Abstract
The Singapore state viewed its citizens as suffering from a moral crisis. At the forefront of this perceived moral crisis were social issues such as the failure of graduate women in getting married, the single mother syndrome , Singapore women marrying Caucasians (known as the Pinkerton syndrome ), decline in family values and a dilution of filial piety to elderly parents. Why did the state consider these social issues as moral ones and what explained its anxiety about the perceived moral collapse of the Singapore nation? A related issue here is the notion of public morality and its enforcement. The question here is whether these should be considered public moral issues and should the state be responsible for enforcing such morality? Alternatively, should moral issues be left to individuals and the family? This paper examined why the state felt that it has a duty to safeguard the moral character of its citizenry, particularly women, and nation; how it consciously transformed private morality into public morality; how it attempted to invent the crisis; and its actual enforcement of such morality in the quest for socio-political legitimacy . By implementing a series of strategies to cope with the perceived moral collapse, which to a great extent hinged on its women, the state was simultaneously attempting to create a common social ideology which was embedded in the Shared Values.
Notes
- 1.
Lee cited in Minchin (1986: 163).
- 2.
Lee cited in Quah (1990: 102).
- 3.
This point was brought to my attention by Professor R. Hill and an anonymous reviewer of the AJWS.
- 4.
For a discussion on state and moral education, see Kuah (1990): 271–383.
- 5.
For a discussion on the patriarchal state, see Dahlerup (1987): 93–127.
- 6.
The support given by western governments to single mother households has been subjected to feminist critiques which argue that such welfare support is an extension of state patriarchal control over these women (Borchorst and Siim 1987: 128–157).
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Acknowledgements
This paper has benefited greatly from comments given by Professor Ron Hill, Professor Max Skidmore, Professor Wong Siu-lun and the anonymous reviewers of the AJWS.
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Kuah, K.E. (2018). Inventing a Moral Crisis: Women and Family. In: Social Cultural Engineering and the Singaporean State. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6971-0_5
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