THE CHANGING STATUS OF CHINESE WOMEN IN SINGAPORE, 1819-1961

Abstract

This Academic Exercise was written as an attempt to discover how, why, and to what extent the traditional status of the Chinese woman has changed with some one hundred and fifty years of settlement in Singapore. The study has been divided into three parts: the first discusses the composition of Chinese society in Singapore, and migration and settlement patterns of the various Chinese communities. It also examines in some detail the traditional status of Chinese women in the two major communities here in order that a basis for comparison might be established. The second part of the study discusses changes in the legal status of Chinese women under English law, as compared to Chinese customary and Imperial law. It focusses on improvements made under the British, and the limitations of British jurisdiction, then deals with the Women’s Charter of 1961, whereby women in Singapore were given legal equality with men. The third part of the study makes a broad survey of the factors that have contributed towards changes in the social status of Chinese women in Singapore. The exercise is concluded by a brief assessment of how the forces of change affected women differently, and how improvements in the status of women have been hindered through the years. In writing this exercise, several problems were encountered, the most pressing of which was a lack of material covering the period in question. Few autobiographies or written records remain today of the lives of ordinary Chinese women in the years before Independence, and Chinese women are mentioned only peripherally in all but a few major works on the social history of the Chinese in Singapore. I have had to rely on the guidance of recollections of friends to piece together a picture of life for the Chinese girl in modernising Singapore. For this reason, and also due to the constraints of time, this study has had to be very general in its discussion on the social developments affecting women, and can be considered at most as being only a preliminary examination of a yet unexplored but crucial era of Singapore’s social history.