The Women's History of the Modern World by Rosalind Miles

Author:Rosalind Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Published: 2020-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed their freedom.

“Revolution is an act of love”

So said Jane Fonda: “We are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood.” Taking a stand against the Vietnam War and in favor of the Vietcong made her the best-known woman of the entire conflict, and for a time the most hated female in America. A natural rebel, she had already been involved in the counterculture of the 1960s, active in both civil rights protests and in the early days of the women’s movement, before turning her attention to Vietnam. As the fighting intensified, public dissatisfaction grew. “Our government was lying to us and men were dying because of it, and I felt I had to do anything that I could to expose the lies and help end the war,” Fonda would later explain. She began by raising funds for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War campaign in the early 1970s, then in 1972 she traveled to Hanoi to see for herself.

So began an episode that proved hard, if not impossible, to shrug off. Meeting with the communist North Vietnamese, Fonda was seen as fraternizing with the enemy. In the eyes of the American public, her broadcasts on Hanoi Radio reporting the damage the US had inflicted put her on a par with Second World War enemy broadcasters like Tokyo Rose. A photograph of Fonda sitting on a Vietcong antiaircraft gun earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane” and the undying hatred of millions. At age eighty-one she remains an activist, now for the climate change group Extinction Rebellion.

The Vietnam War was one that no one could win. But some tried. “Madame Nhu,” as Trần LệXuân was later known, became the First Lady of South Vietnam in 1955 because the president, Ngô Ðình Diêm, her brother-in-1aw, was unmarried. Born into wealth and status, petite, and doe-eyed, Madame Nhu had the face of an angel, the instincts of Ivan the Terrible, and a sense of entitlement twice as big as the Ritz. By the time of the Vietnam War, the sheer force of her personality had made her so powerful that President Diêm himself was afraid of her. To the horror of all, she famously ordered him in public to “Shut up!” and when one angry general threatened to overthrow Diêm and then take her for himself, she screamed at him that he hadn’t got the balls for either, and she’d claw his throat out first.

Small wonder then that she was called the “Dragon Lady” throughout the region, after a well-known racist cartoon character of the time. Claiming credit as a modernizer, she proudly championed women’s rights and in 1962 formed the Women’s Solidarity Movement, an all-female elite paramilitary organization twenty-five thousand strong, of which membership was not voluntary. At the same time, the nation’s First Feminist was busy ramming through parliament various laws banning contraception, abortion, adultery, and divorce, in line with her newfound Catholic beliefs. Her religious conversion

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