Hanoi

We lay in bed listening to the rain continue its patter against the tree lined street outside. With no indication that it would dissipate, we contemplated another day hopping through puddles before deciding that we would visit the Vietnam Women’s Museum. Both because it was highly recommended and indoors.

The museum housed a number of exhibits on the roles and experiences of women in Vietnam, both currently and historically, showcasing the importance of their contribution to the development of Vietnamese society.

Whilst some of the ethnic societies within Vietnam unsurprisingly follow a patrilineal model, interestingly others are matrilineal; where the eldest daughter plays an important role in family affairs, females inherit wealth and are preferred as a gender for new-borns. Nevertheless women in rural Vietnam have an unenviable role of being primary care givers to their children whilst undertaking all domestic tasks in the family home as well as agricultural labour, which includes the harvesting of rice and maize; cut by hand and carried on their backs in large woven baskets down from the fields. We learnt how some women are forced to leave their rural communities to work in Hanoi, selling food, flowers and other products, in order to effectively feed and educate their children. This is due to their land not producing enough income and means very long days and weeks away from home and their families. In worse cases, the women’s husbands are either too ill to work or have died in work accidents, leaving the women alone to raise an income and their children. Already we have past many women matching the description of those in the exhibit, leaving us to reflect on what their own stories might be.

Most interesting was the exhibit on Vietnam’s ‘Heroic Mothers’, women who lost children, their husband and/or their own life whilst engaging in the resistance against French and American forces for the country’s independence. Women actively engaged in front-line guerrilla warfare alongside men and in the south of the country they represented up to 40% of the fighting force. As well as combatants, women also worked as medics, engineers and spies and many were captured, tortured and executed in enemy prisons.

Interested to see if London had a similar resource we were dismayed to find a number of news articles from this summer on what had been proposed as the UK's first women's museum, only to become a museum on Jack the Ripper... (http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/jul/29/…)Read more