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  • A State of Ambivalence: The Feminist Movement in Singapore
  • Mandakini Arora (bio)
A State of Ambivalence: The Feminist Movement in Singapore. By Lenore Lyons. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004. Series: Social Sciences in Asia. 191 pp.

Feminism has no seminal book or founding philosopher that gives it unity worldwide. It is often protean, defined differently by different protagonists and critics. Second-wave feminism that emerged in the United States in the 1960s is now seen as having been white, middle class, and oblivious to differences between women. Since then a myriad "other" feminisms have emerged creating what is known in feminist theory as a "politics of difference".

Lenore Lyons's book on the Singaporean women's organization AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research) engages the politics of difference. It is "a localised account of the negotiation of difference during the course of political activism" (p. 19). For AWARE, "the imperative to deal with difference does not arise out of the politics of difference debate as it has emerged in western feminisms. It arises through, and is constrained by, the realities of living in a multicultural, multiracial society" (p. 19). The Singapore government's policy of multiracialism embeds race as a social identifier, but AWARE deliberately avoids collecting racial data on members thus subverting, at the same time as it is moderated by, state power.

AWARE was founded in 1985 as a research and advocacy group to promote gender equality. It is the only feminist organization in Singapore as indicated by the book's subtitle in which "the feminist movement in Singapore" is synonymous with AWARE. Lyons quotes a founding member as saying that feminism in Singapore is a one-organization movement. Yet neither all the members nor the organization as a whole identify themselves as feminist. (Surprisingly, many of Lyons's subjects associate feminism with bra-burning — that ubiquitous and mythically metonymic western stereotype.) Lyons argues that AWARE maintains a shifting, fluid, ambivalent identity that adapts to an "over-determinist state" (p. 173). On a positive note, she sees it as governed by "an ethical framework of acceptance and respect" (p. 18): "AWARE accepts that women's choices vary. [End Page 275] Feminism is about giving women choices, not dictating what those choices should be" (p. 170). Women come together in AWARE, Lyons notes, not because of a shared experience of victimization as women but as feminist activists who share the goal of building a better society (p. 116).

An Australian who joined AWARE in the early 1990s while living in Singapore, Lyons is both an insider and an outsider to the organization. When she returned to Australia she began a study of AWARE for her doctoral dissertation out of which this book grew. Her research is based on 147 questionnaire responses (out of 631 sent out to AWARE members) and 34 interviews done between 1995 and 1997.

The book is skillfully organized, going from the global to the local. The introduction discusses the politics of difference and Asian feminism. Chapter One moves on to a history of the women's movement in Singapore up to the foundation of AWARE in 1985. Subsequent chapters discuss AWARE's objectives and activities; members' perceptions of feminism; how members construct their identities; men in the organization; and the functioning of an ethics of respect to deal with difference within the organization. The book ends with a discussion of the ever-present state and its "over-determinist role" in the organization (p. 173).

AWARE was established after a lull in women's activism in Singapore following the passage of the Women's Charter (1961) that guaranteed marriage and property rights to non-Muslim women. In the early 1950s, the Singapore Council of Women had organized to push for gender equality, particularly the abolition of polygamy. Once the charter was passed, the drive for change petered out. A short-lived National Council of Women was formed in the 1970s, and in 1980 the Singapore Council of Women's Organizations was organized at the government's behest as an umbrella body for all women's organizations.

In 1983 Lee Kuan Yew, then prime minister, rued that better-educated women in Singapore were...

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