Abstract

This chapter focuses on the Vietnamese outreach toward Algerian and French women’s activists during the French war in Vietnam, through the prism of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. This Leftist international platform gathered women from colonizing and colonized countries, which allowed for the development of transnational anti-imperialist solidarity. At these meetings, pro-independence Vietnamese women easily connected with Algerian women who were also actively resisting French colonialism. WIDF also created an ideal space for women’s grassroots diplomacy where women from colonized countries confronted French women with their deeply rooted colonial bias. Indeed, Vietnamese and Algerian speeches paved the way for the dismantling of ingrained colonial culture amongst European Leftist women, who consequently further echoed the voices of anti-colonial resisters in their home country.

Keywords: French War in Vietnam, anti-imperialism, Leftist women, women’s internationalism, WIDF

Mothers and spouses from Europe, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia, France … who suffered the atrocities committed by the bloodthirsty brutes of Nazism: … If the bloodiest drama could unfold this way in Europe, if the cruelest and barbarous actions could be committed by the most civilized countries of the globe, it is because even before this war, even during peacetime, this barbarity already existed there at a latent state, it has always existed, in real and permanent ways in the colonies.