Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference

By Liz Briemberg

This conference went ahead in early April 1971. The objective was to enable six women from IndoChina to speak with ‘antiwar’ North American women, about the impact of the US war on their countries. It followed one in Toronto with the same objectives and took place while talks to reach a ceasefire agreement between the North Vietnam government and the US were ongoing in Paris.

Vietnam had been a French colony since 1858 and when it declared independence following the end of the second world war France responded by fighting to maintain its colonial rule. In 1954 a peace conference was held in Geneva which resulted in the country being split into North Vietnam and South Vietnam – the North being governed by the communist government of Ho Chi Minh and the South by the government of Ngo Dinh Diem, supported by the US. IndoChina became yet another victim of the Cold War. There were also communists in South Vietnam, known as VietCong, and in 1957 they mounted an insurgency against the South Vietnam government, supported by military supplies from the North. By the early sixties the US had 12000 ‘advisors’ In Vietnam helping the South Vietnam government fight the VietCong and more and more weapons and soldiers were being sent in from the North. In 1964 the US declared war on Vietnam and by 1967 there were some 500,000 US troops fighting in there and the fighting extended into Cambodia and Laos. A huge number of casualties resulted, mainly of Indochinese people but also numbers of US soldiers.

The Tet offensive in 1968 was an all out attack on US positions by the North Vietnamese army and the VietCong, and it left many US soldiers dead or wounded, which led to the US government facing more and more opposition to the war within the US. Large demonstrations were held against the war in many US cities and in 1969, US President Nixon started bringing the troops out. Finally a Peace conference between the North Vietnamese government and the US was organized. It began in 1970 but a Ceasefire agreement was not reached until March 1973.

The original discussions for the Women’s conferences were between Indochinese women and members of Women’s Strike for Peace, a US organization. The Indochinese women expressed a desire to meet with women in the Women’s Liberation movement as well as GI wives, women antiwar organizers and welfare women from the US. When it was decided to hold the conferences in Canada due to visa restrictions on the women entering the US, the Canadian organization ‘Voice of Women’ was approached and agreed to be the official sponsor of the two conferences. This was the background to the Women’s conferences held in Canada with the six IndoChinese women – from North Vietnam, South Vietnam and Laos.

Read more about the Indo-Chinese Women’s conference in Pedestal Volume 3 no. 3 & no. 5.

Reappraisal of the Indochinese Women’s Conference – April 1971

By Liz Briemberg, written in May 1971, shortly after conference ended.

1. The Initial Information and reaction to it.

We first heard about this conference in December 1970 and that was by ‘accident’. It just happened that a woman from S.F. was in town on a personal visit. She came to a meeting of the Women’s Caucus and told us what she knew and gave us a copy of a document sent out by the women in Eastern US.  She herself had heard of this conference only three weeks before her visit.   The reaction in Caucus was one of anger with the US women who had decided on having such a conference here without informing us.   We were angry on three grounds:

• Since the conference was to be in Vancouver we should have had some representation in the original planning, which had evidently been going on for several already prior to us hearing of it. We were to be responsible for organizing much of the practical necessities for this conference.
• The decision that 80% of the conference delegates are to be from the US was thought to be presumptuous.
• We immediately saw that we would be doing most of the hard day-to-day work to get such a conference off the ground while the US organizers would make the substantive political decisions. We never did receive any information or requests from those who had met the Indochinese representatives in Budapest in October 1970 or in fact from any of the eastern organizers.

As we understood it at that time there were to be two conferences held in Vancouver in the first week in April 1971. One was to be organized by the ‘old friend’ of the Indochinese, the Voice of Women, in a manner similar to previous conferences they had held with the Vietnamese.   The second, following that of the V. of W. was to be organized by Women’s Liberation, the so-called ‘new friends’ of the Indochinese. And at that time we had no clear idea how either ‘Third’ World women, welfare women, or G.I. wives, who the Indochinese had asked to meet with, were to be integrated into either conference. Looking back on this I think a basic political error was that of defining the second conference as a Women’s Liberation conference. That led to many of the fundamental tensions throughout both the planning of the conference and the conference itself.

This error was not an accident.   Women’s Liberation, although somewhat diverse, does not of now speak to many of the important oppressions of women in North America and many therefore cannot work within it.   The error comes from an arrogance that what we define as the political and social oppression of women applies to all women similarly.  WL, both the anti-imperialist wing and the feminist wing tend to do this – the worst manifestation of this being racist. having assumed that, we go on to presume that we can make a conference without including women outside of WL in the central planning and policy making decisions.  The Indochinese had explicitly asked to meet with with many women outside of WL  —

‘Third’ world women, welfare women, GI wives and women doing GI organizing work. This meant that the conference could not be described as a WL one and that should have been the a priori assumption from the beginning.  As it was, other non-WL white women from oppressed groups and ‘third’ world women were ‘added on’ rather than being part of the conference decision making bodies.

The initiators of the conference stated that their ‘general aim is to bring an anti-imperialist focus to the autonomous women’s movement’. I agree that we want to mobilize as many women as possible in the struggle against war and US imperialism but we cannot do that by holding a conference organized by self-described anti-imperialist women and then invite other women from WL to come who have a quite different agenda. This method alienates (lays trips) on other women and in many instances is presumptuous. The anti-imperialism of one group may be mainly rhetorical while the other groups actions may be more effectively anti-imperialist.  By not defining clearly from the outset what the Indochinese saw the purpose of the conference to be and by not including in the planning at all stages representatives from the various groups of women to be involved, many of our problems resulted.

In Vancouver we certainly did not understand clearly what was happening and our very real anger over the chauvinist way we, as Canadians, were being treated, blinded us to these other political errors.  We also realized as the conference drew closer how little we knew of the US WL movement. We were quite unprepared for the wide divergencies and hostilities within the movement  We had naively assumed that women would come together around a conference with the Indochinese women.

2. The Portland Planning meeting.

In February 1971 there was a planning meeting held in Portland to which eleven of us went expecting that the confusion around the planning would be sorted out.  We found there that every group felt somewhat like we did – anxious to hold the conference but very angry about the confusing and conflicting info. we had received from the women in the eastern US and angry that they had not involved us in the initial planning. The ‘third’ world sisters there said that the racism demonstrated by the WL groups up until that point was such as to make it essential that the ‘third’ world sisters have a separate conference with the Indochinese.

Much of that planning meeting was taken up in dealing with the general anger and confusion.  We, from Vancouver,m reacted very positively to the ‘third’ world reps. there who seemed to be the only women who had both considered the political meaning and value, and had a real understanding of the importance of the conference to the Indochinese and to the anti-war movement in the US.  The WL reps. there may have been representative of the WL movement but certainly did not represent the groups of women the Indochinese had asked to meet. If these women were representative of the WL movement we should worry about the narrow scope of the movement since they were remarkable in their similarities – university background, young, and mainly single.  In addition to these similarities of background there was much similarity in their politics too. it was a politics of a very individualized, personalized kind.

3. Period between the Portland meeting and the Conference.

Back in Vancouver we found we had an incredible amount of work to do arranging the billets, the security and coordinating with the UBC student Union around the use of this building for the conference.  We also had great difficulty trying to liaise with the Native community.  This was primarily due to the fact we had not tried to work with them before and understandably they were not trustful of us. They also had a lot of things coming down on them in their own communities so it made it even more difficult.

At the same time we were involved to some degree in the Quebec issue. A number of those seeking independence for Quebec were in jail and we were involved in support work for them.  Altogetrher it was a very stressful period.  The Voice of Women group were not helpful as they treated us as interlopers on their turf it seemed and they looked down on our youthful enthusiasms. One of our ideas was to host the Indochinese guests in our ordinary Canadian homes.  The V. of W. would not hear of out and eventually accommodated the Indochinese women in a huge house in the richest part of Vancouver for which we provided the security detail. The house belonged to a ‘communist’ doctor we were told.

4. The Conference.

Overall I found it to be very inspiring to hear these Indochinese guests speak and I was very pleased we had struggled to make the conference happen. They were remarkably communicative about their lives under war and showed a generosity and morality which was very impressive. The problems were certainly not coming from the Indochinese women and their interpreter – they could not have been more tolerant, gentle and considerate.  The problems arose primarily in the workshops which each group held separately when not in the plenary with the Indochinese and at times these problems spilled over into the plenary sessions.

Within the women’s movement there arose a hostile division between those defining themselves as lesbians and the rest. The problem was largely because the lesbian group primarily wanted to talk about the discrimination they experience both in society and within the movement and were little disposed to set that aside for the time being in order to address the necessity for strengthening the antiwar movement which was the purpose of the conference.  Altogether we, in the Vancouver group who saw ourselves primarily as feminists and anti-imperialists, were driven to distraction by the egoism, as we saw it, of many of the American WL members, not just the lesbians.  On top of the Voice of Women group were condescending and strangely, the ‘third’ world women found themselves acting as a kind of mediating group between the two white women’s groupings.  The Vancouver group felt much closer politically to the ‘third’ world women’ group who, in the main, seemed to see themselves as anti-imperialist,anti-racist and feminist.

I found that many of the US  WL women were very defensive about their politics, often guilt-ridden and self-obsessed. The Indochinese spoke of us each having to choose our political priorities, that should not exclude the recognition that our particular struggle is only part of a much broader struggle against the oppression of women.  And that this broader struggle is also only part of the struggles waged by people, men, women, black, brown, yellow and white against oppression.  As the Indochinese guests repeatedly said, we have to struggle wherever we are and in as many ways as possible.  By linking our struggles we can learn from each other, we can offer strength and insights teach other and we can support each others struggles both politically and materially. That is what solidarity means. Our motive for linking our struggle with that of other peoples should not be that of legitimating our own struggle.  If we doubt the legitimacy of our struggle, we should turn to analysis and constant criticism of our ideology and actions to determine what our priorities should be.  It is essential that we link our struggles so that our analysis can be more correct.. It is the isolating of struggles which leads to wrong ideas and strategy.

The lack of understanding or acceptance of the purpose of the Conference, to come together as women primarily to learn from the Indochinese women about their struggle and the ways in which we, as Canadians and Americans, can support them, explains why there was so much hassle at the actual conference. We are very divided amongst ourselves. Racism, US chauvinism, sectarianism, and so on all divide us.  I am not suggesting we pretend those divisions do not exist.  It was the recognition of these divisions which seems the most healthy outcome of the conference in addition, of course, to the inestimable benefits we all received from listening to the lives and steadfast determination of the Indochinese women. Instead of a definition of sisterhood based on one’s sexual preference, we may be able to strive for a genuine, authentic sisterhood based on understanding and support between us for our respective struggles.  The way those divisions were dealt with at the conference was very bad and many women who could not accept the extreme hostility between different groups just left the conference.  Hostility was rampant.  There is no denying it.  The fact that these divisions are so deep maybe partly due to the youth of the movement – people are using their newfound freedom to flex their muscles. There was little self-discipline apparent.

In Vancouver we all came out of the conference feeling tired and confused. We found the meetings with the Indochinese women exhilarating, inspiring and overwhelming in their telling of the tragedies of so many lives in Indochina.  Our encounters with women in our own movement left many of us despairing and angry. Two weeks later I feel quite differently. I think the WL movement ha to do a lot of hard political thinking and exploring; it has to recognize that a Sisterhood baed on gender alone is nonsense; the divisions between women are wide and deep and based on much more fundamental conditions than competitiveness – conditions such as class, race, lesbianism, age, and chauvinism.

Origins of She Named It Canada

By Pat Davitt

The year was 1970. The Vancouver Women’s Caucus was only a year or so old, and we had a number of projects on the go, but somehow we always were ready to take on one more….especially if it sounded interesting.

And this one was interesting. It appeared that a delegation of women from North Vietnam was scheduled to visit Canada in the spring of 1971, according to the local group of Voice of Women, and the visitors wanted to meet with women in Canada who were against the Vietnam War, which was then raging. Even more interesting, the Vietnamese also wanted to meet with progressive women from the United States who were also against the war, hence their itinerary: visits to Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, all Canadian cities close to the border.

It seemed to the Canadian women who had attended a planning conference in Portland that most of our American sisters were woefully ignorant of anything Canadian, other than a vague idea that it was north, somewhere. We decided that we would help our American sisters to understand that Canada existed, was a country (a very large country) with its own history and its place in the world. We would start that process by writing a history of Canada that would appeal to them: a comic book.

Cathy Walker expanded that potential audience: “…then we realized it would also be good for Canadians to learn more about Canada’s history, especially from a progressive perspective. We were interested in creating a popular history…” for everyone to find intriguing, informative, readily accessible, and yes, to enjoy.
And we did. We called it “She Named It Canada…because that’s what it was called.” Read More.

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