The 1961 Hong Kong census reported a total of 337,000 women in all the employed forces, yet women have played a disproportionately small part in the direction of industry and public affairs until the last twenty years or so. It is not surprising that Chinese women were excluded from public life, since they had few rights outside their homes until the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911. But British women, presumably well-educated and qualified to take executive responsibilities, found few opportunities to do so. The fact that Queen Victoria ruled the colony for the first sixty years of its existence should have helped, but it didn’t. What influence women had was unseen, and was exerted through their husbands or other men.
Even today there is not one woman in the top echelon of Hong Kong government, although women constitute about one-twelfth of the government’s Class I and II administrative staff officers (more than a third of these women are Chinese).
In nongovernmental posts, there are about ten women conducting their own retail shops, chiefly in fashions, jewelry and objets d’art. Rosalind Henwood, an American, heads an air freight forwarding business.
There are about a dozen women of prominence in writing, advertising and publicity. Two of them, Mrs. Beatrice M. Church and Miss Elma Kelly, direct their own advertising and publicity agencies. Mrs. Church, a former Far Eastern correspondent for the London Daily Mail, survived Japanese air attacks and ship-sinkings during World War II, served in the SWANS, a women’s service affiliated with the British Navy, and returned to Hong Kong to reestablish the pioneering advertising and publicity firm she had founded with her husband, Captain Charles Church. Captain Church, his health shattered by Japanese tortures during imprisonment at Singapore, died of the effects of his injuries in 1950. Mrs. Church assumed sole control of the business, the Advertising and Publicity Bureau, and has successfully operated it since then. Miss Kelly, a native of Melbourne, Australia, began her career as an analytical chemist. She also was a Japanese war prisoner before setting up her own agency, Cathay, Ltd., in Hong Kong.
There are about 20 women executives and administrators in private or semipublic health and welfare agencies. Women staff officers in government health and welfare work number approximately 150—by far the largest group of women in civil-service staff posts. The colony has a small number of women doctors, educators and lawyers, plus one architect, but most women professionals in these fields are government officers.
Women employed in art or cultural activities total about fifteen, including several Chinese movie actresses. Miss Aileen Woods, a colony resident for nearly forty years, is widely known for her Down Memory Lane program over Radio Hong Kong, which she conducted from 1947 to 1954. A Japanese prisoner in Hong Kong during the war, she subsisted on a semistarvation diet of rice, fish and boiled sweet-potato leaves; her weight fell to 81 pounds and many of her fellow prisoners died. Miss Woods, now seventy-five years old and in excellent health, was honored by a personal visit from Princess Alexandra of Kent during the Princess’s tour of Hong Kong in November, 1961. She was awarded the Coronation Medal in 1953, and the Member of the British Empire in 1958. She still does occasional programs for Radio Hong Kong, a government agency, and is regarded as the unofficial dean of the colony’s working women, having begun her career as a world-touring featured dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies and other shows more than fifty years ago.
In private business and professional activities, as in government staff positions, about one-third of the colony’s career women are Chinese, and both groups of women have achieved much greater prestige and success than any previous generation of the colony’s women. Among the Tanka fishing people of Hong Kong, women own most of the fishing junks. On Po Toi, a small island southeast of Hong Kong Island, a Chinese woman, who died in 1957, held the rank of village elder; as such, she was the arbiter of all local disputes, having an authority rarely given to women. Many women in the colony hope that the lady from Po Toi will become a trend-setter instead of a legend.
What are the prospects for Hong Kong industry and trade? Among the many persons who have weighed these prospects are three of the most influential men in the commercial life of the colony: Hugh Barton, chairman and managing director of Jardine, Matheson & Co.; Sir Michael Turner, chairman, general manager and a director of the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corp.; and John L. Marden, chairman of Wheelock, Marden & Co. A listing of their combined directorships would fill two closely printed pages, and it would be only a mild exaggeration to say that they and the companies they head are in everything of a business nature in the colony. Each man also holds an important position in the colony government; Sir Michael as an unofficial member of the Executive Council, Mr. Barton as an unofficial member of the Legislative Council, and Mr. Marden with unofficial membership in the Urban Council.
Mr. Barton heads one of the oldest and most respected business houses in Hong Kong, with financial or operational control of companies in such diverse lines as real estate, shipping, wharves, warehousing, insurance, utilities, textiles, transport, engineering, airlines and trading. Jardine’s, as it is commonly called, was deeply engaged in the opium trade during the colony’s early years, but has long since turned to other interests.
One of its recent investments, the Jardine Dyeing & Finishing Co., was established two years ago and now produces two million yards of high-quality cloth per month.