Women's Bodies, women's worries
Health and
Family planning in a Vietnamese Rural Community
Tine Gammeltoft
General overview
In this chapter T. Gammeltoft once again starts with a story
illustrating what the chapter will be about: social dynamics underlying
the tensions and contradictions in women's lives. In the daily lives of
the community of Vai Son widely differing and contradictory moral notions
exists. Notions, which create a broad array of differing modes of
percieving and evaluating social relations.
The title of the chapter is Local Moral Worlds. Gammeltoft explains that these
are the local worlds of shared experience which mediate the influence of
macorsocial and political forces, shaping their specific local effects:
society at large and the political notions in it create and influence the
societal moral, which spirals down to the local world.
Since her focus in this book is women, she starts her investigations of this
local moral world by exploring the daily living conditions which women
themselves experience as stressfull, and which seem to be related to two
central facets of life: the experience of overwork and the one of
submission. The conclusions she comes to is that women feel they always
have to depend on men and their families while also bearing the largest
burden of family responsibilities.
As to why it is that women feel this way, she explains that everyday moral
standards are nourished and supported by Confucian ideologies, which
predict relationships between parent-child, husband-wife, ruler-subject, and filial piety, female behaviour and
chastity among other things. And although in some ways such moral
guidelines seem to belong to the past, the Confucian moral framework is
the only natural women have to submit to their husbands and inlaws.
The moral guidelines seem to belong to the past because in socialist Viet Nam
the virtues position women in a double role as responsible for both family
and nation, bringing them in a triangulating category. In fact however
Confucian ideals still persist in the local moral worlds of family and
community: moral standards are dominant in the sense that they are widely
agreed uppon, among women as well as men; and women often seem to be the
strictest judges of eachothers behaviour. But co-existing with these
dominant moral ideologies are alternative moral visions that emphasize
equality rather than hierarchy and individual freedom rather than social
duty. So the local moral world of Vai Son is going through a change: a
transition to the alternative more modern/western moral vision. This shift
of moral framework allows women to feel that their bodies are their own
and that (at least in some situations) it is their right to insist on
their own wishes and do what they can to realize them, eventhough they may
feel they have to comply with and please their husbands.
However, Gammeltoft says, dreams of equality and mutuality colide with everyday
realities, where neither husband-wife nor daughter-in-law-mother-in-law
relations are equal. She calls these use of concepts of freedom and
independence the women talk about visions of an unreal world, of dreams.
And she wonders where these dreams stem from. According to her from
history: literary, colonial and revolutionary history.
She concludes that although there are two different sets of everyday moral
ideologies, these ideas often merge in daily life and the difference
between them lies in their mode of articulation in this very life.
Confucian moralities are dominant in Vai Son in the sense that they are
socially legitimate and generally accepted within the local moral worlds
of family and community, while the alternative moral notions are much less
accepted socially. The alternative moral notions are hidden transcripts
that contain those perceptions of reality which goes against the dominant
world view and as such represent resistance to dominant social orders.
Women often simultaneously embrace and resist dominant moral notions,
living with a double and equally valid sets of moral ideals.
Women's experience of overwork and submission therefore seem to be rendered mre
stressful by the fact that many women are conscious of the contingency of
dominant moralities and articulate about their vision of a differnt and
more equal social order.
Points for discussion
