Beyond the Waves: A Typology of Women’s Movements in Malaysia

The history of women’s activism is often captured through linear metaphors such as “waves” when mapping gender-based and feminist struggles across time and space. However, this Western-centric framework obscures non-Western, particularly the Global South’s women’s activism trajectories and fails to account for localised movements that evolve through unique sociopolitical, religious, and cultural contexts. This paper seeks to reframe the study of the history of women’s movements by situating Malaysia as a focal point for understanding alternative feminist pathways beyond the waval and chronological narratives. Malaysia’s pre-colonial egalitarian gender relations, colonial disruptions, and post-independence industrial transformations have profoundly shaped women’s political, economic, and social participation. Yet, despite increasing visibility in education, labour, and governance, Malaysian women remain constrained by institutional patriarchy and cultural essentialism, reflecting what Welsh (2019) terms a “middle-equality trap.” In order to move beyond the descriptive accounts of stagnation, this study adopts and extends Karen Beckwith’s (1996) typology of women’s movement locations and motivations in activism—gender direct, nongender direct, and indirect—by also proposing a fourth category, gender nondirect. This expanded typology provides a more adaptable analytical framework to capture the multilayered forms of women’s activism in Malaysia. Using this framework, the paper maps women’s participation across four typologies and historical periods, illustrating how Malaysian women engage in gendered and nongendered causes motivated (and not) by their own gender identity as a woman. The historical activism reviewed here ranged from explicitly gender-based and women’s rights movements and also included climate justice, nationalism, and interfaith solidarity. This typological approach demonstrates that women’s activism in Malaysia and elsewhere could move beyond the neatly confined feminist or rights-based categories. Rather, women often navigate diverse and multifaceted political spaces, often while asserting agency as and not as women in the male-dominated or non-gendered movements. The study argues that recognising the multitude of participation in activism would challenge the construction of linear and Western feminist historiography, generally lent to viewing non-White women’s experiences. It aims to foreground the need for localised and intersectional frameworks that recognise women’s varied motivations, strategies, and standings, especially within Malaysia’s sociopolitical landscape.