The Vietnamese Woman in Vietnam’s Process of Change

Abstract

Since the middle of the 1980s, with the beginning of Vietnam’s transformation from a centralized, subsidized economy to a market economy, the status of Vietnamese women has undergone important change and progress. In the twentieth century, especially after the victory of the 1945 August Revolution, the people were liberated and women experienced many changes. Indeed, the first Constitution of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam upholds equality between the two sexes. The law on Marriage and Family, promulgated in 1960, abolished polygamy — a traditional custom in Asia, including Vietnam, which had subjected the lot of women to the trammels of feudal, patriarchal families.