Permanent Exhibitions
Introduction
Three topics at the Vietnamese Women’s Museum includes Women in Family, Women in History, and Women’s Fashion provide an overview of Vietnamese women through stories about rituals, marriage and birth customs, family life, traditional costumes, and their roles in wartime and in modern society. Photos and objects displayed at the Museum invoke special emotions and experience to domestic and international visitors.
Women in Family
This exhibit offers the “circle life” of Vietnamese women. They have matured girls, and then they get married and start a new life as wives and mothers. The role and position of women in their family are focused on the wedding rituals in a patrilineal and matrilineal society. It also offers practices, and rituals related to the desire for children, pregnancy, birth, and care of the new mothers and newborns; small business, cultivation, fishing, and foraging, preparing meals, pottery, sewing, and weaving, and raising children.
Women in History
This exhibit not only examines the role and participation of Vietnamese women during resistance wars against enemies but also focuses on different aspects of Vietnamese women’s daily life during the wars. The stories, contributions, glorious feats with weapons, and sacrifice of Vietnamese women are vividly displayed by objects in the exhibit. Short films introduce how women in contemporary life assert their personality with energy, passion, skill, and spirit based on traditional values.
Women’s Fashion
This exhibit offers diversified fashion and costume art using traditional techniques of many of the differing 54 ethnic groups here in Vietnam. It also introduces the beauty of these ethnic womens fashion ascetics via the use of jewels, betels and areca nuts, per traditional ritual. By displaying a corresponding jewelry collection featuring; hairpin’s necklaces, earrings, bracelets, silver belts, and woven accessories you can quickly learn of the joy in which Vietnamese women express their femininity and hundreds of years of family tradition.
