There remains a great deal of important work to be done on pre–nineteenth-century Vietnam, so it is with joy that I greet Tran's work on gender during the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries. Her book successfully overturns existing assumptions in the field; establishes a useful framework to study gender and broader social, economic, legal, and political issues of the period; and delivers a virtuoso performance in deploying a broad range of sources. Along the way, Tran introduces hitherto-untouched types of sources, including wills and testaments and legal investigation manuals.
Familial Properties seeks to answer fundamental questions about gender: What was the role of women in a patriarchal society? What were the roles of state and ideology in ideas and practices of gender? Most importantly, what were the responses of women? Previous historians have argued that women in Southeast Asia enjoyed more freedom, power, and rights than their counterparts in East Asia and other parts of the world. The standard work for early modern Vietnam has been Yu Insun's Law and Family in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Vietnam (1979), where he argued that in law women had equal rights of inheritance and that this was a function of the essentially Southeast Asian cultural traditions of Vietnam, which stood in contrast to the traditionally patriarchal societies of East Asia.
Tran's revisionist work overturns this consensus and broadens the inquiry beyond legal history. Tran argues that Yu and others have grossly misinterpreted the key articles in the Le legal code, and rejects the thesis that women in early modern Vietnam had equal rights to inheritance or property. Tran establishes that the legal code was essentially patriarchal, enforced by the state to promote patrilineal principles and to ensure state access to taxes and labor. Tran then situates the questions of gender in the broader context of incessant warfare among the Vietnamese kingdoms of the time and argues that this warfare had two effects. First, the state pursued greater control of local society in order to extract the resources it needed to sustain this warfare. Second, the disruptions caused by this warfare, including the massive absence of men from village and family life due to conscription, created opportunities and needs among women to become involved in trade, property management, village affairs, and the continuation of ancestral rituals. Most notably, Tran documents the phenomenon of women making large donations of property to village shrines in return for deified recognition and afterlife veneration by the village community.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of state and societal visions of gender, while chapter 2 argues for the centrality of the roles of wife and mother in social ideologies of family, village, and state. Chapter 3 documents a shift from status- to gender-based legal judgments surrounding illicit sexual relations. Chapter 4 is a careful reading of legal sources, including wills and testaments, that documents that while women had very few legal rights to inheritance, there were possibilities for widows to gain “custodial power” over a deceased husband's property on the basis of her claims to chastity (163); chapter 5 then shows how women with such custodial power donated property to village communities in exchange for ritual sacrifices in the afterlife. Chapter 6 is a historiographic reflection on how women and history have been studied since the French colonial period.
Several points of criticism should be noted, however. Philippe Papin has studied the same temple inscriptions and has made similar arguments to Tran's, yet, inexplicably, no reference to his work is found even in the bibliography or index. Another disappointment is that Tran offers the reader very little sense of the temple inscriptions themselves; the closest we get to them is some paraphrasing and analysis in chapter 5. Some examples of translated reproductions and genre and textual analysis would have been welcome. Finally, despite her omnivorous approach to sources and the existence of a significant corpus of genealogies, Tran does not seem to include the latter in her analysis.
Nonetheless, Familial Properties will remain the standard on the topic of gender in early modern Vietnam for years to come, and deserves the attention of specialists outside the region in search of comparative insights.
