523). In 1983 Prime Minister Lee Kwang Kyu
unleashed the Great Marriage Debate in which he
outlined the crisis discourse – Singapore’s graduate
women tended to have fewer children and therefore
if nothing was done Singapore’s competitiveness
was at stake. The use of eugenics in his arguments
further reiterated the view that the future of Singa-
pore depended on women’s roles as mothers. Intel-
ligent women – graduate women – should be
mothers producing “smart” children to keep the
nation competitive in the global marketplace.
There is still a vacuum in the scholarly literature
on women, Islam, and domesticity in East Asia.
Japan’s Muslims are mostly immigrants – male con-
tract laborers rather than women. Likewise, the
history of women in the Chinese Islamic diaspora
“is largely unacknowledged and even now only
barely documented” (Jaschok and Shui 2000, 45;
see also state of the field essay Gladney 1995,
371–4). In the People’s Republic of China since
1950, the experiences of Muslim women have been
similar to those of non-Muslim Chinese women
(Jaschok and Shui 2000, 138). Research in the cen-
tral China region (Zhongyuan) disclosed the cul-
tural axiom that “a woman’s primary reason for
living is her husband and family” (ibid., 139).
Before the 1950s women were confined to their
houses, particularly in North Henan where men’s
roles were to perform outside work and women’s
roles were to look after the children at home. This
binary division was essentialized in the maxim:
“man working outside, woman doing housework
at home” (ibid., 140, 143). Since the 1950s,
although both husbands and wives earn salaries,
many husbands and some women still isolate
housework as a “woman’s task” (ibid., 145).
Jaschok and Shui’s fieldwork with Muslim women
married to Muslim teachers, scholars, or religious
leaders led to the conclusion that “their duties are
limited to housework; they look after the husband’s
needs and raise their children in the strict obser-
vance of Islam” (ibid., 146). Clearly, domesticity is
still a powerful ideology defining Muslim women
of contemporary China.
Muslim women in Australia come from the
Muslim migrant population who have immigrated
as part of a family unit (Yasmeen 2001, 74). A
study on Muslim women’s settlement needs in Perth
underscored the women’s prioritization of educa-
tion, training, and employment as essential to their
sense of self-esteem and independence (Yasmeen
2001, 82). But these same women preferred to
postpone their ambitions and focus instead on their
roles as homemakers as they assumed primary re-
sponsibility for child-rearing, care of the aged, and
east asia, southeast asia, and australia 133housework. While the roles these women per-
formed may not differ much from those in their
countries of origin, in Australia the high unem-
ployment rate of Muslim men (25.3 percent com-
pared to the national average of 8.8 percent) has
had the impact of restricting women’s space in the
home. Men’s larger role in the domestic arena has
resulted in the shrinking of space available to
women (Yasmeen 2001, 84). Whether Muslim
women attend Islamic schools or not they are still
subject to the Australian syllabus. Hence, Austra-
lia’s female Muslims are in much the same position
as mainstream women with respect to domestic
duties. Most women do their own housework;
some husbands help and some do not; some women
who can afford it can outsource household tasks
(ironing, cleaning) while some may be full time
mothers (Hussain 2003).
Domesticity is therefore a very powerful ideology
shaping cultural constructions of women in this
region of enormous diversity. Despite the appear-
ance of alternative narratives that launched debates
about the “modern” Asian woman (Roces and
Edwards 2000) contemporary state ideologies and
the rise of Islamic revivalism have reinforced rather
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