Signalement d’un article sur l’engagement des femmes du côté de la RDVN (Hanoi) à travers cinq témoignages.

Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who had led the North Vietnamese military during the Vietnam War, was looking for the woman who had shot down an American bomber in June 1968. In the nearly four decades that had passed, she had worked many jobs and raised three children. Few people outside her family had heard her wartime stories.

Heroines and striking female figures are not new in Vietnam — they have played an integral role in Vietnamese history for millenniums. In the 1st century A.D., the Trung sisters, often called Vietnam’s earliest national patriots, led a three-year rebellion against the Chinese Han dynasty, which ruled their country. The female legacy persists in the modern era; in all of Vietnam’s recent conflicts, women have been crucial. They fought alongside men and carried heavy loads down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Yet as the historian Karen G. Turner notes in her book “Even the Women Must Fight,” “Women warriors, so essential to Vietnam’s long history and so important in the most photographed war in history, have remained invisible.”

Lire la suite / Read more : New York Times, 07/06/2017.

Elizabeth D. Herman is a freelance photographer and a doctoral student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley