When Constance Singam was widowed at 42, she woke up to a frightening reality. The death of her husband, who had made decisions and financially provided for her, left her alone to take the reins of her life for the first time. She did not know what to do.
“I began to think about how girls [in Singapore] were brought up differently, how dependent we had become—by the way we were raised—on the men in our lives,” she says. “I felt helpless; I was upset, maybe even angry for being brought up to be so dependent.”
The year was 1978. More than a decade into its independence from British colonial rule, Singapore, then led by prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, was shaped by a system that gave men more power than women in society. “In those early years, there was no discussion about [gender] inequality, or the word ‘feminism’,” Singam explains. “And ‘patriarchy’ never entered our vocabulary. There was no awareness of that.”
Even without a name for it, some women in Singapore, just like Singam, could sense the power imbalance in their lives. It became even more pronounced when the government introduced the Graduate Mothers Scheme in 1984. “At the time, the fall in [Singapore’s] fertility rate was worrying the government,” recalls Singam. “The women that they didn’t
