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Although most histories of the Vietnam War portray South Vietnamese women as victims, prostitutes, or guerillas, this article examines their efforts to halt the war and bring peace to their country. Women stood at the center of Buddhist efforts to end the hostilities and engaged in numerous acts of protest, including self-immolation, to terminate the fighting. While their political and social activism continued their long history of battling to save their people, women who joined the peace movement risked prison, defied social norms, endured enormous pain, placed themselves in jeopardy, and sacrificed themselves to save their country. Working for peace remained their primary motivation, but some women may have believed that by destroying themselves, they could escape patriarchy and reincarnation forever. The women who immolated themselves appear to have achieved perpetual gender neutrality in contemporary Vietnam.
"It is not by protecting and defending yourself that you survive, but by giving yourself away."1
-Karen Armstrong, Buddha
In May 1967, a Buddhist woman named Nhat Chi Mai immolated herself in Saigon, South Vietnam, after declaring her intention to employ her "body as a torch . . . to dissipate the darkness . . . and to bring peace to Vietnam." Although few historians have investigated the antiwar movement in South Vietnam, her premature death expressed the anguish felt by peace activists over the conflict raging in their country and highlighted the essential role of women in the Buddhist peace movement.2 Indeed, despite the fact that Buddhists agitated for peace throughout the war, most accounts of the conflict have discussed the military aspects of the struggle but few have investigated indigenous attempts to end the hostilities. In the same fashion, while more has been written in recent years about the military contributions of American and Vietnamese women, little has been said about the women who served as foot soldiers in the battle to terminate the fighting.3
This article forces us to rethink our conceptions of South Vietnamese women by considering their extraordinary efforts to halt the fighting and pointing out that their toils conformed to a long tradition of feminine service to their nation. Just as Duong Van Mai Elliot's family history, The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family, challenged common images...