No Soft Touch

At the time of the First Burma War in 1824, the courage of ethnic Shan women won the admiration of a British officer, Major Snodgrass, who wrote about the 1825 battle of Wethtikan in his book “Narrative of the Burmese War”: “These warrior women wore armor and as they rode their horses bravely, spoke words of encouragement to the soldiers…one of the fair Amazons also received a fatal bullet in the breast.”

At the start of the 20th century, the anti-colonial movement was strengthened by the participation of educated women. In 1919, female intellectuals established Burma’s first national women’s organization, Konmari, and one year later student members of the group joined in the first university boycott against the British.

Opposition to British colonialism was also the agenda of other women’s organizations, such as the Myanmar Amyothamii Konmari Athin (Burmese Women Association) and the Patriotic Women’s Association.

Mya Sein, left, was chosen in 1931 the first woman representative of Asia for the League of Nations, the world organization that preceded the UN. Hnin Mya, right, was elected Burma’s first woman senator in 1929 [Illustrations: Harn Lay/The Irrawaddy]

Taking a lead from their menfolk, who adopted the honorific Thakhin, meaning master, in an act of open defiance to the British, women came to call themselves Thakhinma.

A number of women were jailed for their political activity. Thakhinma Thein Tin achieved fame for her defiance of the British and was among the first group of five women to be imprisoned.

As opposition to British rule grew, Burmese women began to claim a place in the international arena. The National Council of Women of Burma, founded in 1931, successfully pressured the British government to admit a Burmese woman delegate to a special Burma roundtable conference in London.

The council’s choice was Mya Sein, an author, teacher and mother, known as M.A. Mya Sein because of the master of arts degree she had obtained from Oxford University. Earlier in 1931, she was selected as one of the two representatives for women across Asia for the League of Nations, the world organization that preceded the United Nations.

At the London roundtable, Mya Sein called on the British government to enact a law guaranteeing equal rights for women in Burma.

In 1929, Hnin Mya was elected Burma’s first woman senator. Another distinguished female senator, Dr Saw Hsa, elected in 1937, was made a Member of the British Empire, a prestigious civil honor.

In 1953, five years after Burma gained independence, another leading woman politician, Ba Maung Chain, was chosen as a minister to represent Karen State, Burma’s first (and only) woman minister.

The role of women in Burmese politics diminished following the 1962 military coup that brought Ne Win to power. Women became little more than puppets in the male-dominated administration. The period between 1962 and 1988, when Ne Win relinquished power after a national uprising, can be seen as a feminine “dark age” in Burma.

Under the current military regime, women haven’t fared much better, and none occupies any high position in government.

The year 1988, however, did see the arrival on the political stage of a charismatic female leader—Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of independence hero Aung San. She became the focus of a nationwide movement for political change and was adopted as a role model for progressive young people in Burma.

Nilar Thein and Phyu Phyu Thin both name Suu Kyi (or “auntie,” as they affectionately call her) as their role model. Like them, Suu Kyi sacrificed family and a secure home life for the cause of justice and freedom.

Suu Kyi declined the opportunity to live abroad with her British husband, Michael Aris, and their two children, choosing house arrest in Rangoon instead. When her husband died she declined to leave the country to attend his funeral, fearing that she would not be allowed to return. She hasn’t seen her two sons for a number of years.

“The dawn rises only when the rooster crows,” Suu Kyi declared in a video-recorded speech to an NGO Forum on Women in Beijing in 1995, quoting an old Burmese proverb.