When Women Take Control: Singapore's Family Planning Pioneers and the Making of a Woman's World (1949-1966)

By Sharmaine Koh

Advised by Professor Wannes Dupont

Edited by Grace Blaxill, Daevan Mangalmurti, Judah Millen, and Larissa Jimenez Gratereaux

Introduction

This paper goes against the grain of population control discourse and institutional histories of the Interna- tional Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) to tell a feminist story of the early family planning pioneers from an Asian perspective. Focusing on the Family Planning Association of Singapore (FPAS) as a case stu- dy, it asks: How did the largely women-led FPAS navigate often hostile and highly gendered local and internatio- nal public spheres to advance women’s welfare and reproductive freedoms? Oral history interviews, biographies, Legislative Assembly transcripts, and 291 newspaper articles from the Singaporean publication The Straits Times published between 1949 to 1966 were analyzed with NVivo. Two surprising conclusions emerged: First, against the common assumption that Asian birth control movements were dominated by biopolitical and developmental concerns, the women-led FPAS mobilized the public sphere by retaining its focus on women’s welfare. Second, the gender-segregated nature of local politics produced, rather than impeded, the dynamism and flexibility of the FPAS. This novel historical analysis also opens up new opportunities to study other national FPAs as agents between local politics and international organizations and understand how early female activists changed a world that remained distinctly unequal for them.