So our daughters may walk alongside..
By Claire Chiang - in the Straits Times, 23 Feb 2011 (with thanks to Straits Times)
IN PREPARATION for the Golden Rabbit New Year, I recently indulged in spring-cleaning my library. Amid a lifetime clutter of books that I could not bear to throw away, I chanced upon The Whole Woman, a book by the feminist activist and author Germaine Greer.
Billed 'a polemical bomb' by The Guardian, my copy was autographed with a fluid 'To Claire' accompanied by a drawing of a heart. It was typical Greer: warm and humorous in person, but intimidating in public with her fiery rhetoric and acid anger.
I recalled the gathering in my home some 10 years ago, when she spoke on the challenges facing women in the new millennium. Enthralled but also somewhat uncomfortable with her strong views, I recall asking what millennial women should fight for.
'That's a tough one!' she disarmingly admitted. Then with barely a pause, and wide-eyed in her passion, she declared: 'Go fight for what you want, for you have nothing to lose, because you have lost almost everything any way!'
Provocative though that answer was, it was somehow unsatisfactory. In the years since that meeting, the question 'what do I fight for?' is far from being answered.
Quite by accident, the next book I chanced upon in my spring-cleaning was a slim booklet. The Way To Peace was written by Shirin Fozdar in l948, some five decades before Greer's book. It was a philosophical treatise on the path to peace and moral order.
Two women from different backgrounds yet so similar in their mindsets, Fozdar and Greer would have joined hands to protest against the widespread exploitation of women.
But Fozdar adopted a gentler, less polemical approach, focusing on pragmatic initiatives for women. A passage in her treatise struck me because its sentiments were later enshrined in Singapore's Women's Charter, which she played a key role in initiating.
'Equality of the sexes will liberate half the population of this globe, and set them on an equal pedestal with men. Man and woman are the two wings of the bird of humanity which, when reinforced with the same impulse, soars heavenward to the summit of progress.'
Who was Shirin Fozdar, Singapore's first feminist?
Born in 1905 in Bombay, India, she was one of the founders of the Singapore Council of Women in 1952, and a key figure in establishing the Muslim Syariah Court. Described by President S R Nathan as 'an institution', she was well known here and abroad for her work in the cause of women's emancipation.
Fozdar was already 81 years old when I met her in Bangkok some 20 years ago. She had taken an overnight bus all the way from the impoverished north-eastern part of Thailand, where she ran a vocational school in Yasothon for girls who did not want to be driven by poverty into prostitution. My late father-in-law Ho Rih Hwa had supported her work.
She had heard that my husband planned to build hotels, so she brought with her some triangular pillows made by the Yasothon villagers. From that exchange Banyan Tree Gallery, selling handicrafts by village communities, was born, together with notions about gender, work and the role of business.
Fozdar died in February 1992, aged 87. To honour her legacy, the Association of Women for Action and Research set up the Shirin Fozdar Trust Fund. Launched by then President Wee Kim Wee in May 1993, the fund has given financial assistance to training and crisis centres, homes and shelters, and skills training and welfare programmes for needy women.
To provide the fund with institutional support as well as a platform to motivate young people, it was transferred to the Wee Kim Wee Centre of Singapore Management University in 2009.
Fozdar was a octogenarian activist. Work was the secret of her longevity. She believed that no honest work, however humble, is demeaning.
As a staunch Baha'i, she naturally shared the faith's emphasis on the primacy of women as agents of change through education. Always pragmatic, and probably discriminated against as an educated woman in colonial Asia, she nevertheless had little time for anger or polemics.
I recall some of her sayings: 'Men are not so smart, they need a lot more time to understand what we already know. Slowly and steadily, like two wings of a bird, we have to find the balance to soar together.'
(How often have I thought that of my husband - 'men are not so smart' - especially when he doesn't seem to understand what I'm saying.)
Or: 'We must not run so fast in life and seek to always be the best and ahead of others; you will find yourself running alone, and that can be lonely.'
As I embark on the fifth cycle of my life, I aspire like so many other women to find a Way To Peace and to be a Whole Woman. Whether through Shirin Fozdar or Germaine Greer, or the efforts of countless unsung women at home, we build on those before us, so that our daughters may walk - not behind, not in front, but alongside - all those who want to help make this a better world.
Who was Shirin Fozdar, Singapore's first feminist?
Born in 1905 in Bombay, India, she was one of the founders of the Singapore Council of Women in 1952, and a key figure in establishing the Muslim Syariah Court. Described by President S R Nathan as 'an institution', she was well known here and abroad for her work in the cause of women's emancipation.
The writer is chairperson of the Shirin Fozdar Trust Fund. The fund will hold its second annual conference - this year on the theme 'Women in the Community' - tomorrow at the Singapore Management University.
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