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Power, Patriarchy, and Gender Conflict in the Vietnamese Immigrant Community Author(s): Nazli Kibria Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Mar., 1990), pp. 9-24 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/189956 Accessed: 05-01-2018 20:36 UTC

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POWER, PATRIARCHY, AND GENDER CONFLICT IN THE VIE TNAMESE

IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY

NAZLI KIBRIA

Tufts University

Based on an ethnographic study of women’s social groups and networks in a community of Vietnamese immigrants recently settled in the United States, this article explores the effects of migration on gender roles and power. The women ‘s groups and networks play an important role

in the exchange of social and economic resources among households and in the mediation of disputes between men and women in the family. These community forms are an important source

of informal power for women, enabling them to cope effectively with male authority in the family.

Yet, despite their increasedpower and economic resources, these women supported a patriarchal social structure because it preserved their parental authority and promised greater economic security in the future.

Women maximize resources within patriarchal systems through various strategies (Collier 1974; di Leonardo 1987; Wolf 1972). Kandiyoti (1988) has suggested that women’s strategies reveal the blueprint of what she calls the “patriarchal bargain,” that is, the ways in which women and men negotiate and adapt to the set of rules that guide and constrain gender relations. The notion of “bargaining with patriarchy” suggests that both men and women possess resources with which they negotiate to maximize power and options within a patriarchal structure. The bargaining is asymmetric, for as long as patriarchy is maintained, women’s power and options will be less than those of men in the same group.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 1988 Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting, Philadelphia. I would like to thank Greg Brooks, Suzy Nguyen, Elizabeth H. Pleck and Susan Silbey for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. The skillful editing and suggestions of Judith Lorber have contributed to the final version of the article.

REPRINT REQUESTS: Nazli Kibria, Department of Sociology, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155.

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 4 No. 1, March 1990 9-24 ? 1990 Sociologists for Women in Society

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10 GENDER & SOCIETY / March 1990

The analysis of women’s strategies, with its potential to reveal processes of negotiation between men and women, may also shed light on the dynamics of change in gender relations. Social transformations, such as those implied by modernization and migration, often entail important shifts in the nature and scope of resources available to women and men (Lamphere 1987; Pessar 1984). A period of intense renegotiation between women and men may thus ensue, as new bargains based on new resources are struck. Indeed, the fundamental rules of the previous system of gender relations may come into question, as the social worlds of men and women undergo change. However, when patriarchal structures remain in place despite certain changes, limited transformations in the relations between women and men may occur without

deep shifts in men’s power and authority. This article examines the organization and activities of the informal

community life of Vietnamese immigrant women in the United States. Data are drawn from an ethnographic study of a community of Vietnamese refugees in Philadelphia. Through research on the women’s social groups and networks, I explored the effects of migration on women’s roles in the family and community and the collective strategies forged by women to cope with male authority in the family.

Settlement in the United States has increased opportunities for the growth of Vietnamese women’s power because their economic contributions to the family economy have grown while those of men have declined. Women use their new resources to cope more effectively with male authority in the family. However, male authority is not openly challenged. Because there are important advantages for women in maintaining the old “bargain” between men and women, the Vietnamese women have tried to maintain the patriar- chal family structure.

RESEARCH DESIGN

Using participant-observation and in-depth interviews, I studied 12 Viet- namese households located in a low-income, inner-city area of Philadelphia from 1983 to 1985 (Kibria 1986). Interviews were conducted with 15 women and 16 men, all of whom were members of the households composing the core sample.

The 12 households were located in close proximity to each other, within a radius of 10 blocks. They ranged in size from 3 to 19 members, with a median number of 7. Study participants had been in the United States for 3 to 5 years. Of the 46 adults, 32 had lived in the urban areas of southern and

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Kibria / VIETNAMESE GENDER CONFLICT 11

central Vietnam prior to leaving the country. The men had often been in the South Vietnamese army or worked in small businesses and middle-level government administrative and clerical occupations. The women had en- gaged in farming and commercial activities or a variety of odd jobs in the informal urban economy, such as selling goods in the bazaar and working in restaurants and laundries.

All of the households had experienced a decline in their socioeconomic status with the move to the United States, especially when compared to their situation in Vietnam before the political changes of 1975. At the time of the study, the economic situation of the study participants was generally marginal and precarious, a finding that is supported by other studies of post-1978 Vietnamese arrivals to the United States (Gold and Kibria 1989; Haines 1987; Rumbaut 1989). In 1984, over 30 percent of the men in the households of the study were unemployed. Of the men who were employed, over half worked in low-paying, unskilled jobs in the urban service sector or in factories located in the outlying areas of the city. The women tended to work period- ically at jobs in the informal economic sector as well as in the urban service

economy. Eight of the households had members who collected public assis- tance payments (Kibria 1989).

The family economy or a system of pooling and exchanging material resources within family groups was an important strategy by which the Vietnamese households coped with these economic uncertainties and diffi- culties (Finnan and Cooperstein 1983; Gold 1989; Haines, Rutherford, and Thomas 1981).

Another important sphere of economic cooperation were the informal, women-centered social groups and networks in the community. I use the term social group to refer to clusters of people who gathered together on a regular, if not frequent, basis. These groups had a stable core membership that usually included kin but were by no means exclusive to family members. Over the course of a year, I attended and observed the informal gatherings of 7 social groups in women’s homes as well as in Vietnamese-owned service establish-

ments (ethnic grocery stores, restaurants, hairdressers) where the women worked. I gained access to each of the 7 groups through my relationships with members of. the study households. The women’s groups included members of these households and others in the community.

The study of the women’s social groups revealed the complex and powerful role of the Vietnamese women in the ethnic community. The women’s community was organized around two central activities: the distri- bution and regulation of the exchange of resources among households and the mediation of domestic tensions and disputes. Through these activities,

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12 GENDER & SOCIETY / March 1990

the women’s groups were an important source of collective power and support for women. However, the power of the women’s groups was “unof- ficial” in nature and limited by the structural and ideological boundaries of the patriarchal family system. In their involvement in family conflicts, the women’s groups often tried to protect the interests of individual women who were in conflict with male authority in the family. Yet they did so in ways that did not challenge, but rather reaffirmed, traditional Vietnamese ideology concerning the family and gender roles.

THE EFFECTS OF MIGRATION:

OLD STRATEGIES AND NEW RESOURCES

The traditional Vietnamese family was modeled on Confucian principles. In the ideal model, households were extended, and the family was structured around the patrilineage or the ties of the male descent line (Keyes 1977; Marr 1976). Women were married at a young age and then entered the household of their husband’s father. The young bride had minimal status and power in the household until she produced sons (Johnson 1983; Kandiyoti 1988; Lamphere 1974; Wolf 1972). The patriarchal bargain in this setting was one in which women expected significant rewards in their old age from allegiance and deference to the patrilineal family system. The power and resources of women in the patrilineal extended household tend to vary across the life cycle. While young brides are subservient to both men and older women in the household, older women hold a position of some power and status (cf. Wolf 1974).

There were also resources available to Vietnamese women in traditional

rural society that could be used to cope with male authority in the family and community. According to recollections of my informants, in rural Vietnam, women’s neighborhood groups were an important source of informal power. Women were able, through gossip, to affect the reputations of men and women in the community. However, in rural Vietnam, the influence of the women’s groups was curbed and limited by powerful male organizations, such as village political and legal bodies, as well as the patrilineal descent group (Hendry 1954; Hickey 1964; Keyes 1977).

Women in rural Vietnam also had some access to economic resources

through their involvement in village commerce and business. Women often sold food and other goods at the village market, and many played an important role in the family business (Hendry 1954; Hickey 1964; Nguyen Van Vinh 1949). But while such activities may have enhanced the resources

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Kibria / VIETNAMESE GENDER CONFLICT 13

and bargaining power of women in the family, there is little evidence that they weakened the fundamental economic subordination and dependence of women on men.

The social and economic bases of the traditional system of gender rela- tions were deeply affected by the social turmoils in Vietnam of the 1950s and

1960s, which also transformed the lives of the participants of this study. War

and urbanization eroded the structure of the patrilineal extended household. Within the cities, the households that survived retained their extended

character but they were less centered on patrilineal ties and incorporated a wider array of kin. For many Vietnamese, economic survival in the cities was precarious (Beresford 1988, 57). However, many Vietnamese from middle- class backgrounds, such as the participants in this study, were able to take advantage of the expansion of middle-level positions in the government bureaucracy and army. Such occupational opportunities were fewer for women; they engaged in informal income-generating activities or worked in low-level jobs in the growing war-generated service sector in the cities (Beresford 1988; Nyland 1981; Thrift and Forbes 1986). As in rural Vietnam, most women remained dependent on men for economic support.

War and migration to the cities thus served to weaken the patrilineal extended household – the structural core of the traditional patriarchal system. However, because the middle-class status of the families depended in large part on the incomes of the men, the threat of economic impoverishment sustained the ideals of the traditional family system and men’s authority in the family. Women feared the economic consequences of male desertion, a not uncommon occurrence, especially when men were on military duty for extended periods. The “bargain” between women and men that emerged in this setting was one in which women deferred to men’s authority in exchange for economic protection.

In the United States, the social context of gender relations was both similar to and different from that of modern, urban South Vietnam. The most important difference was that the relative economic resources of men and women had shifted. As in Vietnam, women continued to engage in a variety of income-generating activities, including employment in informal and low-level, urban, service-sector jobs. In contrast to Vietnam, however, the economic contributions of men had declined significantly. In Vietnam, the men held jobs that enabled them to maintain a middle-class standard of living for their families. In the United States, many Vietnamese men faced unem- ployment or had low-paying unstable jobs that did not usually enable them to support a family. Compounding the men’s economic problems has been a widespread sense of powerlessness and alienation from the institutions of the

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14 GENDER & SOCIETY / March 1990

dominant American society. The shifts in the resources of women and men that have accompanied the migration process have thus created the potential for a renegotiation of the patriarchal bargain.

THE WOMEN’S COMMUNITY: STRATEGIES OF

POWER AND RESPONSES TO CHANGE

The women’s social groups were formed around household, family, and neighborhood ties. Groups had a stable set of regular members, ranging in size from 6 to 10 women. The boundaries of groups were fluid and open, with participation in group activities generally unrestricted to women in the ethnic

community. The groups had heterogeneous membership, including women of varied ages and social backgrounds, and the Vietnamese women in the community tended to participate in the gatherings and activities of several social groups. Such overlapping membership in the groups led to connections of both a direct and indirect nature among women across the community. The groups were thus at the core of social networks of women that extended throughout the area.

A woman’s membership in a group, regardless of the extent of her involvement, signified an obligation to participate in exchange activities with others in the group and connecting network. Exchange was a central and perhaps the most visible activity of the women’s community, in ways similar to those in low-income, urban, black communities (Martin and Martin 1978; Stack 1974). Women exchanged food and material goods of various sorts, as well as services and tasks such as child care and cooking. They exchanged information on such issues as where to get “good buys” on food and other items for the family. They also shared knowledge on available jobs and income-generating opportunities in the area, as well as how to cope with and maximize gains from various institutions (e.g., welfare and social service agencies, hospitals, and schools). For both men and women in the commu- nity, the exchange networks of the Vietnamese women represented a highly valued material and informational resource.

Besides their involvement in exchange activities, the women’s groups also played an important part in strategies for coping with familial male authority, often playing a pivotal role in supporting and protecting women who were in conflict with the men in their family. In traditional Vietnamese society, the

principle of male authority was expressed in the cultural and legal acceptance of wife beating (Marr 1976; Ta Van Tai 1981). In three of the study house- holds, physical assaults by men on women in the family were a regular occurrence, thus suggesting that wife beating continues among the Vietnam-

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Kibria / VIETNAMESE GENDER CONFLICT 15

ese in the United States. However, in the United States, the Vietnamese

women’s groups play an important moderating role in situations of domestic violence, protecting women from the excesses of the patriarchal family system, as shown by the following:

Several women were gathered at Dao’s house. Dao brought up the situation of her older sister Thu. She said she hadn’t wanted to talk about it before … but

everyone here was family. Now it was so bad she had to talk about it. Thu’s husband (Chau) was hitting her very much. The other day, Dao had to take Thu to the hospital, when Chau had hit Thu on the face. One of the women says, “What about Chau’s brother? Does he say anything?”

Dao replies that the brother had told Chau to stop it. But nobody really cared about what the brother said, certainly Chau didn’t. The brother was very old. He did nothing but eat and sleep. And he hardly talked to anyone anymore, he was so sad to leave Vietnam. Dao starts crying, saying that if her parents were here, they could help Thu.

Dao’s neighbor says that maybe Thu should leave the husband. That wasn’t a bad thing to do, when the husband was so bad, the woman should leave the husband. Chau didn’t even take care of the children. He wasn’t a good father. He also hit the children. Even the smallest one, who was only three years old. No good father would do that.

Dao says that yes, that was true, Chau wasn’t a good father. He also didn’t like to work and have a job. Thu talked about leaving Chau, but she was scared. She thought maybe Chau would come after her and the children and do something bad to them. One of the women says, “My brother, he’s Chau’s friend. I’ll talk to my brother and he’ll tell Chau to be good, and not make trouble for Thu.” Several other women mention people they know who are in some way associated with Chau. They all say they will talk to these people about Chau. Someone says, “Thu is a good woman. She wants to take care of her children, her family. Chau, he’s no good.” (Fieldnotes)

Dao’s social network was an important source of support for Thu. Largely through gossip, the women were able to bring pressures to bear on Thu’s husband. Chau found his reputation throughout the community affected by the rapidly disseminated judgments of the women’s group. In conversations with a number of men and women in the community, I found that Chau had been ostracized not only by the women but also by male friends and relatives. Chau left the city to join a cousin in California. There were no legal divorce proceedings, but the marriage had been dissolved in the eyes of the Vietnam- ese community. Thu and her children continued to live in the city, receiving help and support from family and friends. Chau, in contrast, severed almost all relationships in the area.

The example above shows how the women collectively helped to bring male authority back into its acceptable limits. The women’s group supported Thu in breaking ties with the husband, a course of action that conflicted with

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16 GENDER & SOCIETY / March 1990

the values and norms of family solidarity and female propriety. Marital separation or divorce is a stigma among the recently arrived Vietnamese in the United States, particularly for women. But in Thu’s case, the women created an interpretation of the situation in which the man was at fault. The judgment or “message” of the women’s group was that the principle of male authority had been abused, contradicting other central familial values. The women interpreted Thu’s actions so that she was not seen as violating family and gender norms. Women emerged in this situation as both guardians of the family and as supporters of a particular woman’s interests.

There were other instances in which women collectively stepped in to protect the interests of women who were in conflict with men in the family, most often husbands. These situations involved not only domestic violence but also disputes between women and men over various sorts of household decisions. In one case that I observed, a young woman named Lien was supported by female kin and friends in her decision to seek employment despite the objections of her husband. After completing six months of training in haircutting, Lien had had her second child. She planned to leave the baby in the care of her aunt while she worked as a hairdresser in Chinatown. Lien’s

husband objected to her plans, feeling that it was important for her to stay at home with the baby. While Lien agreed that it was preferable for her to remain

at home, she argued that her husband’s frequents bouts of unemployment made it necessary for her to go out and work.

With the support of other women in the community, Lien’s aunt intervened

in the couple’s dispute in a powerful fashion. At a gathering of friends, Lien’s aunt discussed how she had “had a talk” with Lien’s husband in which she

had emphasized that Lien was not deviating from traditional women’s roles but merely adapting out of necessity to economic circumstances:

I told him that Lien should take care of the baby, that is the right way. But this is America and we have a different kind of life now. If Lien doesn’t work, then

the children won’t get good food, good clothes … the welfare money is not enough. I explained to him that she’s not being a bad mother, she’s working for the children.

The women at the gathering accepted the interpretation of the situation presented: that Lien was acting in conformity with the dictates of traditional gender roles. Because of the gossip that ensued, Lien’s husband found himself under community pressure to accept Lien’s decision to work outside the home.

In another case women mobilized community opinion against a man who forbade his wife to see her brother, whom he disliked. Ha, a woman in her early thirties, had been living in the city with her husband and their children.

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Kibria / VIETNAMESE GENDER CONFLICT 17

Some time ago, Ha’s brother and his four children had arrived in the city from

the refugee camp to join Ha. Ha described the household atmosphere as tense and uncomfortable during this time. Her husband, Le, was in “a bad mood,” as he was not able to find a suitable job. Le and Ha’s brother had been fighting constantly over small matters. Because of these problems, after a stay of two months, the brother and his children moved to another apartment in the area.

Ha went over to see her brother frequently, usually every other day. Ha often cooked for her brother’s children, and she sometimes lent her brother

small amounts of money. Le resented Ha’s involvement in her brother’s life and eventually told her to stop visiting them. Ha became incensed and told women kin and friends that she would divorce Le if he did not allow her to take care of her brother:

I told my friends and Le’s sister that I don’t want to stay with Le. They said I must stay with Le because it’s-not good for me and my children to leave. They talked to me a lot about it. And then Le’s sister said that Le was bad to tell me

not to see my brother. All my friends said that was right, that my brother was like Le’s brother, Le must understand that. Le changed after that. Because his sister talked to him, everyone talked to him. He knows that everyone will think he’s bad if he tells me to not see my brother.

In this case the women’s community “stepped in,” both to discourage Ha from leaving the marriage and to change Le’s behavior and attitude toward Ha’s relationship with her brother. The women were able to muster consid- erable support for their position. Because of the women’s actions, Le felt social pressures from both his family and the community to allow Ha to maintain her relationship with her brother. The women constructed an interpretation of the situation such that Le was seen to be violating the foremost value of family solidarity.

While extremely powerful, the women’s groups were not always success- ful in their interventions in family disputes. In one such case, a women’s group supported a member named Tuyet in her efforts to dissuade her hus- band from purchasing an expensive car with the family savings. Tuyet told women friends that the purchase of the car would significantly postpone their plans to buy a house. Despite the gossip that followed and the women’s collective disapproval of his actions, Tuyet’s husband went ahead with the purchase. His decision to ignore the women’s community was influenced perhaps by his stable and favorable employment situation, which reduced his sense of economic dependency on the women’s resources. However, while Tuyet’s social group was unsuccessful in deterring the purchase of the car, their judgments did serve to cause Tuyet’s husband to reconsider and delay his purchase.

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18 GENDER & SOCIETY / March 1990

In all of these cases, the process by which the women’s community attempted to influence the outcome of the disputes was similar. The women’s groups derived influence from their ability to interpret situations, define who was right or wrong, and impose these interpretations through gossip and the threat of ostracism. In the process of generating collective interpretations of situations, women drew on the symbols and values of the traditional family ideology to provide legitimacy for their actions and opinions. The judgments of the women were often effective sanctions, as both men and women in the

ethnic community valued the economic and social resources available to them through the women’s exchange networks.

THE NEW PATRIARCHAL BARGAIN

The collective strategies of the women for coping with male authority reveal some aspects of the new patriarchal bargain being generated by migration. The power exerted by the women’s groups over the behavior of men and women in the Vietnamese immigrant community reflects the decline in men’s social and economic resources. But while the women’s groups use their enhanced power to support the struggles of individual women with male authority in the family, they are careful not to disturb the traditional bound- aries of family and gender relations.

In their activities, the women’s groups constantly displayed concern for upholding and preserving elements of the relationship they had had with men and the family system prior to settlement in the United States. For example, the women’s groups did not support women in their conflicts with men in the family when they had violated traditional sexual norms. In one case, a widow had developed a reputation for sexual promiscuity. In the second case, a woman had left her husband for a man with whom she had been having an affair for several months. In both cases, the women’s groups disparaged and isolated the two women, and in the second case, provided support to the husband. In general, the women’s groups judged harshly those women who failed to show a high degree of commitment to “keeping the family together” or to the norms of behavior appropriate to wives and mothers. The women would mobilize their community resources to sanction and enforce these normative codes by withholding resources from offenders.

Anything that threatened to disrupt the fundamental structure and ideo- logical coherence of the family was unacceptable to the women’s community. Repeatedly during my research, the Vietnamese women talked of the threat presented by the familial and sexual values of the dominant American culture

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Kibria / VIETNAMESE GENDER CONFLICT 19

to their family system. Thus, when asked about the greatest drawback of living in the United States, women often expressed fears concerning chil- dren’s defection from the traditional family system:

The biggest problem of living here is that it’s difficult to teach your children how to be good and to have good behavior. The children learn how to be American from the schools, and then we don’t understand them and they don’t obey us. The customs here are so different from our culture. The children learn about sex from TV. Maybe American parents think that’s OK but for me that’s not OK because I know the children will learn bad behavior (hu) from watching TV. Also, I worry about when my children grow older they won’t ask me my opinion about when they have girlfriends and they get married.

Another expression of the conflicts about the dominant American culture felt by the women was their ambivalence about the protection from domestic violence offered to them by the American legal system. While many women felt positively about the illegality of wife beating in American society, there was also widespread concern that the intervention of the law into family life detracted from the authority and rights of parents to discipline their children as they chose (cf. Pleck 1983).

Besides the decline of parental authority, there was another consequence of Vietnamese assimilation into American culture that women feared: the

desertion of men from the family. Both the economic protection of men and the officially sanctioned authority of parents over children were aspects of the premigration patriarchal bargain that women viewed as attractive and beneficial for themselves, and they would often use the resources and power available to them through their community groups and networks in an attempt to preserve these aspects of the old “bargain,” as illustrated by the following situation:

Ly told me her sister-in-law Kim’s daughter, 15-year-old Mai, was thought to be mixing with American boys at school. Ly thought Kim was “making too much fuss about it,” as Mai was “really a good, smart girl who’s not going to get into trouble.” This afternoon, in the restaurant where Kim worked, the regular crowd of five or six women gathered around a couple of tables, chatting and drinking tea and bittersweet coffee. Kim, quite suddenly, started crying and dabbing her eyes with a napkin. Everyone’s attention focused on Kim, who then talked of how she didn’t know what to do with her children who were on

the streets all the time, she couldn’t keep her eye on them continually because she worked all the time. Especially Mai, who was growing up to be a woman now, she was always playing on the streets, sometimes until late at night. And she didn’t take care of her younger brothers and sisters, and didn’t do any of the housework, instead always wanting money to go and buy the latest fashions.

An elderly white-haired women wearing traditional dress and seated at the next table piped in loudly about how this was what happened to all the children

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20 GENDER & SOCIETY / March 1990

when they came here, they became like American children, selfish and not caring about their family. The other women then talked of how they all had similar problems, that children here just didn’t listen to their parents and family. One said, “You should make her behave right, otherwise she’ll be sorry later. She’s not an American girl, she’s Vietnamese.” There were murmurs of agreement. (Fieldnotes)

In this case, a women’s group supported a member’s authority as a parent. In the process of doing so, the group upheld and affirmed traditional notions of appropriate female conduct. Following the incident described above, the women’s group also carefully watched and supervised Mai’s activities in an attempt to support her mother’s concerns actively.

The new patriarchal bargain emerging in the United States is thus one in which women use their heightened resources to cope more effectively with male authority. But there is also a concern for maintaining the old modes of accommodation between women and men and the traditional ideological relationships within the family.

CONCLUSIONS

This study showed how the Vietnamese women’s groups, using the resources that had become available to them as a result of migration and that were necessary to their families’ survival, challenged male authority. But they did not use their newly acquired resources to forge a radical restructuring of the old patriarchal bargain. In many ways, the women remained attached to the old male-dominant family system that called for female deference and loyalty because it offered them economic protection and allowed them to continue their officially sanctioned authority over the younger generation.

The social losses incurred by the Vietnamese men with settlement in the United States have enhanced women’s collective power. Their exchange networks have come to assume an important source of economic security and family survival. Moreover, the women’s groups have become an important, if not the primary, agent of negotiation between the Vietnamese community and “outside” institutions, such as hospitals and welfare agencies. As a result, the men defer to the moral judgments of the women’s community in part because many cannot afford to be cut off from these resources. In sum, the Vietnamese women’s community in the United States is continuous with the past in its basic organization and activities, but it is now operating in a social context that enhances its status and power.

The women’s status and power, however, are not great enough to trans- form gender relations in the Vietnamese immigrant community radically.

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Kibria / VIETNAMESE GENDER CONFLICT 21

While the economic resources of the women have risen, compared to those of the men, they are seen as too limited to sustain the economic independence of women from men, and so the women continue to value the promise of male economic protection. In short, the difficult economic environment and the continued material salience of family ties in the United States help preserve the attraction and meaning of the traditional patriarchal bargain for women, although in a tempered form.

Migration to the United States has thus had a complex, somewhat contra- dictory, impact on the status of Vietnamese immigrant women. On the one hand, migration has weakened men’s control over economic and social resources and allowed women to exert greater informal family power. At the same time, the precarious economic environment has heightened the salience of the family system and constrained the possibilities for radical change in gender relations. For the moment, the patriarchal family system is too valuable to give up as it adds income earners and extends resources. Another appeal of the traditional family system for women is the status-related privileges that are promised to them–in particular, the authority to wield considerable influence over the lives of the young.

Thus, because they expected to gain important economic and status benefits from allegiance to the traditional family system, by and large, the Vietnamese women of the study were a conservative force in the community, deeply resistant to structural changes in family and gender relations. In this regard, the responses of the Vietnamese women are not unlike views ex- pressed by many women supporters of the current antifeminist movement in the United States, who see shifts in gender relations as a threat to their economic security (Chafetz and Dworkin 1987; Ehrenreich 1982; Klatch 1987).

The experiences of these Vietnamese women also suggest that women may, in a selective manner, take advantage of the resources that have become available to them as a result of the very social transformations they resist. These new resources strengthen women’s capacity to cope effectively with male authority; as long as the men need the women’s economic and social resources, their ability to resist the collective interventions of women is limited. At the same time, the women themselves fight to hold back the social

consequences of migration, in particular the cultural incursions into the family that cause the undermining of their own authority over their children.

The “bargain” between the Vietnamese women and men that has been described here is highly unstable and tenuous in quality. The ability of women collectively to sanction the behavior of men rests on the dependence of men on the economic and social resources of women. If there is little economic

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22 GENDER & SOCIETY / March 1990

progress in the situation of the Vietnamese men in the future, then a funda- mental appeal of the traditional patriarchal bargain for women, that is, the promise of men’s economic protection, may become far less compelling. Male authority may then be openly challenged, paving the way for a radical restructuring of gender relations. In such a situation, the traditional family structure may further erode – without the material support of men, women may find their traditional status and authority over the younger generation difficult to sustain.

Alteratively, the Vietnamese men may gain economic and social re- sources in the future, in which case they are likely to reinstate their authority over women. A rise in the economic status of these Vietnamese families has

other implications as well. As I have described, the women’s strategies for coping with male authority are collective in nature, closely tied to the presence of a distinct and highly connected ethnic community that allows for the growth of women’s social networks. A rise in the economic status of the Vietnamese families may be accompanied by movement into the outlying areas of the city and the subsequent geographic dispersal of the Vietnamese ethnic community. Such changes would have serious implications for the ability of the Vietnamese women to forge the kind of powerful community life that I have described in this article. Thus, somewhat ironically, the assimilation of the Vietnamese into dominant American economic and social

structures may indicate both a major shift from the traditional Vietnamese patriarchal family system and a reassertion of the economic and social bases of male authority in the family. Recent scholarship on the effects of modern- ization and migration on women’s lives has seriously questioned the prior assumption that these processes are uniformly liberating for women (Morokvasic 1984; Ybarra 1983). My research on Vietnamese immigrant women suggests that the effects of migration on gender relations must be understood as highly uneven and shifting in quality, often resulting in gains for women in certain spheres and losses in others.

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Nazli Kibria is currently visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University. Her research interests are race and ethnicity, gender, family, and the study of develop- ment processes in South and SoutheastAsian societies. She is working on a book based on her research on Vietnamese immigrants in the United States.

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