Shirin Fozdar

Shirin Fozdar (1905–1992) was a women's rights activist. Born in India, she worked on women's rights and welfare issues in her native country in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950 she and her husband moved to Singapore to help spread the Baháʼí Faith. In Singapore, she became a champion against marriage inequality and polygamy; she was instrumental in the founding of the Singapore Council of Women and of the nation's Syariah Court, and was a leader in the advocacy effort that saw the Women's Charter become law.

Following the death of her husband in 1958 and the passage of the Women's Charter in 1961, she moved to Thailand for 14 years, during which time she established a school for girls at risk of being forced into prostitution.

Early life Shirin Fozdar was born in Mumbai (then known as Bombay), India in 1905. Her parents, Mehraban Khodabux Behjat and Dowlat, were Irani practitioners of the Baháʼí Faith that had converted from Zoroastrianism. One of the teachings of the Baháʼí religion is that men and women are equal, and at the age of 17, she gave a presentation on universal education at the Baha'is of India National Convention in Karachi. By the 1930s she was involved in the All-Asian Women's Conference, which sent her to give a presentation on equality at a League of Nations conference in Geneva in 1934. She continued to give public speeches, and in 1941 gave a speech on peace in Ahmedabad at the behest of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1952, Fozdar co-founded the Singapore Council of Women (SCW) along with other activists representing existing women's organizations. Fozdar was one of the leaders in pushing for the meeting that led to the establishment of the SCW, and in that initial meeting helped shape the group's vision and agenda. She was elected to serve as the group's honorary general secretary, sending its early communications to the media and politicians. The group was the first women's political action organization, and with over 2,000 members, was the largest such group for five decades.

One of the issues that attracted Fozdar's immediate attention was marriage inequality; the laws governing marriage and divorce gave the husband the power to easily divorce and remarry, and left the wife with little recourse. In an interview, Fozdar explained that "When I first came here, the rates of polygamy and easy divorce were alarming. Marriage laws were lax. Women suffered all kinds of atrocities because men held the belief that women were the weaker sex." The court had jurisdiction over marriage and divorce, could order husbands to pay alimony, and before polygamy was outlawed, could force a husband to secure his first wife's consent before marrying a second wife. The book Our Lives to Live: Putting a Woman's Face to Change in Singapore credits Fozdar, Che Zahara binte Noor Mohamed, and Khatijun Nissa Siraj as the main forces behind the court's formation. She traveled internationally, continuing to give speeches on women's rights issues as well as on the Baháʼí Faith.