So That They May Be an Honor to You

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the ethno-culturally hybrid Straits Chinese, who intermarried with local Malays for generations in the Straits Settlements of British Malaya and Singapore, and the role of female education in efforts to restore their socioeconomic status during the early twentieth century. Straits Chinese were also known as Peranakan (Malay for “child/born of”), and their women were called Nyonya. Peranakan male elites (called Baba) expressed concerns about the backwardness of the Nyonya in the Straits Chinese Magazine and founded the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School to modernize their women and their community. The Straits Chinese perspective on female education was similar to that of elites in various modernizing nations around the world, but their case was unique because they occupied several ethno-cultural and national categories concurrently. Straits Chinese women were tasked with representing modernity and tradition simultaneously, and with helping to secure their community’s place in the transition from colony to nation-state.