Illustration By @zhang.sherina

On 8 March, timelines will fill with flowers, quotes about empowerment, and celebratory posts marking International Women’s Day. We will speak of strength. Of resilience. Of progress.

But rarely do we ask: whose stories were strong long before we started celebrating them?

History has often favoured the loudest names, the highest ranks, the men who stood at podiums or led battalions into battle. Meanwhile, women’s contributions linger in footnotes, softened into side notes, or forgotten entirely.

This Women’s Day, perhaps remembrance is just as important as celebration. And perhaps there is no better place to begin than with Sybil Kathigasu.

“They seemed desirous of battering the truth out of my body… They would run needles into my fingertips… They heated iron bars… squeezing my fingers together…”

And yet, recognition does not always translate into remembrance. As one commentary in TODAY observed, “among the pantheon of Malayan heroes of the Japanese Occupation, however, the name Sybil Kathigasu was missing.”

Missing, not because she lacked courage, but because history often centres different kinds of heroism.

When we think of wartime resistance, we picture men in uniform. Generals. Fighters. Political leaders. Women who resisted through caregiving, intelligence work, or moral defiance are frequently categorised as supporters rather than strategists, as background figures rather than central actors. But what Sybil did was neither passive nor peripheral. It was deliberate. It was dangerous. It was leadership expressed through care.

The Cost of Courage

The torture she endured severely damaged her health. After the war, she travelled to the United Kingdom for treatment, but the injuries left lasting effects. She passed away in 1948, not long after receiving her medal.

There was no long life of public honour. No decades of national celebration. Instead, her name slowly faded from mainstream conversation.

Today, her story appears in the latest Form 4 Sejarah syllabus textbook. Yet in an exam-oriented system where history is often studied for marks rather than memory, such stories can become little more than paragraphs students skim past on their way to the next test. Ask a room of university students today to list national heroes, and her name rarely appears among the first few mentioned.

That absence tells its own story.

Reclaiming “Her Story” This Women’s Day

International Women’s Day is often framed around empowerment in the present, celebrating achievements, encouraging ambition, and advocating for equality.

These conversations are necessary. But remembrance is also a form of justice.

To remember Sybil Kathigasu is to acknowledge that Malaysian women have always been courageous. That resistance did not only happen in jungles or political chambers. It happened in clinics. In hidden radios. In prison cells. In the quiet refusal to betray others despite immense suffering.

Her story challenges us to reconsider how we define heroism and who we allow to embody it.

 

This 8 March, beyond the flowers and hashtags, perhaps we can ask:

Whose names have we forgotten?

Whose sacrifices have we softened?

Whose stories deserve to be restored to the centre of our national narrative?

History is not only the story of those who fought with weapons. It is also the story of those who fought with conviction, compassion, and silence.

If we are serious about honouring women, then Sybil Kathigasu’s story must no longer remain a footnote. It deserves to be remembered, not just on Women’s Day, but in the telling of our history itself.