Citations coordinate distinct time-spaces, bringing them into a common relation of contiguity (Silverstein 2005).
Nữ Giới Chung created a peculiar time-space in the early 20th century, one that integrated citations from different historical periods across the world and Vietnam, brought together by women who had received an education blending Eastern and Western influences. It was a time-space as diverse and dynamic as a cinematic montage, constructed through jump-cuts slicing across the expanse of history. The diversity of citations, as well as the way they were employed, compels us to rethink the meaning of “Chung” in Nữ Giới Chung, especially in terms of its scope.
Here, "Chung" does not mean a singular voice or a pre-existing, unified message within Vietnamese womanhood. Instead, "Chung" / "Chuông" (Bell) signals the construction of a time-space where women come together for an encounter—to revisit history, to rewrite history, and to continue writing the history of women in the chronicles of Vietnam and the world. So, how were the reels of history “cut” by the women writers of Nữ Giới Chung? And how were these cuts intertwined with the story of Nữ Giới Chung itself?
Let us briefly discuss the concept of citationality. Citation is the fundamental property of all signs—what Derrida calls their iterability. Every sign is always ready to escape its original context of utterance and enter a new context where it is cited.
Citing marks the ownership of speech, attributing it to a speaking agent. However, citation simultaneously inserts both the speech and the speaker into another context where the utterance is staged and performed as a citation. Depending on the arrangement, we may have a dialogic discourse, in which one voice borrows and responds to another, with the original and cited voices clearly marked with quotation marks (territorial marks). Alternatively, we may have a monologic discourse, in which the speaker internalizes the cited voice, or a semi-monologic discourse, in which the speaker reports what another person has said (reported speech).
The purpose of citation is to establish a genealogy of thoughts, to borrow authority from others in order to reinforce one's own authority, and to have one’s perspective supported by those of others. If memorization is often described as an act of internalization, then citation can be seen as an externalization, a means of engaging in dialogue and interrogating the origins of thoughts that one assumes to be one’s own. To weave new thoughts, one must first unpick old stitches.
However, in the early 20th century, research could only be conducted using available books or personal memory. Therefore, citation was not merely a scholarly/historiographical gesture ensuring historical accuracy (a verifiable intellectual genealogy); it was also a performance, a mise-en-scène, a decorative act, aimed at constructing a time-space that evoked history as an ambience.
What was the purpose of this?
We can interpret that in Nữ Giới Chung, Chung does not refer to a separate time-space where contemporary women conversed among themselves. It was not defined by the exclusion of male discourse or by women retreating into an insular sphere. Instead, Chung called women to stand together with the world, to stand together with history, a history shaped by all genders—not apart from it.
The cited source is not always a person, and even when it is, the person does not necessarily have a clearly defined identity. We sometimes encounter “Ông Bội-Căn” (full name citation), “a scholar from the Western lands” (泰西, Thái Tây, referring to Western nations, partial name citation), or “a scholar from England.” We also see references to “Confucian books,” “Chinese characters,” or simply “books” (anonymous citation). The subject of the utterance does not need a clear identity; it may represent Western civilization (scholar) or general wisdom (books).
The authority of a citation lies in its Westernness or its officialized status—either by being published (books) or widely circulated through oral tradition (vernacular literature). The transmission and construction of knowledge did not occur at the level of personal dialogue, where citation serves to protect individual intellectual property and create intersubjective exchanges. Instead, the priority here was intercultural dialogue, where individuals acted as representatives of cultural currents rather than as independent thinkers.
These annotations demonstrate that, at this stage, chữ Quốc ngữ could not yet stand alone as a fully independent system of signs, with a direct connection between sign and referent. It required mediation, subtitling, by other languages (Hán and French) used in Vietnam's educational and administrative environments.
Given that Confucian and French texts were commonly used in schools, it is likely that Western intellectual and historical figures were accessed through Chinese translations rather than in the original French or English, leaving behind parallel traces of translation (Bội Căn / Roger Bacon).
Due to incomplete digitization and an unfinished database, we cannot yet statistically classify the frequency of different citation sources. However, based on available data, citations in Nữ Giới Chung can be grouped into three major categories:
These categories reflect the research of Nguyễn Hoa Mai on the history of women’s education in early 20th-century Vietnam, highlighting the coexistence of Confucian and European learning systems.
Through polyphonic discourse, we see that the colonial education system produced multilingual subjects, shaping a multicultural, multilingual space-time—with Nữ Giới Chung as one example. This multilayered colonialism created an ambivalent legacy, blending influences from various periods of domination.
Trích dẫn và viết lại lịch sử thế giới: Từ lịch sử danh nhân đến lịch sử thân mẫu
It is important to note that Nữ Giới Chung was a newspaper featuring multiple female voices. There was no single mode or purpose of citation. Here, we focus on a specific example from the editor-in-chief Sương Nguyệt Anh, which does not represent the entire publication.
Her essay "The Power of Women", published in the first issue, demonstrates a unique citation strategy:
“An English scholar (Anglé) once said: ‘The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.’”
“Even the greatest men, like Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, whose names instilled fear, did not possess this kind of power. A woman’s power is the power to create life itself.”
In this passage, history is rewritten from the perspective of women—not as secondary figures, but as the foundational force behind civilization itself. By citing great men and reframing their significance through the role of their mothers, Sương Nguyệt Anh rewrites history not as the history of men, but as the history of those who gave birth to them.
