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War, Women, Vietnam: the Mobilization of Female Images, 1954-1978

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War, Women, Vietnam: the Mobilization of Female Images, 1954-1978 War, Women, Vietnam: The Mobilization of Female Images, 1954-1978 Julie Annette Riggs Osborn A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: William J. Rorabaugh, Chair Susan Glenn Christoph Giebel Program Authorized to Offer Degree: History ©Copyright 2013 Julie Annette Riggs Osborn University of Washington Abstract War, Women, Vietnam: The Mobilization of Female Images, 1954-1978 Julie Annette Riggs Osborn Chair of the Supervisory Committee: William J. Rorabaugh, History This dissertation proceeds with two profoundly interwoven goals in mind: mapping the experience of women in the Vietnam War and evaluating the ways that ideas about women and gender influenced the course of American involvement in Vietnam. I argue that between 1954 and 1978, ideas about women and femininity did crucial work in impelling, sustaining, and later restraining the American mission in Vietnam. This project evaluates literal images such as photographs, film and television footage as well as images evoked by texts in the form of news reports, magazine articles, and fiction, focusing specifically on images that reveal deeply gendered ways of seeing and representing the conflict for Americans. Some of the images I consider include a French nurse known as the Angel of Dien Bien Phu, refugees fleeing for southern Vietnam in 1954, the first lady of the Republic of Vietnam Madame Nhu, and female members of the National Liberation Front. Juxtaposing images of American women, I also focus on the figure of the housewife protesting American atrocities in Vietnam and the use of napalm, and images wrought by American women intellectuals that shifted focus away from the military and toward the larger social and psychological impact of the war. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter One: Romance and Rescue: Gender, Myth and American Impressions of Vietnam in the 1950s………………………………………………………………………………………35 Chapter Two: A Flaming Feminist or a China Doll? Depictions of Madame Nhu and the Republic of Vietnam………………………………………………………………………..……91 Chapter Three: Seduce and Destroy: Images of “Viet Cong” Women…………………………149 Chapter Four: Incendiary Images: Gender and Civilian Casualties in the Vietnam Antiwar Movement……………………………………………………………………...……………….201 Chapter Five: “The Blame and the Guilt, the Guilt and the Blame”: Three American Women Assess the War, 1968 - 1978…………………………………………………………..250 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...305 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………...…….309 Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………….......327 i Introduction In its 1966 Christmas issue, Look magazine published a feature story called “Women of Vietnam,” that profiled three Vietnamese women who embodied the largely unknown nation that was embroiled in a war in which the United States played an increasingly important role. Look offered three archetypes: the First Lady, the young, glamorous, and modern wife of Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky; the widow, a haggard, impoverished woman whose husband was killed by the National Liberation Front; and the bar girl, a twenty-year old worker in Saigon’s “semiprostitution” scene who earned more money in a month than nearly any member of the Saigon government. “Women of Vietnam” pointed out that though they may look as “fragile as butterflies…in all of Asia, there are no tougher, more resilient females.”1 The article, with its creation of neat, comprehensible categories of Vietnamese women, demonstrates the American urge to understand the conflict in Vietnam and the utility of female symbols in making sense of a lingering, remote war. “Women of Vietnam” is sympathetic to the women’s suffering, endured over decades of war: the first lady was lonely, a result of her husband’s political commitments; the overburdened widow led a grueling, dreary life spent toiling in a “manless village;” and the bar girl betrayed her fear of being unable to find a husband after the war, knowing that Vietnamese men would not look fondly on a young woman paid to traffic with foreigners. Though proclaiming an interest in Vietnamese women, the article unsurprisingly was most concerned with the ways the American presence had changed life in Vietnam, usually finding 1 Laura Bergquist, “Women of Vietnam,” Look, 27 December 1966, 17-21. 1 it to be generally beneficial for the women. The first lady was shown to lead a glamorous life because American officials approved of her husband’s political skill, the widow made a living by laundering the clothes of American military members, and of course the bar girl’s livelihood was the direct result of United States military escalation. At the same time that it suggested that the women lived largely off American largesse, the article praised the shrewdness of the women, seeing virtue in their ability to survive and provide for their families in the face of fear and death and deprivation. Invoking images of refugees scavenging in piles of trash, “mama-sans” hawking American goods in the black market, and scantily- clad young women who supported extended families by having sex with members of the American military, Look offered a somewhat ambivalent picture of Vietnam, one that was a complex mélange of voyeurism, admiration and pity. For a casual reader in 1966, the article, flanked by a dozen large, glossy photographs, was likely unremarkable, as the magazine’s massive readership was familiar with the human interest approach it took in covering American foreign affairs. Adding “color” to political stories through visual images and short articles was a founding principle of Look, whose circulation numbers outpaced even Life magazine throughout the 1960s.2 To a reader familiar with the war, however, the article is rich with detail about women’s experiences, speaking to the economic impact of American military escalation, demographic shifts in the rural countryside, and social changes in urban Saigon. The article is also significant in that it hints at the tension between images and reality in Vietnam, as it suggests that photographs of exotic, beautiful women distracted from the reality of lives under the constant and shifting 2 See Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 2 threats of war, even as it attempts to tell the story of the war through photographs. The text of the article contains very little information about the war itself, no indication of who in Vietnam was the ally and who was the enemy, or what was the American stake in the war in political terms. Relying heavily on images and captions, the Look article raises far more questions than it answers about the women of Vietnam, but betrays a great deal of information about the ways that the American media conceived of them. In 1971 Hannah Arendt wrote of the crucial importance of image making in the context of the Vietnam War, suggesting that images of the conflict, including those like the women portrayed in Look, were not just physical evidence of what happened but were fundamental to the public’s interpretation of the war and even more importantly became the basis of America’s foreign policy. Arendt wrote that the generation of intellectuals and government officials who orchestrated American intervention in Vietnam understood that “half of politics is ‘image making’ and the other half is making people believe in the imagery.”3 While Arendt was speaking broadly of the myriad deceptions and self-deceptions revealed in the Pentagon Papers, her observation is valuable in assessing the ways that popular publications presented the war as it was unfolding. Journalist Tom Englehardt also wrote of the unique power of various Vietnam War images, many of which “seemed to jump from the battlefield onto the home screen or into newspapers and magazines and were seared into public memory.”4 Many of the images Englehardt writes about portrayed episodes of violence that were transmitted through still photography and television footage, pictures of war that punctuate American 3 Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” New York Review of Books, 18 November 1971, 30-39. 4 Tom Engelhardt. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 192. See also Michael A. Anderegg, Inventing Vietnam: The War in Film and Television (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 3 memory of the war. This dissertation evaluates several such images from America’s war in Vietnam, focusing specifically on the mobilization of images that reveal deeply gendered ways of seeing and representing the conflict for Americans. I consider literal images such as photographs, film and television footage as well as images evoked by texts in the form of news reports, magazine articles, and fiction. I focus on the central importance of images in the popular media because they represent the ways average Americans learned about the war, often in shallow, misleading, heavily edited, two-dimensional ways, but also because so many of the resonant images of the war featured women. Though concerned generally with the ways masculinity and femininity were being redefined in the period, this project is less concerned with notions of masculinity than with the definition and redefinition of femininity. Some of the images I evaluate include a heroic French nurse who was the only woman trapped at the besieged fortress of Dien Bien Phu, the figures of refugees fleeing for South Vietnam in 1954, images of the first lady of the southern government Madame Nhu as an exotic beauty and a potent political leader, and female members of the southern insurgency the National Liberation Front. Images of American women are also considered, as I focus on the figure of the housewife protesting American atrocities in Vietnam and the use of napalm, and images wrought by American women intellectuals that shifted focus away from superficial moments, away from the near-obsessive reverence for American military superiority and refocused questions on the moral aspects of the war.
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