Women and the Vietnamese War Effort
South Vietnam
While not much is known about their personal stories, we do know that the Army of the Republican of Vietnam created a Women’s Armed Forces Corps to help women with family stationed in combat. Throughout the conflict, familial obligations were the leading cause of soldiers deserting the army. The Women’s Corps, which at its height had over 2,700 members, provided vital services in administrative, medical, social work, and intelligence – freeing up male service members to focus on combat with the knowledge their families were being cared for. To serve in the Women’s Corps, women needed five years of formal schooling. Eleven years were required to serve as an officer. Recruits had to be unmarried and stay so during their first two years of their three-year term of service.
The South Vietnamese war efforts did little to break out of the era’s established gender roles. While the Women’s Corps’ work was vital, it was entirely focused on child care, medical care and administrative duties – work that was already considered acceptable for women at the time. Women could train in self-defense and weapon skills with local People’s Self Defense Forces, but such training did not make a woman eligible to join a combat unit. Women were technically allowed to serve in combat roles, but the commissioner of the Saigon Self Defense unit went on record to say that women were best suited to support positions.
North Vietnam
The Vietnamese People’s Army did not hold itself to any of the traditional gender roles of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. President Ho Chi Minh, the leader of communist North Vietnam, expected women to mobilize and fight for their country right alongside the men. Women enlisted in both the People’s Army within North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, active as a sabotage unit in South Vietnam. Many of the enlisted women served as nurses, like in the US and South Vietnamese armed forces, but there were women who served in various combat roles as well.
The North Vietnamese forces do not appear to have had separate women’s forces, unlike both the US and South Vietnam. At least two women, Le Thi Hong Gam and Ngo Thi Loan, joined Brigade 559 as a communications worker and nurse, respectively. Brigade 559 was a transportation unit of the People’s Army that focused on transporting materials and information from North Vietnam to Viet Cong units active within South Vietnam. It was not designated as a women’s unit.
The North Vietnamese also undertook an effort to acknowledge the human cost of the war on its people. An award was created with the honorary title of Heroic Mothers of Vietnam. It was bestowed to over 50,000 North Vietnamese women in recognition of the loss of their sons. Some women fought in North Vietnam’s conflicts themselves in addition to losing sons like Nguyen Thi Nghi, who was a resistance worker against the French Occupation of North Vietnam and lost two sons in the Vietnam conflict.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
“Women in the Vietnam War.” History.com staff. 2011.
“The Marine Corps Demographic Update.” US Marine Corps. June 2017.
“South Vietnam’s ‘Daredevil Girls'” Heather Stur, New York Times. August 2017.
“The Vietnamese women who fought for their country” BBC Staff, BBC. December 2016.