From Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, and from the Mekong Delta to the Red River Delta, the women of Vietnam are coming into their own. This book reveals their conditions, their needs and policy expectations during the early stages of modernization of this newly industrializing economy.

The language of women and of research from a society that is in dynamic change, where women are in movement from the informal to the national economy, conveys the intense urgency associated with issues that range from the effects on the family of modernization, to urbanization and the effects on women's labour, to agricultural development, to women's health and fertility, to violence against women, and to women's political status history. Here the most up-to-date Vietnamese research on women, from the factory to the farm, and from the family to the state, is joined with the observations, analysis and feminist theories of US researchers who have been engaged in cross-cultural exchange with Vietnam.

Spanning the disciplines, this research and analysis on the conditions of Vietnam's women in transition represents the latest, and in some cases the only, political, economic, sociological and historical study of women in Vietnam today.