No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism

9. Rethinking Global Sisterhood

In April 1971, approximately one thousand female activists from throughout North America gathered in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada, to attend the Indochinese Women’s Conferences. The U.S. and Canadian women came from large metropolitan centers, small towns, and even rural communities to meet a delegation of women from Viet Nam and Laos. Some North American antiwar protestors had previously traveled to Southeast Asia. Others had learned through movement newspaper stories and photographs to empathize with the sufferings and to respect the heroism of Indochinese women who were fighting for national liberation. However, the Indochinese Women’s Conferences of 1971 presented the first opportunities for large numbers of American and Canadian women to have direct contact with their “Asian sisters.” This essay examines the Indochinese Women’s Conferences (IWC) of 1971 as a case study that illuminates how North American women sought to build an international, multigenerational, and multiracial movement based on antiwar politics. It expands on existing scholarship on social activism of the long decade of the 1960s in three ways. First, it highlights the variety of women’s activism in the antiwar movement. Feminist scholars have identi- fied the chauvinism within these circles as a catalyst for the emergence of a separate women’s liberation movement.1 Yet the IWC indicate that despite this disaffection with the male-led antiwar cause, women continued to pursue peace activism alongside new feminist initiatives. Furthermore, the conference was organized and attended by diverse groups of women. The cosponsors of the conference included “traditional” women’s organizations, Rethinking Global Sisterhood Peace Activism and Women’s Orientalism JUDY TZU-CHUN WU 193 9 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb “Third World” women, as well as women’s liberation activists who themselves ascribed to a variety of political viewpoints.2 Second, the conference offers an opportunity to analyze the hopes for and the obstacles limiting the formation of multiracial and transnational alliances—that is, “global sisterhood .” Tensions among conference organizers and delegates tended to coalesce around race, sexuality, and nationality. Nevertheless, some American women regarded these conferences as life-transforming events; they experienced profound emotional and political connections with one another and, particularly, with the women from Indochina. Finally, this study examines how North American activists both challenged and were influenced by Orientalist understandings of Asia and Asian women. Edward Said conceptualized Orientalism as a system of knowledge that the West developed about the East as the Occident colonized the Orient.3 Within this framework, the East historically serves as a contrasting and not coincidentally inferior image to the West. This polarization not only created the Orient in the Occidental imagination but also defined the West to itself. Leila Rupp, in her study of interwar female internationalism, identifies a particularly female form of Orientalism that Western women exhibited toward their non-Western sisters. In their efforts to condemn repressive gender practices in these societies, Western women tended to reinforce colonial perceptions that these practices exemplified the essence—that is, the backwardness —of traditional non-Western societies.4 In addition, they highlighted the need for Western women to rescue and modernize their less fortunate sisters. This “politics of rescue” was also present during the movement to end the U.S. war in Viet Nam. However, during this period, North American women of varying racial backgrounds also exhibited what I characterize as a radical Orientalist sensibility. Through travel, correspondence, and meetings, they learned to regard Asian female liberation fighters, especially those from Viet Nam, as exemplars of revolutionary womanhood. These idealized projections countered classical Orientalist depictions of exotic, sexualized, and victimized Asian women. Nevertheless, these radical portrayals also tended to serve an Orientalist purpose in which the Orient again served as a mirror for Western self-definition. Now representing a contrasting image of revolutionary hope to oppressive gender roles in North American societies, Asian women helped female reformers in the West to redefine their aspirations and political goals. JUDY TZU-CHUN WU 194 Sisterhood across Borders The IWC in Canada resulted from a long history of North American and Southeast Asian women engaging one another politically. Through face-toface meetings that took place in Europe, Asia, Cuba, Africa, and Canada, they had cultivated personal and political connections that laid the basis for fostering an international sisterhood rooted in the common goal of ending the U.S. war in Viet Nam.5 The sponsors of the IWC—designated “old friends,” “new friends,” and “Third...