The research project “Issues of Women in Vietnam in the Early 20th Century through the lens of the Nữ Giới Chung Newspaper,” undertaken by the Vietnam Studies Center, is an effort to bring the first women’s newspaper in Vietnam (launched in the late 1910s) to contemporary readers of the 21st century, especially those identified as “Generation Z.”
Although it existed for just over 5 months, with the first issue published on February 1, 1918, and the last issue printed on July 19 of the same year, Nữ Giới Chung, with Editor-in-Chief Suong Nguyet Anh (1864-1921, the daughter of the patriotic Southern poet Nguyen Dinh Chieu), left a profound mark on the history of modern Vietnamese journalism with a total of 22 newspaper issues. Despite its short existence and modest circulation, these newspapers still provide contemporary readers with rich information and sketches of the women’s rights movement in Vietnam at that time. The 22 issues of Nữ Giới Chung currently available allow us to experiment with the methods of digital humanities to effectively and vividly explore the historical and cultural issues of Vietnam in the early 20th century reflected in the newspaper. Through these experiments, Vietnam Studies Center hopes to receive opinions, suggestions, and contributions from readers to make the introduction of Nữ Giới Chung more complete, thereby enriching our contemporary understanding of a very special period in our national history. This experiment is also the first step towards further digital humanities research on Vietnamese society through different media sources in the first half of the 20th century, and it can continue to expand into subsequent periods.
Nguyen Nam
