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Thefeminist movement inMalaysia is a multicultural coalition of women's organisations committed to the end of gender-baseddiscrimination,harassment andviolence against women. Having first emerged aswomen's shelters in the mid 1980s,[1] feminist women's organisations in Malaysia later developed alliances with othersocial justice movements. Today, the feminist movement in Malaysia is one of the most active actors in the country'scivil society.
The history of feminist movement in Malaysia, its birth and the usage of the very term 'feminist' are contested. Unlike the history of the feminist movement inBritain and theUnited States for instance, the struggle forwomen's rights in Malaysia were not founded onwomen's right to vote. Like many other postcolonial countries during the fall of the British empire, all Malaysian citizens, both male and female, were granted the right to vote during the country's political independence in 1957.[2]
To avoid the anachronism of the termfeminist, it may be advisable to chart the history of feminism in Malaysia with the recorded usage and political championing of 'women's liberation' in the early twentieth century. The first documented use ofwomen's liberation orwomen's emancipation as a political and social project in 1920sMalaya was byMalay Muslim male reformers and writersSyed Syeikh Al-Hadi and Zainal Abidin Ahmad, better known asZa'aba.[3] Although they advocated the education of women and girls as a means to women's emancipation, the Malay Muslim modernists, orkaum muda, stressed the importance of Islamic learning as a way of equipping Malay women with the skills to fulfill their primary role, as educators of their children.[4]
In the post-war years between 1946 and 1948, women from different ethnic groups mobilised againstanti-colonialism and issues related to women's inferior status in occupied Malaya.[5] Although they were members of the female-arm ofnationalist andcommunist parties founded by men, the women became more radicalised in their gender-oriented anti-colonial aims and eventually gained semi-autonomous status from their parent parties. Prominent radical women of the period included the likes ofShamsiah Fakeh and later,Khatijah Sidek.
The first women's NGO in Malaysia, theWomen's Aid Organisation (WAO), was founded in the mid 1980s as a shelter for women and children who needed legal consultation and protection fromdomestic violence. Soon, other NGOs, such asAll Women's Action Society (AWAM) emerged to campaign against the rising number of reported incidences ofviolence against women. Most women's NGOs which were founded since are located in the urban centres ofPeninsular Malaysia.
Malaysia outlawed marital rape in 2007.[6][7]
Cases ofchild marriages gained nationwide attention in recent years as ahuman rights andgender issue. In nearly all cases, under-aged girls were married off to men much older than themselves. As most child marriages occur in Malaysia's Malay-Muslim community and thereby sanctioned bySharia courts, Islamic reasons are often cited as a moral and legal justification for marrying off under-aged girls.[8] Young femalerape survivors are sometimes pressured into marrying their abusers as a way of mitigating gross sexual abuses.[9]
In 2012, Malaysia's previousprime minister,Najib Razak, declared that "There is no need for a women’s rights movement in Malaysia becauseequality has been given from the start."[10] The Malaysian premier's views did not go unchallenged in civil society[11] and online.[12] In April 2014, feminism was accused of being a "facade used by a secret Zionist-Christian alliance to dishonour Muslim women" by Abdullah Zaik Abdul Rahman, the president of the Islamic organisationMalaysian Muslim Solidarity (ISMA).[13]
Feminism in Malaysia is championed primarily by activists within women's NGOs. There are setbacks to the apparent NGO-isation of feminism in Malaysia, defined as the donor-led and institutionalisation of activism or 'Activism Inc.'[14] The funder-led agenda of women's NGOs in Malaysia resulted in the constraining of feminist activism to fulfill the requirement and targets set by donors. Other problems arise from the NGO-isation of feminism that appear at odds with the spirit of feminism, namely the inter- and intra-organisational income inequalities amongst women workers of NGOs resulting from unequal distribution of funding.
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