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Singapore Family, Marriage, and Divorce
Almost all Singaporeans lived in small nuclear
families.
Although both Chinese and Indian traditions favored large
extended
families, such families were always rare in immigrant
Singapore
where neither the occupational structure, based on wage
labor, or
the housing pattern, characterized by small, rented
quarters,
favored such family forms. In the 1980s, families were
important in
that most individuals as a matter of course lived with
their
parents until marriage and after marriage maintained a
high level
of interaction with parents, brothers, and sisters.
Probably the
most common leisure activity in Singapore was the Sunday
visit to
the grandparents for a meal and relaxed conversation with
brothers,
sisters, in-laws, uncles and aunts, cousins, and other
assorted
kin. Although the age of marriage increased in the 1970s
and 1980s,
reaching a mean 28.5 years for grooms and 25.8 years for
brides in
1987, Singapore remained a society in which it was assumed
that
everyone would marry, and marriage was a normal aspect of
fully
adult status.
Both ethnicity and class affected the form and
functioning of
families. Chinese and Indian families rested on cultural
assumptions of the permanence of marriage and of the
household as
an ongoing, corporate group whose members, bound by duty,
obligation, and subordination, pooled and shared income.
The
continued efforts of Indian parents to arrange the
marriages or at
least to influence the marital choices of their offspring
and the
Tamil obligation to provide daughters with large dowries
reflected
such cultural definitions of family and household. In a
similar
manner, some Chinese combined the household with the
family
enterprise, practicing a traditional entrepreneurial
strategy that
included mobilizing the savings of all household members
and
allocating them in accord with a long-term plan for family
success.
Such a strategy might take the form of a thriving business
with
branches in the major cities of Malaysia and Indonesia, or
of sons
and daughters employed in the Singapore civil service, a
large
foreign bank, or a university in Australia.
Malay families, on the other hand, gave priority to the
individual and to individual interests. They viewed
relations
between siblings as tenuous and saw the household as a
possibly
short-lived coalition of autonomous individuals linked by
sentiments of mutual concern and affection. Malays had
traditionally had much higher rates of divorce and
adoption than
other ethnic groups, and the distinction continued in the
1980s
although the divorce rate was lower than in the l940s or
through
the l960s. More significantly, for the Malays divorce was
regarded
as a realistic and normal, although unfortunate,
possibility in all
marriages. Because Malays did not define the household as
a
continuing body, they did not make long-range strategic
plans to
maximize family income and success. In Malay families,
husbands,
wives, and children with jobs held separate purses and
sometimes
separate savings accounts. It was thus difficult for
Malays to
establish family businesses as the Chinese and the Indians
did.
Class affected families in a manner generally similar
to many
other industrialized societies. In all ethnic groups,
lower-class
or working-class people tended to be dependent on kin
outside the
immediate household for a wide range of services, and to
operate
wide networks of mutual assistance and gift exchange.
Throughout
the 1980s, kin provided the bulk of child care for married
women
working in factories. Such relatives were paid for their
services,
but less than a stranger would have been paid. The
possibility of
such support often determined whether a woman took a job
outside
the home, and thus demonstrated the relation between large
numbers
of kin and material comfort and security. Substantial sums
of money
were passed back and forth on such occasions as the
birthdays of
aged parents, the birth of children, or the move into a
new
apartment. Family members were a major source of
information on and
referrals to jobs for many unskilled or semiskilled
workers.
Relations with the extended circle of relatives were not
always
harmonious or happy, but they were important and necessary
to the
welfare and comfort of most working-class families.
Middle- and upper-class households were less dependent
on kin
networks for support. They maintained close ties with
parents and
siblings, but did not need to rely on them. Indeed their
relations
with their extended kin often were more amiable than those
of the
lower-class households, where mutual need often was
accompanied by
disputes over allocation of such resources as
grandparents'
childcare services, or of the costs of supporting elderly
parents
and other dependent kin. Middle- and upper-class
households spent
more leisure time with people who were not their relatives
and
gained much of their social support from networks based on
common
schooling, occupation, and associational memberships. In
such
families, the bond between husband and wife was close as
they
shared more interests and activities than most workingclass
couples and made more decisions jointly.
Marriages across ethnic lines occurred, but not often.
Between
1954 and 1984, intermarriage rates remained at a s;
table 5
to 6
percent of all marriages. None of the traditional cultures
encouraged marriage outside the group. The Hindu
traditions of
caste endogamy and the Malay insistence on conversion to
Islam as
a condition of marriage were major barriers to
intermarriage.
Shared religion encouraged intermarriage, with marriages
between
Malays and Indian Muslims the most common form of ethnic
intermarriage. Interethnic marriages included a
disproportionate
number of divorced or widowed individuals.
Divorce rates in Singapore were low. Interethnic
marriages were
somewhat more likely to end in divorce than were marriages
within
an ethnic group. During the 1980s the divorce rate for
Malays fell,
while it rose for the other ethnic groups. In 1987 there
were
23,404 marriages in Singapore, and 2,708 divorces, or 115
divorces
for every 1,000 marriages. The figures included 4,465
marriages
under the Muslim Law Act, which regulated the marriage,
divorce,
and inheritance of Muslims, and 796 divorces under the
same act,
for a Muslim divorce rate of 178 divorces for every 1,000
marriages. Marriages under the Women's Charter (which
regulated the
marriage and divorce of non-Muslims) totaled 18,939, and
divorces
under that law were 1,912, for a non-Muslim divorce rate
of 100 per
1,000 marriages. The differential rates of divorce for
ethnic
groups may have suggested greater differences than were in
fact the
case. Situations that for Malay families resulted in
prompt, legal
divorce were sometimes tolerated or handled informally by
Chinese
or Indian families for whom the social stigma of divorce
was
greater and the barriers to legal separation higher. For
all ethnic
groups, the most common source of marital breakdown was
the
inability or unwillingness of the husband to contribute to
maintaining the household. This sometimes led to
desertion, which
was the most common ground for divorce.
Data as of December 1989
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