Fleeting Feminism: The Singapore Women's Federation, Singapore Chinese Left‐Wing Feminism and Anti‐Colonial Nationalism, c. 1950s

ABSTRACT In 1955, two female factory workers and trade union leaders, Tan Lee Eng and Kwek Tai Eng, established the Singapore Women's Federation (SWF) to unite women regardless of race, religion or class for the anti‐colonial nationalist struggle. Singapore Chinese left‐wing feminism emerged at the confluence of the nationalist interest in mobilising women, and women workers’ agency in protesting gendered labour grievances. Despite internal class and ethnic divides, the SWF showed unprecedented potential in mobilising the left, and assumed leadership of the multi‐ethnic Anti‐Yellow Culture Council. Singapore Chinese left‐wing feminism could only be fleeting, as its potency in mobilisation invited quick suppression from the anti‐communist government. Contributing to ‘Third World’ feminist scholarship, I foreground the perspectives of Singapore working‐class feminists and present them as skilful appropriators of transnational discourse for local struggles. Other than writing women back into Singapore's decolonisation history, this article also invites us to rethink long‐standing debates on communism in Singapore's left, and reimagine anti‐colonial nationalist mass mobilisation as gendered in nature. Singapore Chinese left‐wing feminism was stitched into the very fabric of Malayan anti‐colonial nationalism – it was not peripheral, but central, to its operation in mass mobilisation.