An assistant joint professor of marine affairs, history and gender and women’s studies lectured on her novel, “Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era” last Thursday.
Jessica Fraizer lectured in honor of Dana Shugar, who served as the first head of Gender and Women’s Studies Department prior to her death from breast cancer in 2000.
It was the first lecture of the fall 2019 semester for the gender and women’s studies lecture series.
Fraizer’s inspiration to write the novel all started with research.
“I was inspired to write the book based on when I was doing research as a graduate student,” said Frazier. “I found this information about these middle aged, middle class white women with children were traveling to Hanoi when the U.S. was bombing over North Vietnam.”
Fraizer started teaching in 2013. She teaches a variety of courses, from marine environmental history to human rights. She immediately accepted the invitation to host a lecture based on the fourth chapter of her novel entitled “Establishing Feminist Perspectives on the Vietnam War.”
From the start of the lecture, Frazier made the main point from her novel very clear.
“The traces and the genealogy of this development in feminist thought and shows that the context of the 1960s and 1970s nurtured particular feminist revelations,” Frazier said.
Frazier talked about a variety of topics that nearly all correlated to how one event in 1971 changed the course of the Vietnam War.
“Conversations leading up to, at and following the Indochinese Women’s Conference highlight the ways for feminist’s U.S. involvement in Vietnam came to symbolize all that was wrong in the United
One of the major causes for this conference, which was led by women’s rights groups, came from the poor treatment of Vietnamese women during the war.
“The prison environment in which up to thirty two people including children who were born in prison lived in 10 by five-foot high cell with little food, no clothing and no bathing facilities,” said Frazier.
The women throughout Vietnam began to reach for equal rights, which started with defending their country.
“Vietnamese men soon accepted women into the military and even allowed them to command defensive military operations,” said Frazier. “This account provided them with ammunition to combat sexism within the movement organizations.”
Near the conclusion of her lecture, Frazier went into how the unions on both sides made progress in their goals after the conclusion of the war.
“In the new revolution of government, women held positions in the national assembly and posted a role as village chairperson and district level committee members,” said Frazier. “By first recognizing women’s oppression based on sex, as well as oppressions based on race, class and nationality, some women’s liberations could begin to see connections between struggles.”
Other than teaching students and talking about her book, Frazier revealed that she is working on another project, as well.
“I am working on a book on transnational feminism in the late 20th and early 21st century, so it is going to be a collective biography of women from all different regions of the world.”