am a junior history major and music history and theory minor from Greenville, Kentucky. I entered the University of Kentucky in 2001 as a National Merit Finalist and a Singletary Scholar. Since coming to UK, I have been fortunate to enjoy the best of what the university has to offer. I studied music and flute performance abroad for six weeks in Salzburg, Austria, with the best teachers in my field. I was selected to participate in the 2004 Bingham Seminar on Japanese urbanism. In addition, I am a student of the Honors Program, as well as the Gaines Center for the Humanities. My goal is to graduate with recognition from both of these programs by completing a project on Vietnam that I began last year under the expert guidance of Dr. George Herring.As I progressed as a student of history, I began studying the Vietnam War and its effects on the Vietnamese people. My studies gradually evolved into an investigation of the role of women in the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and National Liberation Front (NLF) during the Vietnamese fight for independence against the French and the United States. In Dr. Herring's class, I researched many secondary sources pertaining to the topic, including Karen Turner's Even the Women Must Fight , and Sandra Taylor's, Vietnamese Women at War . As my interest in the subject piqued, I was able to obtain primary sources that included a collection of interviews from the private collection of WGBH at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Reading the personal accounts of women who aided the nationalist movement in so many different facets of combat had a profound impact on me. From these manuscripts, I developed an intense desire to know these women who sacrificed so much for a cause in which they believed.
Earlier this year, I was awarded the Breathitt Undergraduate Lectureship to give a speech on this theme. Resuming my research on the subject increased my desire to discover even more about the women who served in the NVA and NLF. In gathering information for my speech, I interviewed Dr. Robert Brigham of Vassar College who had just returned from a trip to Vietnam. He described the role women play in society today and he gave clues as to whether their social goals during the revolution were achieved. Through Kaleidoscope, it is my pleasure to share my summations, thoughts, and visuals from the Breathitt lecture I gave on January 21, 2004.
As a junior Gaines fellow, I plan to focus my senior thesis on the subject of Vietnamese women. Feeling passionately about the roles and results of the actions of these revolutionaries, I plan to travel to Vietnam during the summer of 2004 to hold interviews with members of the Women’s Union and other females who played a part in the resistance. Seeing the land for which these women fought so resiliently and immersing myself in the culture that spawned such fierce female warriors will elevate my understanding to that of a true historian rather than that of a college undergraduate.
Jordan Wood’s paper concerns a part of the Vietnam Wars about which
little has been written. Volumes have been devoted to military strategy and
tactics and specific military operations. What Jordan does so well here is
to show the vital role played by those women who served as support troops
and actually participated in combat for the North Vietnamese and the National
Liberation Front of South Vietnam against South Vietnam and the United States.
She has found and makes excellent use of obscure memoirs written by women
who took part in the war and interviews with Vietnamese women conducted shortly
after the war and now located in the University of Massachusetts, Boston,
Library. She places her subject in the broader context of Vietnamese history,
a tradition of women assuming leadership roles as warriors dating back to
Vietnam’s ancient struggles against the Chinese. She shows how the wars
fought between 1945 and 1975 were part of a broader struggle by Vietnamese
women to secure full equality in modern Vietnamese society. She recounts in
fascinating
detail through individual case studies the diverse and truly critical roles
played by women in the thirty year war for Vietnamese national unity. Jordan
Wood’s important paper highlights a most significant and little known
dimension of the Vietnam Wars.
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