Our Lives to Live

Putting a Woman's Face to Change in Singapore

Kanwaljit Soin, Margaret Thomas

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9789814641999
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Our Lives to Live: Putting a Woman's Face to Change in Singapore explores and documents how women's roles, choices, and voices in Singapore have changed in the last 50 years; how women, from all sectors of society, have helped to shape the Singapore we know today. The 31 chapters, some with a more academic slant, others with a distinctly personal tone, reflect the rich diversity and depth of women's contributions to Singapore's evolution in the last half century, and also point to the problematical areas that still need attention.The perspectives in this book are provided by three generations of women, and they put a human face — the woman's face — to the tremendous changes in Singapore society over the past 50 years. The authors include some of Singapore's most accomplished women in many different fields — Speaker of Parliament Halimah Yacob, political scientist and diplomat Chan Heng Chee, global women's activist Noeleen Heyzer, sociologist and politician Aline Wong, food ambassador Violet Oon, sports legend Pat Chan, law lecturer and playwright Eleanor Wong, and novelist Meira Chand. Contents:

• Fifty Years of Change and Struggle for Equality (Aline Wong)
• Women and an Age-Friendly Singapore (Angelique Chan)
• A Home-schooling in Financial Fitness (Audrey Chin)
• Preparing Our Children for the Future (Carmee Lim)
• My Life to Live (Chan Heng Chee)
• My Choices (Choo Wai Hong)
• Where Will Women Be in 50 Years? (Chye Shu Wen)
• The Coming Out of the Political Singaporean (Constance Singam)
• I'd Rather Be a Good Wife Than a Good Woman (Eleanor Wong)
• Street Smarts and Social Enterprise (Elim Chew)
• Women in Labour (Evelyn S Wong)
• Nurturing Nature (Geh Min)
• Cooking for Their Country (Gretchen Liu)
• We Must Have Women in Parliament (Halimah Yacob)
• Singapore Style (Jennifer Schoon)
• The Woeful Wombs of Singapore (Kanwaljit Soin and Margaret Thomas)
• The Gifted Who Discern and Say It for Us (Koh Tai Ann)
• Violence Against Women — From Shadows to Sanctuaries (Kokila Annamalai)
• Mothering and Parenting: The Superwoman Myth (Lai Ah Eng)
• Women in the Singapore Economy — The Inequalities Continue (Linda Y C Lim)
• Sing Women! (Madeleine Lee)
• Singapore's Women's Charter: Revolution or Evolution? (Malathi Das)
• Meetings with Remarkable Women — The Making of Lim Mei Lan (Meira Chand)
• Beyond Diplomacy — Women Creating Change Through the United Nations (Noeleen Heyzer)
• The Power of Sport (Pat Chan)
• Women of Faith and Advocacy (Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew)
• The Women in My Life: Ages of Wisdom (Renyung Ho)
• Domestic Labour in Singapore — The Long Road (Siti Nadzirah Samsudin and Braema Mathi)
• Childbearing in Singapore — Do We Have Real Choices? (Teo You Yenn)
• Two Sex Workers Speak (Vanessa Ho)
• A Woman's (Man's) Place is in the Kitchen (Violet Oon)
• Our Journey, Our History — The Milestones in the Path of Women in Singapore

Southeast Asian and Singaporean history students; members of the general public who are interested in learning more about the trajectory of Singaporean women's struggles, contributions, and status over the past 50 years. Key Features:

• A vibrant and compelling collection of perspectives — some provocative, some a touch irreverent, all thoughtful and relevant — by women about women and their role and contributions to Singapore
• Appealingly designed by well-known artist and illustrator, PK Cheng — with hand-drawn colour caricatures of each author
• Part of the World Scientific Publishing 50 years of Singapore collection celebrating Singapore's half-century of independence

ALINE WONG obtained her PhD from UC Berkeley and was Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. She entered politics in 1984 and served as Minister of State for Health and for Education (1990–2001). She then became Chairman of the Housing and Development Board (2003–2007). She is currently Academic Advisor at the SIM University.

Chapter 1

Fifty Years of Change and Struggle for Equality

Aline Wong

In March 2014, in celebrating International Women’s Day, the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations launched a Singapore Women’s Hall of Fame¹ that honoured 108 women pioneers from the early beginnings of Singapore as a British colony, through her independence and up to contemporary times. These women were leaders and pathbreakers in various areas of endeavour which had hitherto been men’s domains, ranging from education, medicine, law, engineering, to business, science and arts, sports, the uniformed forces, government and community service.

This project is as much about celebrating women’s achievements as recording the long process of how women have become what they are today. From the incipient opportunity to receive a modern education in the early 1920s, to becoming the first woman doctor, lawyer, or academic dean in the ’50s and ’60s, and to being the first woman judge, Permanent Secretary, woman Ambassador, politician or Cabinet Minister from the 1980s onwards, or the first corporate women to be ranked for influence by Forbes, the first sportswomen to win an Olympian silver for Singapore, and the first women’s team to conquest Mount Everest, the progressive advancement of women in the past decades — upping the ladder and going beyond the familiar arenas — is vividly chronicled through the remarkable achievements of these pioneering women. These remarkable women are not just the great individual achievers who breached the glass ceiling at each age. They, in fact, heralded the arrival of each epoch in women’s transformation whose time had come.

“ Indeed, the statistics show women have now achieved almost parity with men in most areas of activity, and even surpassed them in some areas ”

At the 2014 edition of Singapore Perspectives, the National University of Singapore’s Institute of Policy Studies’ annual conference, the participants were asked to vote on the one area in which social differences have narrowed the most over the past 50 years. They were to choose between race, language, religion, gender, education, income and social class. The greatest majority chose gender. Indeed, the statistics show women have now achieved almost parity with men in most areas of activity, and even surpassed them in some areas. Women are getting better and better educated, advancing in careers, and achieving economic independence and autonomy in life choices including marriage and childbearing. Perhaps only in two areas are women still lagging behind men: their representation on boards of directors and in politics. These are two areas or issues that women’s lobby groups are currently focusing on.

To fully appreciate the tremendous changes that have occurred in the lives of women over the past 50 years, it would be appropriate and interesting to examine the lives of women who are in their mid-60s and 70s today. This is the Baby Boomer cohort who, when they were growing up, went through the hardships of World War II and the Japanese Occupation; faced limited, though gradually improving, education and employment opportunities in the ’60s and ’70s; and who married, had children and were largely homemakers. Contrast their life experience and aspirations with those of the current Generation Y or Post-Millennials.

A delightful article was written by Ann Wee on “Older Women” in an edited volume on women.² She described the lives of women who came to Singapore as immigrants in the early 20th century, working as amahs and samsui construction workers and in various services and small enterprises. They were not educated, were hardy and strong both physically and in spirit, worked hard and saved to send money back to their family and village community. They formed credit unions for financial security. They were low in social and legal status, whether as wives or single women, working or not gainfully employed. These were the pioneer women whose children are the Baby Boomers who have now reached retirement.

An ideal narrative about changes in Singapore women would therefore be about three generations. The glimpses in this book of three generations of women give a human face, the woman’s face, to the tremendous changes in Singapore society over the past 50 years.

Life stories are a reflection of the social forces that shape the individual’s life journey. What are the social forces that are most prominent in shaping women’s lives in Singapore?

These are: a rising level of education for both men and women, rising economic opportunities that came with the country’s economic development, changing cultural values and practices pertaining to marriage and procreation, changes in family structure and norms with regard to the roles of husbands and wives, and removal of barriers to equality between men and women in the workplace, in business and in public life. More recently, over the past one and a half decades, the forces of globalisation and the information and communications technology revolution have also affected men and women in their work, family and social life.

All these factors for women’s great advancement since Independence have been well-documented. So too have the dilemmas faced by women in their choices. Earlier on, the one dominant dilemma faced by women had been career versus family. This caused role conflicts and role strains — women dropping out of the labour force after marriage and childbirth, women unable to return to the workforce after their children had grown up, and loss of confidence and self-esteem among stay-at-home mums. Now, the major dilemma facing women is no longer whether to work or not to work, but how to work so as to maintain a work-life balance. There is also an increasing number of well-educated women who choose to be stay-at-home mums, have more than two children and feel proud about their choice. So things have continued to evolve for contemporary women.

An interesting publication by the SCWO in 2005 entitled “Her Story”³ contains a series of essays which represent the voices of women around the dawn of the 21st century. The topics are grouped under four sections representing the different life stages: “Growing Up” with freedom and choices available in education, career options, dating and sexuality; “Making Choices” in adult life: marriage and childbearing, divorce and singlehood, the superwoman conundrum; “Career and Community”: labour force participation, the glass ceiling, volunteerism and public life, and getting older; and “Living Longer”: redefining age, second careers, being single again, older women’s health and financial security. Taken together, the tone of the publication is a shout from women’s hearts (not a cry of agony), a declaration of women’s autonomy vis-à-vis the state, the family and society. It is a celebration of women’s coming of age at last!

“ Feminism is, however, no longer on the minds or the lips of the current generation of women…”

It all sounds very feminist. Feminism is, however, no longer on the minds or the lips of the current generation of women who have had or are having a very good run in modern, meritocratic, competitive and affluent Singapore. To a large extent, the angst and the anger have gone. So too the idealism and passion for equalising the playing field for our sisters.

The feminist movement in Singapore has followed a somewhat similar trajectory to that in Western countries such as the US. There was here also a first wave of feminism between the 1920s and the 1950s, with pioneer women leaders calling for more education opportunities for women, reforms in the marriage and family laws, and women’s right to vote. As in the US, the early struggle for gender equality was led by educated, middle-class women. When Singapore obtained self-government in 1959 and general elections were held, women gained the right to vote, and in 1961, the Women’s Charter was passed to protect the rights and interests of women and children, and abolish polygamy. Soon after those momentous gains, the women’s movement notably died down.

A second wave of feminism (which occurred in the West in the mid-’60s to the ’70s, in conjunction with the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-Vietnam War movement) occurred in Singapore only in the early 1980s with the emergence of women’s organisations such as AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research) pushing the feminist agenda, and with the election in 1984 of three women Members of Parliament after a hiatus of zero female representation for 14 years. In 1989, the ruling People’s Action Party formed a Women’s Wing to focus attention on women’s issues, groom women activists and strengthen political support among the grassroots.

Owing to the efforts of women politicians and women’s organisations, as well as the exigencies of the times (such as the continuously falling fertility rates and a persistent labour shortage), the Singapore government removed many barriers to women’s advancement in the ensuing two decades (from the mid-1980s till the mid-2000s). These include equal pay, equal medical benefits for male and female civil servants, more maternity leave benefits, childcare facilities, childcare leave and paternity leave, the five-day work week, the right to citizenship by descent of children born overseas to Singapore female citizens, and the quota on female students in medical school. The Women’s Charter has also undergone a couple of revisions to provide stronger protection for women, including protection against domestic violence. These gains in women’s status and welfare as a result of feminist lobbying can well be called “reform feminism”.⁴

In the US, with the gains made by Blacks in civil rights — a struggle with which the second-wave feminists were closely aligned — the feminist movement was pronounced dead by media reports in the 1980s and 1990s. But it was not so. Feminism had spread by then to developing and underdeveloped countries, where priority concerns were somewhat different, e.g., reproductive rights (i.e., access to contraception), women’s equal rights to landholding and inheritance. The current state of feminism in the West is highly divided along sectarian interests: along ethnicity (known as multiracial feminism), along class (Marxist or socialist feminism, feminist anti-capitalism), along sexual orientation (LGBT), and along eco-feminism (climate change and impact of tourism on women). These groups invoke different social and political ideologies, and push for their own political agendas. The current state of affairs has been called an “inclusive, multicultural” feminist movement, which is in fact highly divisive.

As mentioned earlier, feminism is hardly on the minds of contemporary women in Singapore. Currently, the women’s organisations (e.g., AWARE, UN Women (Singapore)), are focusing attention on the global issues of violence against women, including human trafficking. There is, besides, a hint of some women’s groups aligning themselves with the LGBT community for a more inclusive society.

But what about the individual woman? After 50 years of women’s struggles, is she better off than her mother? Is she much better off than her grandmother? The answer is yes, if one just looks at objective situations, as seen in statistics of women’s advancement. But if you look into the woman’s subjective self through the lens of (true) feminism, the answer is an ambivalent one. The feminist credo is essentially one of liberation, equality and solidarity. Its tone and magic is in its uplifting quality, as a philosophy, a practice and experience in everyday living. So, are contemporary women here truly emancipated — after they have gained freedom of choice? Are they truly equal (with men) and believers still in the just society?

“ But what about the individual woman? After 50 years of women’s struggles, is she better off than her mother?

Based on my observations as a grandmother, a woman still married to the same man for nearly 50 years, and an ageing feminist(!), I would like to sketch out the following facets in the lives of contemporary women in Singapore, and let the readers ponder on whether women in this city-state are truly emancipated or not. These facets include flashes/images that may not be representative of all the women achievers, and may in fact be stereotypes and prejudices, but together they are an exposition on the “bonds that tie” women, from which I hope they will become free at last.

(1)Globalisation and survival of the superwoman/supercouple

(2)Power women on boards and the hunger for power

(3)Capitalism and branded goods consumerism

(4)Dependence on foreign maids

(5)The supermum and her conquest by the tuition industry

(6)Seduction of the spa and anti-ageing promise

Globalisation and survival of the superwoman/supercouple:

Globalisation is a double-edged weapon. On the one hand, it opens up boundless opportunities for both men and women and has lifted millions of people in the developing world out of dire poverty. On the other, it has created hardships for many in both worlds whose skills have been outdated by the rapid technological advances and their jobs lost to outsourcing by the transnational companies. For women who are married and wish to advance in their careers, the world of work has become much more fast-paced, 24/7 and involves a lot of business travel. So too the career of her husband. The marriages of modern-day superwomen are therefore subjected to much greater stresses and strains than ever before. The buzzword among educated women, human resources professionals and policy circles is work-life balance. However, in interview after interview of great achievers, the frank answer given by women is often: there is no such thing as work-life balance. Sequencing of work and life aspirations, yes and perhaps, but when you have to do everything at once, there is no other way than to grit your teeth and just manage your multiple tasks by prioritising and working extra hours!

Another phenomenon that impacts marriages here has become a great concern to working or non-working women over the past decade or so. This is the in-migration...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Grace Fu
• Editors’ Note
• Chapter 1. Fifty Years of Change and Struggle for Equality
• Chapter 2. Women and an Age-friendly Singapore
• Chapter 3. A Home-schooling in Financial Fitness
• Chapter 4. Preparing Our Children for the Future
• Chapter 5. My Life to Live
• Chapter 6. My Choices
• Chapter 7. Where Will Women Be in 50 Years?
• Chapter 8. The Coming out of the Political Singaporean
• Chapter 9. I’d Rather Be a Good Wife than a Good Woman
• Chapter 10. Street Smarts and Social Enterprise
• Chapter 11. Women in Labour
• Chapter 12. Nurturing Nature
• Chapter 13. Cooking for Their Country
• Chapter 14. We Must Have Women in Parliament
• Chapter 15. Singapore Style
• Chapter 16. The Woeful Wombs of Singapore
• Chapter 17. The Gifted Who Discern and Say It for Us
• Chapter 18. Violence against Women — From Shadows to Sanctuaries
• Chapter 19. Mothering and Parenting — The Superwoman Myth
• Chapter 20. Women in the Singapore Economy — The Inequalities Continue
• Chapter 21. Sing Women!
• Chapter 22. Singapore’s Women’s Charter: Revolution or Evolution?
• Chapter 23. Meetings with Remarkable Women — The Making of Lim Mei Lan
• Chapter 24. Beyond Diplomacy — Women Creating Change through the United Nations
• Chapter 25. The Power of Sport
• Chapter 26. Women of Faith and Advocacy
• Chapter 27. The Women in My Life — Ages of Wisdom
• Chapter 28. Domestic Labour in Singapore — The Long Road
• Chapter 29. Childbearing in Singapore — Do We Have Real Choices?
• Chapter 30. Two Sex Workers Speak
• Chapter 31. A Woman’s (Man’s) Place Is in the Kitchen
• Chapter 32. Our Journey, Our History — The Milestones in the Path of Women in Singapore
• About the Illustrator