategy. Because the NLF lacked the resources to wage a conventional war, its cadre relied upon cultivating local support. These liberation fighters “depend[ed] upon village residents to protect them. . . . Villagers became the ‘parents’ and the cadres their ‘children.’ ”25 Some of the NLF members had organic roots and kinship ties to the villages where they were stationed. Others claimed and cultivated these fictive relationships to claim reciprocity and protection.
Maternalist activists in the West embraced pacifism.26 However, they could understand the fierce desire to step outside of accepted gender practices in the name of protecting their families. After all, to help end the war and stop nuclear annihilation, members of WSP, VOW, and WILPF also left the confines of the home to travel, lobby, and stage protests. Rather than condemning the Vietnamese women for fighting to save their loved ones, Western women peace activists demanded that the U.S. government end the war. As one slogan adopted by WSP pleaded: “Not Our Sons, Not Their Sons.”
The model of revolutionary womanhood that Vietnamese women offered resonated differently for the new friends who cosponsored the IWCs. This designation generally referred to a younger generation of women who became politically active through the civil rights, New Left, and eventually the women’s and sexual liberation movements. In contrast to the old friends who claimed their roles as housewives and mothers to justify their political interventions, the new friends sought to fundamentally challenge male domination over women. They demanded equal opportunities and rights for women in the legal and political system as well as the workplace. They identified inequalities in the home, naming the “second shift” that women worked as primary caregivers and housekeepers as well as the limited rights of women in marriage and divorce. They questioned the reproduction of gender roles through child rearing practices and socialization. They protested the sexual objectification and violence directed toward women and their bodies. And they challenged heteronormativity by claiming lesbianism as a sexual and political practice.
Although the individuals referred to as “new friends” differed and disagreed with one another, they collectively constituted members of the so-called second wave of feminism. The first wave crested with the attainment of suffrage in 1920, while the second wave is associated with women’s activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Historians have increasingly challenged the waves analogy, because this framework tends to privilege certain forms of white middle-class women’s activism as indicators of feminism. Scholars also are increasingly critical of differentiating distinct strands of feminism, such as liberal, radical, socialist, and lesbian. After all, individuals tend to evolve in their political understandings, participate in multiple organizations and collectives, and embrace diverse political views.27 However, some of these terms do capture key distinctions that emerged within the collective group of new friends. For them, the experiences of Vietnamese women offered a range of possibilities to help second-wave feminists discover new political roles and identities.
For liberal feminists seeking access and equality for women in the realm of work and politics, the experiences of Vietnamese women provided insight into the social reconstruction of gender roles. The VW booklet notes, “It is easy to inscribe the ‘liberation of women’ in the programme of a political party, it is much more difficult to get it into legislation, and more difficult still to integrate it into the customs and manners of the time.”28 Significantly, the publication did not regard women in the West as the vanguard of change, stating instead that “at present, women in all Western countries are still asking for equal salary and wages with men. . . . And they are not to get it very soon.”29 Strikingly, the authors regarded women in the West as being engaged in a similar struggle and perhaps even falling behind the so-called Third World. Because North Vietnam was in the process of constructing a new society, VW documented at length the rights and advances women had achieved under the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, such as suffrage, equal pay, and women holding prominent positions of political and economic leadership. At the same time, the publication also frankly acknowledged barriers to greater gender equity, conveying both advances and challenges through individual stories and charts with clear quantitative data.30
Figure 14. Triple threat: WILPF, WSP, and women’s liberation. Charlotte Bunch Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
While the Vietnamese focus on women integrating the public arena might appeal to liberal feminists in the West, other aspects of the Vietnamese analysis resonated more strongly with women’s liberation activists in the United States.31 These individuals sought to identify and subvert the workings of patriarchy in all realms of life, not just in the public sphere of work and politics but also in the private sphere of personal, familial, and sexual relationships. For these women, the Vietnamese provided functioning examples of female communities. They organized all-women economic production teams, guerrilla units, and even regular military battalions, while leading hybridized and improvised family structures in the midst of war. Although products of emergency circumstances, these practices nevertheless offered empowering demonstrations of how women, through separatist institutions, could transform the society around them.
The VWU often used biographical examples of heroic women to offer political instruction. This “emulation campaign” was primarily directed toward the largely peasant constituency in Vietnam.32 One of the prominently featured women was Nguyen Thi Dinh, a cofounder of the NLF and president of the Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam. Unlike Nguyen Thi Binh, who came from a relatively elite family, Dinh was a peasant. Born in 1920, she began dedicating herself to fighting French colonialism at the age of fifteen. She eventually became a guerrilla fighter and a general in the People’s Liberation Army. Like many other women engaged in the struggle for national liberation, described by the Vietnamese as “long-haired warriors,” Dinh suffered imprisonment and separation from her husband and child, as well as the death of her loved ones. Dinh’s life story as a female revolutionary leader engaged in armed struggle inspired new friends in the West who were trying to understand how they might fundamentally change their society. In addition, the Vietnamese use of the personal to offer political instruction corresponded strongly to one of the key mantras of the U.S. women’s liberation movement: the personal is political.
Some second-wave feminists had the opportunity to learn from Vietnamese women through direct contact. Vivian Rothstein, who was a student activist at Berkeley before her involvement in the women’s liberation movement in Chicago, met with Vietnamese women in Eastern Europe and then in North Vietnam in 1967. As a member of Students for a Democratic Society, she had been invited by Tom Hayden to participate in a significant gathering of antiwar activists in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in September 1967. Thirty-eight Americans attended the meeting, including representatives from religious pacifist organizations, the civil rights movement, the liberal and progressive media, and faculty and student antiwar activists. In Bratislava, they met with Vietnamese spokespersons from the North and the South, including Nguyen Thi Binh and other representatives of the VWU.33
Rothstein recalled that the Vietnamese women whom she met insisted on having women-only discussions with American representatives. This was unusual for her. She tended to work in mixed-gender settings as a student activist. Also, the Bratislava conference was attended by men and women. However, the women from South Vietnam wanted to convey how the war had a unique impact on women. Rothstein recalled that they discussed how militarization fostered the growth of prostitution in South Vietnam. In addition, they provided examples of how American soldiers threatened and utilized rape as well as sexual mutilation as military tactics. Shaken and moved by these meetings, Rothstein requested an audiotape version of their presentation so that she might share their “appeal to the American women.”34
During the conference in Bratislava, Rothstein received an invitation from the VWU to visit North Vietnam. The trip to Eastern Europe was the first time she had left the United States, so traveling to Hanoi, which was then being bombed, was a “huge, terrifying” experience. Nevertheless, the journey profoundly touched Rothstein. In North Vietnam, she observed how the VWU inspired and mobilized women to protect and transform their society. The VWU had chapters at various levels, ranging from local villages to the national level and operating in schools, workplaces, health clinics, and government units. In all of these settings, the unions trained women for political leadership and advocated for their collective interests. VWU representatives conveyed to Rothstein “how important it was to organize the women . . . and how powerful American women could be” as well.35 When Rothstein returned to the United States, she went back to the “little women’s group” that she had participated in before she left. Inspired by her experiences in Czechoslovakia and North Vietnam, Rothstein proposed the formation of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, a group modeled on the VWU.
Just as American activists learned from the Vietnamese, their hosts were eager to learn from the visitors. Charlotte Bunch-Weeks, a women’s liberation activist based in the Washington, DC, area, traveled to Vietnam as part of a multiracial and mixed-sex group in 1970. Bunch-Weeks had a long history of engaging in international activism. Her parents initially planned to be missionaries in China. Due to her father’s ill health, they resided in a small town in New Mexico instead. Unable to live overseas, her family brought the world to their home. They regularly hosted foreign exchange students. Inspired by the progressive Christian student movement, Bunch-Weeks first traveled abroad in 1964 to attend a YMCA program in Japan, titled Our Responsibility in a Changing Asia. It was her first “real-life experience of being in a minority,” and the conference taught her “to understand that the world looks different depending on . . . where you are. . . . It sounds very mundane now, but at that moment it was like a paradigm shift in my head.”36 Despite the profound impact of this experience, Bunch-Weeks initially felt torn about leaving the United States. At the time, she was attending Duke University and had become involved in the civil rights movement. While Bunch-Weeks was in Japan during the summer of 1964, some of her friends participated in Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Following her graduation, Bunch-Weeks found a position with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, a think tank that also employed Peter Weiss, Cora Weiss’s husband. In DC, Bunch-Weeks continued her activism in civil rights and antiwar causes. In addition, she became invested in women’s liberation.37
Like other travelers to North Vietnam, Bunch-Weeks returned with a deeper commitment to ending the war. She remembers one particularly profound exchange she had with a Buddhist nun. Her delegation had traveled south of Hanoi, where they viewed the countryside, villages, and towns that had been repeatedly bombed, regardless of whether they constituted strategic military sites. In Vinh, a major city on the Gulf of Tonkin, her group learned that “over 4,000 air attacks” occurred there from 1964 to 1968, “an average of two tons of bombs dropped” for each person residing there. One of these attacks resulted in the destruction of a Catholic cathedral and the deaths of a number of worshippers there. She recalled viewing “the remains of Vinh’s churches, schools, hospitals, homes; all indiscriminately destroyed.”38 Outside of Vinh, her delegation visited a Buddhist pagoda, which was only partly standing. Their host, “a small, thin, quiet Buddhist nun in [a] brown habit,” showed them around the facility and explained religious customs. Bunch-Weeks recalled feeling “very tired” and wanting to say goodbye, when
suddenly she leaned toward us, grew very intense, and grasped our hands. She said that she had been waiting many years to talk with American women. She was convinced that if the women of the US knew what was really happening in her country, they would make it stop. She told of her experience, of how children came crying to her for their mothers, but she knew their mothers had been killed. Finally she said, “We the women, must unite to stop this war. We must unite to stop the terrible things that are happening in this world. I would like you to take that message back to the women of America.”39
Accepting this mandate, Bunch-Weeks returned to the United States and shared her experiences through talks and writings, which circulated in women’s liberation and antiwar publications. She also cofounded the Women and Imperialism Collective in the Washington, DC, area and proposed to launch the National Women’s Anti-War Program. Along with Cora Weiss, Bunch-Weeks served on the steering committee of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the new Mobe). The first Mobe or National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam had organized a series of national protests, including a large rally of over one hundred thousand in Washington, DC, in 1967, the follow-up March on the Pentagon, and the protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The new Mobe formed in 1969 and coordinated a series of local and national protests that culminated in two national moratoriums, general strikes to force the Nixon administration to end the war. Held on 15 October and 15 November of that year, the second moratorium attracted over half a million people to Washington, DC. The strong showing sought to challenge Nixon’s 3 November appeal to the “silent majority” of Americans whom he believed supported his policies. The new Mobe continued its efforts into the spring of 1970 as Nixon’s secret bombings and invasion of Cambodia, a neutral country, were made public.
Although Weiss and Bunch-Weeks played leadership roles in the new Mobe, they both recognized the limited authority and respect that women had within the male-dominated antiwar movement. Even though women performed crucial organizing work, their ideas and voices tended to be marginalized and at times publicly denigrated. To address these issues from within the movement, Bunch-Weeks, Weiss, and other female members on Mobe’s national staff and steering committee formed a women’s caucus. Their group identified three main goals: (1) “combating male supremacy” in the antiwar movement, (2) developing “ideological and programmatic clarity about how the struggle for the liberation of women is related to the struggles against racism and imperialism,” and (3) connecting the “spring actions of the Mobe to their own oppression as women.”40 The Women and Imperialism Collective as well as the Women’s Caucus provided opportunities for female activists to organize with other women and to develop a feminist analysis of war and imperialism.
Bunch-Weeks did not just receive political inspiration from Vietnamese women. During her travels to North Vietnam, she received a request to give a presentation on the origins, status, and goals of the American women’s liberation movement.41 Her Vietnamese hosts were eager to learn from her. They wanted to understand political developments in the United States and how they might communicate better with American activists.
These conversations and international partnerships helped the VWUs develop effective antiwar outreach campaigns. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Dung, a member of the 1969 delegation that traveled to Canada, was stationed in Paris as part of the NLF’s external relations division. Dung first joined the Vietnam Women’s Union in 1945, focusing her efforts initially on eradicating illiteracy among women and children. Dung, although highly educated and fluent in French, never developed a facility in English.42 When she was stationed in Paris, she befriended two women who both played crucial roles in assisting Dung’s mission. Maria Jolas, a French woman who was more than seventy years old at the time, and Diana Jolston, an American expatriate, helped to translate and edit Dung’s weekly newsletter.43 When Dung became a member of the Paris Peace Talks delegation in 1968, Phan Thi Minh, a cousin to Madame Binh, assumed the responsibilities of disseminating information about the war in Vietnam and meeting with antiwar activists from the West. Minh eventually traveled throughout Europe with actress Jane Fonda to speak against the war. Jolas and Jolston tutored Dung and Minh about the nuances and divisions within the United States, including those who opposed the war. Together, they strategized about the most effective way to communicate and persuade their intended audience. In fact, Jolas played a central role in arranging the 1968 Paris Women’s Conference, which was cosponsored by WSP. The partnership between Dung, Minh, Jolas, and Jolston enabled the development of an international women’s antiwar network.
Vivian Rothstein, Charlotte Bunch-Weeks, and other women’s liberation activists who met with Vietnamese representatives in Asia and other parts of the world became key organizers of the IWCs. Their face-to-face encounters inspired U.S. women profoundly. Alice Wolfson of the Washington, DC, Women and Imperialism Collective shared her impressions after a 1970 planning meeting for the IWCs that was held in Budapest, Hungary:
We have just had our first formal meeting with the Vietnamese & Cambodians. They are incredible out of sight people. Yesterday, when I first met them, I filled up with tears & wanted to take them in my arms & say “I’m sorry.” . . . No matter how much you read & how much you know in your head what a monster imperialism is, it comes home to you with an emotional force that seems physical, meeting women who live under the threat of death. It seems impossible to think that I could ever, even for a minute, contemplate withdrawing or dropping out.44
By organizing the IWCs, women’s liberation activists had the opportunity to recreate their political intimacy with Southeast Asian women for larger numbers of women who did not have the privilege or opportunity to travel to Asia and other parts of the world.
The final group of cosponsors of the IWCs were Third World women. These individuals from racially oppressed groups in North America identified their status in the West as being akin to the status of Third World peoples globally. Understanding themselves as internal colonial subjects, they expressed solidarity among themselves based on similar experiences of disfranchisement and marginalization within the United States. In addition, they allied with people in the Third World who were fighting for self-determination and national liberation from colonialism and neocolonialism. Given this identification with Third World people both domestically and abroad, women of color tended to distance themselves from the predominantly white old and new friends. Instead, racialized women in the “First World” turned to one another and to women in the Third World for political inspiration.
Both the old and new friends recognized that their groups consisted predominantly of white women. Consequently, they attempted to work with nonwhite women. WSP and WILPF cultivated contacts with Coretta Scott King and other African American women at a time when great pressures were being placed on male civil rights leaders to avoid making public statements about Vietnam.45 In addition, both organizations also attracted women of Asian ancestry. Aline Berman, a Chinese American, attended the Jakarta and Paris meetings as a WSP representative. Her husband, Dan Berman, also was engaged in antiwar activism and worked with Bob Browne on the Inter-University Committee. In addition, Marii Hasegawa, a Japanese American, served as president of the U.S. Section of WILPF during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The presence of women of Asian ancestry in mainstream women’s peace organizations stemmed from these groups’ engagement with domestic racism and international pacifism. Marii Hasegawa explained that WILPF was “one of the few organizations which had passed a resolution against the concentration camps in which Japanese and their citizen children were held in WWII” by the U.S. government.46 To assist Japanese American internees seeking to resettle outside of the designated internment zones on the West Coast, WILPF supported a hostel in Philadelphia where Hasegawa found a place to stay after she left camp.47 In addition to WILPF’s concern about domestic racism, the group also promoted an international agenda to stem nuclear proliferation. WILPF sponsored annual commemorations of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with other pacifist groups and Asian American organizations. WILPF also facilitated international exchanges with Japanese women’s peace organizations. These reminders of Asia and Asian bodies as the victims of American foreign policy no doubt fostered the political involvement and leadership of Asian Americans. These antinuclear campaigns laid the basis for WILPF’s eventual peace efforts on behalf of Vietnam and Vietnamese people.48
The category of Third World women, which could have described nonwhite individuals involved in mainstream women’s organizations, tended to refer instead to women who became active during the late 1960s in racially based liberation movements. These activists identified as black, Asian American, Chicana or Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and indigenous or Native. For these individuals, the Vietnamese analysis of women’s oppression as resulting from a confluence of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism held particular appeal. In the mid- to late 1960s and into the 1970s, women of color in the global North began to articulate an intersectional analysis.49 Rather than seeing themselves only in terms of their race, gender, or class, they began to understand how multiple systems of social hierarchy operated simultaneously to shape their lives. Consequently, they turned to one another and to women in the Third World for political inspiration.
Like other antiwar activists, women of color also traveled to Vietnam. In 1970, the same year that Elaine Brown and Pat Sumi traveled to Hanoi as part of the Cleaver delegation, Betita Martinez also visited North Vietnam. She believes that she was the first Mexican American to journey there. In fact, she went on the same delegation as Charlotte Bunch-Weeks and like her fellow traveler was asked to introduce the movement that she was engaged in building in New Mexico.
Martinez grew up in Washington, DC, a member of an international and multiracial family. Her father, a dark-skinned Mexican, worked for Mexico’s embassy, and her mother, a fair-skinned Scotch-Irish, worked for the Swiss embassy. Growing up in the racially polarized, black-white city of Washington, DC, Martinez found it difficult to socially locate herself as a multiracial person of Latino/a heritage. She recalled, “The composition of the neighborhood was either . . . black or white, or both, because that’s the way Washington, DC, was. There was no Latinos around the street back then. It was a very lonely thing.”50
In that environment, Martinez developed both a racial identification with African Americans and a global consciousness against Western colonialism. She inherited her father’s dark skin and was treated as if she was black. Martinez recalled, “The girl next door was not allowed to play with me by her parents because I was too dark . . . and we passed for black often on the buses and got sent to the back of the bus.”51 Her parents, who became Spanish language and literature teachers, offered emotional support for their daughter. Her father, who arrived in the United States right after the Mexican Revolution, told her stories about how “the U.S. bombed Vera Cruz to stop the revolution.”52 His anger against American intervention planted seeds of political inspiration for Betita. After graduating from college and in the aftermath of World War II, she obtained a position with the United Nations, conducting research for a department on former European and American colonies. As she read reports about the Congo and South Africa, she became “completely disgust[ed].” She decided to leak information in the reports to a “progressive representative of the trusteeship council . . . [so] he could then announce and talk about [the information] . . . and embarrass the colonial powers.” She admitted that it “was a completely subversive, incorrect thing for a staff member to do,” but her life experiences collectively helped her to make a connection “very early between racism and colonialism.”53
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Martinez also became invested in supporting the civil rights movement. As a writer and editor based in New York City at the time, she recalled the visceral impact of the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four little black girls. She thought to herself, “[I] gotta go down there and shoot those guys, or something, do something.”54 Instead of engaging in retaliatory violence, she decided to volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Appointed by James Foreman, she initially worked in Mississippi for the 1964 Summer Project. She then coordinated the New York office, where she raised funds and mobilized support for civil rights activities in the South. She also edited an important collection of letters about Mississippi Freedom Summer under the name of Elizabeth Sutherland. In the predominantly black-white environment of the committee, Martinez felt more comfortable using a non-Latino name. In the movement she was known as “Liz,” not Betita. She also chose Sutherland rather than Martinez as her surname, because “in my mother’s past there was this Duchess of Sutherland . . . the chief lady-in-waiting to the queen.”55
Martinez’s interest in Latino/a issues persisted, though, and her ethnic consciousness eventually emerged. She traveled to Cuba repeatedly, the first time after the 1959 revolution, and eventually published a book in 1967 about her observations of their new society. Also that year, she decided to relocate from New York City to New Mexico. She initially lived with Beverly Axelrod, an attorney known for defending political activists like Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and a participant at the 1965 WSP-VWU–sponsored meeting in Jakarta. Eventually, Martinez started an influential Chicano/a newspaper, El Grito del Norte. Originally reluctant to leave the East Coast, she recalled feeling an immediate sense of cultural familiarity with the Southwest: “[Getting] off the plane late at night in Albuquerque, I looked around, I felt the air. I looked at the mountains, I heard the Spanish” and thought, “mmmmm, this is interesting. . . . Suddenly . . . I felt at home.”56
When Martinez traveled to Vietnam in 1970, her sense of commonality with the Vietnamese, particularly the women, was due not only to gender but also to a comparable colonized status. Because of the heavy bombing campaign ordered by President Nixon at the time, the plane that she and Bunch-Weeks traveled on to Hanoi “landed on a totally dark airstrip in a totally dark airport.”57 Martinez’s reflections, though, quoted in a study of the Chicano antiwar movement by scholar Lorena Oropeza, focused on the positive spirit of the Vietnamese people:
“There are mountains and valleys and caves and big skies and glowing sunsets, as in New Mexico.” . . . The Vietnamese were campesinos (literally, people of the campo or countryside) who loved their land. Eastern medicine was like our curanderismo (folkhealing). . . . “The spirit of the people was like a force of nature itself, creating life in the shadow of death. The white people of the West with their unnatural soul and their unnatural weapons are a death people. . . . The Vietnamese are a life people. And anyone who thinks that a life people can really be conquered is a fool.”58
Martinez observed how the vast majority of Vietnamese people were peasants, a status similar to the agricultural background of many Chicano/as of New Mexico.59 In addition, the Vietnamese were demanding the right to determine their political future, just like what the Chicano/a movement and other liberation movements in the United States and globally were demanding.60 Finally, she admired the indomitable spirit of the Vietnamese people.
These reflections crystallized for Martinez on the trip to Vinh, the same journey that both she and Bunch-Weeks remembered for their encounter with the Buddhist nun: “We went with a translator and a driver . . . it must be like sixty miles. The trip [took] all day because the bridges were bombed out, the roads were bombed out. I mean, we had detours, like, nonstop because of the bombing and at the same time . . . it was spring and so the rice fields were in bloom with that beautiful green color they have. . . . It . . . just struck me as, well, the green is the spirit of Vietnam and they’re not gonna bomb that away.”61
When Martinez arrived at Vinh, she was struck by the utter destruction of the city and the hypocrisy of the United States: “After this long trip . . . there was only one building left standing in this big city. . . . I could visualize the whole flattened city and we sat on the steps looking at the city and on the radio . . . [which] picks up stations from around the world . . . there was [a U.S.] program on the air, glorifying that this was the first Earth Day. Earth Day was being celebrated for the first time by the United States. . . . It was enraging to hear that while looking at this devastation.”62
In the midst of this destruction, Martinez recognized the resilience of Vietnamese people who were fighting against the United States: “Our translator was a . . . wonderful young woman. She was in the dark—we could hardly . . . see in the dark and . . . she was sewing and it looked like she . . . had . . . something stiff and white that she was sewing. . . . So I said, ‘Excuse me, but could I ask what you are sewing?’ ‘Oh,’ she said very happily, ‘I’m . . . making your . . . boxes for your boxed lunch tomorrow.’ . . . I thought, ‘Jesus Christ. These people would go to no ends to treat us right . . . and look what our country has done.’ ”63 As Martinez completed her journey in North Vietnam, she vowed, “I gotta go straight to Washington, DC, and tell that president, forget it, you’re never gonna defeat these people. . . . Their spirit is too strong.”64
The commonalities that Martinez identified between Vietnamese and Chicano/a people coalesced around the issue of land.65 Just as the Vietnamese wanted to protect their country from military aggression and ecological destruction, the Chicano/a movement sought to assert the rights of Mexican Americans to lands of the Southwest. One of the key ideals in the Chicano movement was the reclamation of Aztlan, the mythical homeland of the Aztec people before Spain and then the United States invaded, colonized, and annexed the region.66 Following the U.S.-Mexican War, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo promised to respect the land rights of the existing Mexican residents. Through legal maneuverings, economic pressures, and at times outright violence, Anglos eventually dispossessed Mexican Americans as well as indigenous peoples of the vast majority of their holdings. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Chicano/a activists sought “to recover lands, the communal lands, not individually held lands . . . [which consisted of] huge areas of . . . thousands of acres of north New Mexico.”67 Martinez acknowledged that the movement to restore land ownership was a difficult one. These activists fought against privatized economic development policies advocated by entrepreneurs. In addition, their efforts to claim land based on the authority of Spanish grants raised questions about who constituted the original owners. After all, the land was “originally Pueblo land, you know, . . . Indian land,” and therefore illegitimately given away by the Spanish to people who became known as Mexican Americans. Chicano/a activists who proudly proclaimed their descent from indigenous people eventually developed “a decent relationship . . . with some of the native groups . . . about supporting their [mutual] struggles for their land.”68 Martinez foregrounded these issues of colonization and land in El Grito del Norte, drawing comparisons between Chicano/a and indigenous people’s movements to reclaim land in New Mexico with the efforts of Native people in Hawaii as well as with peasants in Japan, India, and Vietnam.69 This global Third World consciousness was emerging more broadly in political movements during the late 1960s and 1970s. Martinez claimed that El Grito del Norte was at the forefront. She recalled, “There were about twenty Chicano newspapers . . . in the late sixties . . . in different parts of California, Texas, all over, Colorado . . . but ours was the only one that was completely international.”70
After returning from Hanoi, Martinez did not in fact travel to DC but instead focused on sharing her insights with the Chicano/a community. She wrote articles in El Grito del Norte and also gave public presentations. She was one of the featured speakers at the Chicano National Moratorium. Held in Los Angeles on 29 August 1970, the moratorium was part of a nearly two-year effort to mobilize Chicano/as against the Vietnam War. Similar to African Americans, Mexican Americans tended to have lower socioeconomic status as well as fewer opportunities for career advancement and college admissions. Consequently, Chicanos tended to be overrepresented in the military.71 Chicano/a activists like Martinez encouraged other members of their communities to question why they were fighting in the war. They formed the only “minority-based antiwar organization, called the National Chicano Moratorium Committee.”72 The National Moratorium attracted an estimated twenty thousand to thirty thousand protesters, including elderly and children; it was the “largest anti-war march by any specific ethnic or racial group in U.S. history.”73 The event, though, was brutally disrupted by the Los Angeles police force. Approximately 150 were injured that day, and three were killed. Martinez recalled, “[I was] standing there, ready to make a speech at the podium and I look up from my notes and I see police charging across the whole park with tear gas flying. So I said, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna make my speech.’ I was out of there, man, and ran into the house across the street with a Chinese family that didn’t know what was happening.”74
Despite this aborted attempt, Martinez found other ways to encourage Chicano/as to understand the issues of the war. She was not able to replicate her own experiences of traveling to Vietnam. The people with whom she interacted in New Mexico lacked the financial means to do so. Also, some expressed reservations that their journey might taint them as communists. However, Chicanas from New Mexico did travel to Vancouver for the IWC. There they met with women from Southeast Asia and other women of color, including other Mexican, Mexican American, and indigenous activists from throughout North America.75 Reporting in El Grito del Norte, Dolores Varela titled her article, “We Are People of the Land.” The “we” in the article referred to herself, who was engaged in land struggles in New Mexico; Alison and Suzette Bridges, “who have been carrying on the Indian fishing struggle in Washington state for so long”; and Indochinese women who referred to themselves as “people of the land.”76
Maternal peace activists, second-wave feminists, and women of color all developed profound political connections with Southeast Asian women. These alliances across national, cultural, and ideological boundaries provide an opportunity to reexamine global sisterhood in two significant ways. First, rather than regarding women in the Third World as oppressed recipients of Western benevolence and feminist rescue, it is important to emphasize the agency of Vietnamese women in initiating international partnerships and to recognize their role as political mentors for women in the West. In other words, global sisterhood as a political strategy was not just imposed by the West but also crafted and promoted by women in the Global South.
Second, international sisterhood does not depend upon a monolithic, universal analysis of gender oppression that transcends time and space. Rather, the political messages that Vietnamese women conveyed through face-to-face meetings and the circulation of print and visual media suggest that a rich and diverse array of discourses could be transmitted and debated between women of varying backgrounds. Activists of the broader 1960s movements have been accused of a devolution toward “sectarianism” as the decade progressed. In contrast, as Vivian Rothstein noted following her travels to North Vietnam, what impressed her was the emphasis that the VWU placed on organizing a “majoritarian” movement. This approach focused on building broad political agreements and coalitions.77 Literally engaged in a struggle for life and death, the women of Vietnam cultivated the widest possible range of allies.
Global sisterhood, then, was not intended to propose a rigid universal theory for understanding women’s oppression. Rather, the VWU sought to involve women of varying backgrounds and political beliefs to engage in ideas with one another and to learn from each other’s life experiences. Vietnamese women did want women from the West to help them end the war. Yet the women from Southeast Asia believed that they had a reciprocal and perhaps even greater ability to inspire the political imagination of women in the First World. The Indochinese Women’s Conferences of 1971 represented a continuation of these efforts to build a global antiwar movement among diverse sisters.