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Vietnam The Family since 1954
In the first decade after World War II, the vast majority of
North and South Vietnamese clung tenaciously to traditional
customs and practices. After the 1950s, however, some traditions
were questioned, especially in the North. The timeless notion
that the family was the primary focus of individual loyalty was
disparaged as feudal by the communists, who also criticized the
traditional concept of the family as a self-contained
socioeconomic unit. Major family reform was initiated under a new
law enacted in 1959 and put into effect in 1960. The law's intent
was to protect the rights of women and children by prohibiting
polygyny forced marriage, concubinage, and abuse. It was designed
to equalize the rights and obligations of women and men within
the family and to enable women to enjoy equal status with men in
social and work-related activities. Young women were encouraged
to join the party as well as the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth
League and the Vietnam Women's Union, and they were trained as
cadres and assigned as leaders to production teams.
In conjunction with the law, a mass campaign was launched to
discourage, as wasteful, the dowries and lavish wedding feasts of
an earlier era. Large families were also discouraged. Parents who
felt themselves blessed by heaven and secure in their old age
because they had many children were labeled bourgeois and
reactionary. Young people were advised not to marry before the
age of twenty for males and eighteen for females and to have no
more than two children per household. Lectures on birth control
were commonplace in the public meeting rooms of cooperatives and
factories.
According to Ha Thi Que, president of the Vietnam Women's
Union in the early 1980s, popularizing family reform was
extremely difficult, even in 1980, because women lacked a
feminist consciousness and men resisted passively. To promote
equality of the sexes, members of the women's union took an
active part in a consciousness-raising campaign under the slogan,
"As good in running society as running the home, women must be
the equals of men." Such campaigns resulted in a fairer division
of labor between husbands and wives and in the decline of customs
and practices based on belief in women's inferiority.
In 1980 some old habits remained. Change reportedly was
slower in the mountain areas and in the countryside than in the
towns. According to Ha Thi Que, in areas where state control and
supervision were lax, old-fashioned habits reemerged not only
among the working people but also among state employees. She also
pointed out that many young people misinterpreted the notion of
free marriage, or the right of individuals to select their own
marriage partners, and were engaging in love affairs without
seriously intending to marry. Marriages were also being concluded
for money or for status, and in the cities the divorce rate was
rising.
In the North, family life was affected by the demands of the
war for the liberation of the South, or the
Second Indochina War (see Glossary), on the society and by
the policies of a regime
doctrinally committed to a major overhaul of its socioeconomic
organization. Sources of stress on the family in the North in the
1960s and the 1970s included the trend toward nuclear families,
rural collectivization, population redistribution from the Red
River Delta region to the highlands, prolonged mobilization of a
large part of the male work force for the war effort, and the
consequent movement of women into the economic sector. By 1975
women accounted for more than 60 percent of the total labor
force.
In the South, despite the hardships brought on by the
First
Indochina War (see Glossary) and Second Indochina War, the
traditional family system endured. Family lineage remained the
source of an individual's identity, and nearly all southerners
believed that the family had first claim on their loyalties,
before that of extrafamilial individuals or institutions,
including the state.
The first attempt to reform the family system in the South
occurred in 1959, when the Catholic Diem regime passed a family
code to outlaw polygyny and concubinage. The code also made legal
separation extremely difficult and divorce almost impossible.
Under provisions equalizing the rights and obligations of
spouses, a system of community property was established so that
all property and incomes of husband and wife would be jointly
owned and administered. The code reinforced the role of parents,
grandparents, and the head of the lineage as the formal
validators of marriage, divorce, or adoption, and supported the
tradition of ancestor cults. The consent of parents or
grandparents was required in the marriage or the adoption of a
minor, and they or the head of the lineage had the right to
oppose the marriage of a descendant.
In 1964 after the Diem regime had been toppled in a coup, a
revised family law was promulgated. It was similar to the
previous one except that separation and divorce were permitted
after two years of marriage on grounds of adultery, cruelty,
abandonment, or a criminal act on the part of a spouse.
Concubinage, which had been expressly forbidden previously, was
not mentioned, and adultery was no longer punishable by fines or
imprisonment.
During the war years, family life was seriously disrupted as
family members were separated and often resettled in different
areas. If the distance from one another was too great, they could
not assemble for the rites and celebrations that traditionally
reinforced kinship solidarity. Family ties were further torn by
deaths and separations caused by the war and by political
loyalties, which in some instances set one kinsperson against
another.
In those areas where hostilities occurred, the war was a
family affair, extending to the children. Few Vietnamese children
had the opportunity simply to be children. From birth they were
participants in the war as well as its victims. They matured in
an environment where death and suffering inflicted by war were
commomplace and seemingly unavoidable.
The years of military conflicts and refugee movements tended
in many parts of the South to break up the extended family units
and to reinforce the bonds uniting the nuclear family. The major
preoccupation of the ordinary villager and urbanite alike was to
earn a livelihood and to protect his immediate family, holding
his household together at any cost.
After the mid-1970s, the North and South faced the task of
social reconstruction. For the South, the communist conquest and
ensuing relocation and collectivization policies created an
uncertain social milieu. While the return of peace reunited
families, communist policies forced fathers or sons into
reeducation camps or entire families into new economic zones for
resettlement. For those who saw no future in a socialist Vietnam,
the only alternatives were to escape by boat or escape by land.
As the pace of rural collectivization accelerated in 1987,
and as the people became more receptive to family planning, it
seemed likely that families in the South would gradually take on
the characteristics of those in the North. This conjecture was
reinforced by Hanoi's decision in 1977 to apply its own 1959
family law to the South.
According to an official 1979 survey of rural families in the
Red River Delta commune of An Binh near Hanoi, a typical family
was nuclear, averaging four persons (parents and two children).
The An Binh study, confirmed by other studies, also showed the
family to be heavily dependent on outsiders for the satisfaction
of its essential needs and confirmed that the family planning
drive had had some success in changing traditional desires for a
large family. Seventy-five percent of those interviewed
nonetheless continued to believe three or four children per
family to be the most desirable number and to prefer a son to a
daughter.
The An Binh study revealed in addition that almost all the
parents interviewed preferred their children not to be farmers, a
preference that reflected the popular conviction that farming was
not the promising route to high-status occupations. Such
thinking, however, was alarming to officials who nevertheless
considered the promotion of agriculture as essential to the
regime's scheme for successful transition to a socialist economy
(see Agriculture
, ch. 3).
In December 1986, the government enacted a new family law
that incorporated the 1959 law and added some new provisions. The
goal of the new legislation was "to develop and consolidate the
socialist marriage and family system, shape a new type of man,
and promote a new socialist way of life eliminating the vestiges
of feudalism, backward customs, and bad or bourgeois thoughts
about marriage and family." The law explicitly defined the
"socialist family" as one in which "the wife and husband are
equals who love each other, who help each other to make progress,
who actively participate in building socialism and defending the
fatherland and work together to raise their children to be
productive citizens for society."
Reflecting the government's sense of urgency about population
control, the 1986 law stipulated a new parental "obligation" to
practice family planning, a provision that was absent from the
1959 text. The new law was notable also for its stronger wording
regarding the recommended marriage age: it specified that "only
males twenty years of age or older and females eighteen years of
age or older may marry." The 1959 text had stated only that such
persons were "eligible for marriage."
Other noteworthy provisions concerned adoption, guardianship,
and marriage between Vietnamese and foreigners. Foreigners
married to Vietnamese were to comply with the provisions of the
1986 law except in matters relating to separation, divorce,
adoption, and guardianship, which were to be regulated
separately. The new code also called on various mass
organizations to play an active role in "teaching and campaigning
among the people for the strict implementation" of the law.
Data as of December 1987
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