For a few British women who came to colonial Malaya in the 1950s and 1960s, Singapore became home. Based on oral history interviews, this talk is about British women who have lived in Singapore for fifty-odd years. Theirs are stories of choices regarding marriage, family, work, friendship and spirituality. The choices are uniquely individual and illustrate the complexity of gendered imperial histories.

Event Details

Date: 9 February
Time: 11am. Refreshments will be served at 10:30am.
Location: River Room at the Asian Civilisations Museum

About the speaker: 

Mandakini Arora teaches history at the Center for American Education and at PSB-Academy. She also teaches gender studies at NUS. She is interested, both intellectually and personally, in issues of gender, power, and powerlessness. She has a PhD in Russian women’s history from Duke University and wrote a dissertation on the world of Russian peasant women in the late 19th century, at a time when peasant men were migrating in numbers to the cities, leaving farms and households to women to manage.

Outside academia, Mandakini has worked for the past twelve years as a volunteer at AWARE in research and publications. She edited AWARE’s annual journal, Awareness. She also produced a book on the history of AWARE and its place in the history of women’s activism in Singapore. The book is Small Steps, Giant Leaps: A History of AWARE and the Women’s Movement in Singapore (AWARE, 2007).