Domesticity, Labor and ‘Ideal Homes’ in Singapore, 1936-

Abstract

This paper examines the evolving instrumentality of the “ideal home” to the processes of empire making in Malaya and Singapore, the formation and maintenance of the nation through housing, and the re-articulation of the domestic ideal in the contemporary globalized context. In 1936, taking reference from the Ideal Homes Exhibition hosted by London’s Daily Mail, some women argued for a similar exhibition to be held in Singapore, but conversations were suspended with the onset of the Second World War. In 1948, Ideal Homes Company was founded, which began building private housing estates comprising one- and two-story bungalows and semi-detached houses advertising a modern tropical domesticity in Malaya throughout the 1950s. The first Ideal Home Exhibition in the colony finally opened in 1956 at the Happy World amusement park. In 1965 the YWCA hosted the first post-Independence Ideal Homes Exhibition. By this time, the propagation of the ideal home was intrinsic to the aspirations of the nation. What were the relationships between the woman, the home and the city in its development from an industrializing to postindustrial society? From the colonial imagination of a modern home to the building of the domestic ideal in the colony to the national exhibition to the millennial Ideal Homes magazine (2007-), this paper traces the interconnected histories of domesticity, labor and housing through the representations and lived realities of “the ideal home” amid Singapore’s transforming social milieu.