| This dissertation examines the experiences of women in early modern Vietnamese society: the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. It is the first full-length historical study of Vietnamese women written in English, Vietnamese, or French. This study Vietnamese society challenges the paradigmatic framework of Vietnamese gender history by demonstrating how constructions of Vietnamese womanhood emerged out of colonial legal discourses and are easily contradicted by the historical evidence. Contrary to the existing scholarship, this dissertation argues that women's private lives were severely circumscribed by code and local custom. Restrictive structures that organized their private lives led women to seek out mechanisms that ensured de-facto authority in over property, sexual, and religious life, ironically giving them important public roles in village life.;The study relates Vietnamese women's experiences to the socio-economic structure of Da&dotbelow;i Vie&dotbelow;ˆt during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The economic dislocations of the civil wars between the Ma&dotbelow;c, Tri&dotbelow;nh and Nguye˜n families in these three centuries shifted female labor toward market activities. In turn, with the stabilization of society and economics in the Northern and Southern Realms, women engaged in marketing activities befitted greatly. They transferred their monetary gains into public works programs and religious institutions and were commemorated by stone stelae that marked their position in village life prominently.;By examining the women's lives through the themes of representation, their life course, sex, and property, this dissertation takes Vietnamese women out of national regional narratives and focuses on how reading history through women's experience changes our perception of Vietnamese society in the early modern period. The sources consulted include legal records, missionary materials, religious texts, oral folk poetry, and stele inscriptions written in written in nom, classical Chinese, and French, collected in archives throughout Vie&dotbelow;t Nam, Paris, and Rome. |
