Gender Roles and Scholastic Performance among Adolescent Vietnamese Women: The Paradox of Ethnic Patriarchy

A number of scholars have devoted attention to the advancing status of Vietnamese-American women, members of an ethnic group with strong patriarchal traditions in the home country. Their advances are usually interpreted as results of the increasing adoption of relatively egalitarian “American” rather than traditional “Vietnamese” perspectives on behavior appropriate to men and women. This article argues that in one important area of advancement, education, young Vietnamese-American women are actually surpassing the performance of male coethnics, despite the fact that older Vietnamese women show significantly lower levels of education than men. Using interview data obtained in a Vietnamese community, the article then argues that this educational performance occurs not because of the abandonment of patriarchal views, but rather, ironically, because of the persistence of these views, which place greater social controls on young women than on young men.