Khatijah Sidek: The Silenced Voice of a Freedom Fighter in the UMNO Political Struggle

This article seeks to examine a memoir written by Khatijah Sidek from the perspective of feminism, a subaltern analysis advanced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. An important aspect of this article is women political struggle in the context of Malaysian politic of the 1950s in which UMNO was the dominant political party. At the time, women’s in politics was very limited. This memoir, written by Khadijah, tells of her fight for equal political participation in UMNO as the men. This article highlights that women’s voice in politic was silenced, a fact borne out by Khadijah Sidek’s own termination as UMNO’s party member following her struggle to change the political scenario. This article underscores the fact that male hegemony rendered mute the political voice of the subaltern women.