Monogamy Bill For Singapore

Press, Volume C, Issue 29526, 30 May 1961, Page 2

Monogamy Bill For Singapore

IBy

JOHN SHAW]

SINGAPORE.

The ribald Chinese classics featuring the callous husband, unhappy wife, scheming concubine and the ogreish mother-in-law will, no longer be true to life in Singapore, soon. The island’s reformist Government is about to revolutionise the bitter, bickering society in which wives are often known by their numbers instead of their names.

In future marriages the “number one wife” will be the only one. After more than a year of mandarinisfh discussion a select committee, including four women members of Parliament, has just drafted a Women's Charter, quickly tagged “the one man, one wife bill.”

Soon it will go, for certain approval, to the Legislative Assembly. The charter has the backing of aU parties and, in any Case, no reactionary male member of Parliament will dare to vote against it; his own wife and women constituents will see to that.

Singapore’s marital chaos has elements of farce and tragedy. There is the recent Court squabble over a Chinese millionaire's will by his three widows and their 11 children. And there is the young wife who drank caustic soda rather than share her home and husband. But the tradition of taking extra wives, long banned in China, is not preserved in Singapore only by rich men who can well afford to indulge a roving eye. Many clerks and labourers have two wives—perhaps they grew tired of the first one or perhaps they wanted many children to support them in their old age. Triple Marriages

An estimated 300,000 Chinese in Singapore are involved in triple marriages—about two-thirds of the married population. They have not been considered social sinners in a society in which a man with one wife or a wife with a husband all to herself have often been the exceptions. When the Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew. who wed a fellow law student from Cambridge University, accused an opposition candidate in a recent by-election of having once been a bigamist the reaction of most voters seemed to be, "So what?” The Women’s Charter will not represent a new deal for Singapore's minority of Western ised. English -_ educated. or Christian Chinese. To them a concubine is a curiosity, and they have been marrying for generations in churches and registry offices.

But as a woman editor, praising the charter, wrote recently: “We live in a room .it the top. air-conditioned by tihe breeze of emancipation But on the floors below there are neighbours who live in an almost feudal darkness.”

This unhappy relic beneath Singapore's slick modem-looking surface is partly the result of 140 years of easy-going British rule which resnected all Chinese customs that did not break the peace or interfere with business.

Marriage by family command. by an exchange of gifts, or simply by placing * two-line newspaper advertisement was allowed—but it was outside the British statutes on bigamy, divorce, inheritance, and maintenance Another cause is that many emigrant Chinese cling longer to tradition than China itself has done. Long after polygamy became rare and was banned there, it flourished in nostalgic Singapore Another tradition no schooling for dau^rters—survived too and left thousands of Chinatown girls with only marriage, any marriage, as the alternative to dullness and drudgery at home. Living next to the Chinese of Singapore, if not among them, is a large Malay community, living by the laws of the Koran which allows a Muslim man to take four wives if be can afford them. The habit* of their neighbour*

seem to have strengthened the Chinese in their traditions. Modern Laws But in future Chinese women will have every right that was denied them by the old customs. They may still marry, if they wish, by bowing before their kitchen gods or to the portraits of their ancestors, but modern law will give substance to the ancient ceremonies. There are, of course, many happy marriages in Chinatown. But social workers there say there are far more loveless ones in which the first wife has had to suffer cruelty and resentfully share her unhappy home with another woman because Chinese custom does not allow divorce. re-marriage or maintenance. The Women’s Charter cannot atone for past miseries any more than it can guarantee future harmony. But it will help tens of thousands

of wives already unhappy in multiple marriages. A husband can no longer take an extra wife without breaking the law. or install a concubine at home without being called to the divorce court.

And he will hesitate to illtreat his wife (or allow his mottier to do so) wihen he knows his wife or all of them can hurry off to a new life via the court taking a share of his salary. “This has all come too late to save my marriage,” a middle-aged first wife told a social worker this week. “But I can’t tell you how thankful I am for my daughters* sake.”