Tan Cheng Hiong

Tan Cheng Hiong (1904–1999) was a Singaporean women's rights activist and the first president of the Singapore Council of Women. She was inducted into the Singapore Women's Hall of Fame on 18 March 2016.

Biography Hiong was born in Singapore in 1904. She married Chinese-born publisher George Lee, brother of philanthropist Lee Kong Chian in 1931, with whom she had nine children. After 15 years of marriage she discovered her husband had taken a concubine, at which point she had contemplated suicide. In 1952 she met activist Shirin Fozdar, and together they, along with Checha Davies, founded the Singapore Council of Women on 4 April 1952. Throughout the 1950s, Hiong and Fozdar worked to criminalize polygamy, advocate for child care and safer conditions in the workplace, and pressed the government to begin reforms to prostitution law.

Hiong was the president of the Singapore Council of Women from 1952 to 1957, and the Vice President from 1958 until 1971, when it was dissolved. She died in Singapore in 1999 at the age of 95.