One early summer afternoon, a thunderstorm crashes down like a stampede of cavalry as petite Mary Chen stands in the sidewalk arcade in front of her borough warden campaign office. She talks to the passers-by, exchanging pleasantries and encouraging them to vote for her or to come inside and have a chat.

Her borough includes only about 2000 households in the alleys off Sungchiang Road in Taipei's Chungshan District, but five different candidates are competing in this election. One is the current borough warden, and three challengers enjoy the backing of political parties.

Chen's flyer-resum*, however, proclaims no party affiliation. Apart from her master's degrees in public administration and environmental administration taken at National University in California, it lists only her work with several social service organizations. Under "current occupation" she has written "housewife."

Women's anger

"Ten years ago, I joined the Homemakers' Union and Foundation and gained experience in issues involving the environment, women, education, and consumers. I began to realize that only when these movements are brought into the community will the living environment improve and care be provided to all needy members of society," Chen says. Community work has always been a focus of women's organizations, but the direct catalyst for the new focus on the community was the rape and murder two years ago of Peng Wan-ru, who was head of women's affairs for the Democratic Progressive Party.

"That horrifying incident made us deeply sense how the deterioration of social order was angering and terrifying women. The only way to lessen the fear in people's hearts was to alleviate as much as possible the decline of public order," Chen says. She holds that this movement must spread to every corner of society, with community organizations taking responsibility for protecting women and children.

When class lets out or begins at the Wuchang Elementary School across the street from Chen's borough, you can see women wearing vests bearing the Chinese characters for "Loving Mother." They hold flags to stop traffic, blow whistles, and gesture with both hands to guide kids safely across the street.

Parents of students in the Wuchang school district-which includes the Wuchang and Chungshan junior high schools and the Wuchang elementary school-have done more than just form this "loving mothers brigade" out of fear for their children's safety walking to and from school. The community's women became gravely alarmed when high school student Pai Hsiao-yen was kidnapped and killed and when various other stories circulated about kidnappings. In response, they established the Mother's Public Safety Committee of the Wuchang School District, whose members have worked together to protect the school district's children.

When the group was first called together last year, the mothers in the group, who reside in seven different boroughs, went everywhere to make a survey of public security problem spots. Then they took their notes and photographs and gave them to the police precinct which had jurisdiction over the area, asking that it send officers on patrols to those places. "We mothers live here. Every day, we take children to and from school and we go to the market to buy food. We're very familiar with all the streets and back alleys. And to some degree we know about where there are frequent burglaries, where flashers frequently expose themselves and where teenagers congregate," says Lin Hsiou-chin, who got involved in the group because her children were enrolled in the district's schools from elementary school through junior high.

The hard work quickly yielded results. A few months after the survey was completed, Lin Chun-sheng, one of the kidnappers in the Pai Hsiao-yen case, was discovered hiding in the Wuchang neighborhood by a local resident. When the police surrounded him, he took his own life. The place he hid had been listed as one of the "public security problem spots." The group has since expanded to become the Junghsing Women's Association. Its concerns include women's issues, the environment and public safety.

Household guardian spirits

A research study on "Women and the Community" conducted by the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University revealed that environmental and quality-of-life issues are what concern women most in community after community. For the vast majority of women, their community-including nearby public facilities such as markets, parks and schools-is where their lives are centered and the bulk of their time is spent. Naturally, they are very sensitive to changes in the environment where they pass their days.

"When the environment changes or the quality of life falls short of expectations, women are always the first to notice and the first to act. When these community movements are in their infancy, women do the difficult work of convincing people and getting the word out."

Yet, having been socialized to traditional gender roles as youngsters, many women invest great energy in their community work but are confined or confine themselves to being "lubricators"-keeping the gears running smoothly-rather than acting as prime movers. Take the small political entity of the borough. Although many women work as borough administrators, in which capacity they run about busily attending to practical administrative matters, the borough wardens, who speak as representatives of their boroughs and have the power to decide policy, are overwhelmingly male. Taipei City, for instance, has 435 borough wardens, but less than 10% of them are women.

Reallocating community resources

"Facilities overseen by men are less attentive to the needs of us women and children," says Lin Hsiou-chin. In their struggle for resources, women have begun to adopt some very aggressive tactics.

Just look at what women did for the Junghsing Flower Garden, which is near the Wuchang school district. In 1989 the Taipei City Government acquired the garden from private hands, and recently the Bureau of Public Works planned on making improvements. Yet the mothers of the neighborhood feared that the city government would make such "improvements" as covering green space with pavement and building the same old shade pavilions that are seen in city park after city park. Under the aegis of the Homemakers' Union, they approached the city government and applied to make a "Study on the Junghsing Garden Improvement Plans." Asking the loving mothers of the community to hit the streets with questionnaires, they surveyed local residents about what they really wanted there.

"The result was they discovered that local residents most wanted leisure facilities for teenagers and a 'botanical trail' with written explanations about the plants," says Lin Hsiou-chin. Lin, who has just presented a copy of their findings to the city government, says the Bureau of Business Management was surprised that the women had provided a clear direction for government administration. The incident warns people against overlooking the resolve of women.

From running home to running borough

Recently, these women have found an even better way to accomplish their goals.

Now that Taipei is in the midst of borough warden elections, some community groups and groups promoting social causes have formed the "Professional Borough Warden Alliance," nominating and supporting people with the will to be good community managers to stand for election. It has caught people's notice that 20 of the 29 people they've nominated are women.

"While the borough may be the administrative unit in the ROC that best meets the definition of community, it doesn't bring fully into play functions that ought to be part of a community," says Peng Yen-wen. Borough wardens have traditionally acted as their parties' local vote assignors and vote buyers. Because borough wardens stand for election, some have even used the post as a springboard to run for elections to representative bodies or for careers in government. As a result, community resources are often monopolized or sacrificed for the sake of gaining political power, and they don't actually benefit the public.

Peng Yen-wen gives this example: Those serving as borough wardens in Taipei city get NT$45,000 as an office stipend. It's sort of like a salary, as the wardens can do with it as they see fit. Every year they are granted control over a budget of NT$200,000 for local facilities, from several tens of thousands of NT dollars to over NT$1 million in resource recycling funds, and so forth. If these moneys were used well, they could really be of help to the community. Borough wardens should thus become professional community managers.

"We hope this time to raise the proportion of women, not only from the standpoint of equal rights, but also because we have discovered that the abilities and ideals of many women community managers are worth recommending," she says. Most of these women candidates have long been working for community groups, trying to get their ideas to take root at the local level. Otherwise, they are members of women's groups. "The unit of the 'borough' is an area with distinct borders, on average having jurisdiction over several thousand households. It is of the scope that women care about most."

Wanfang's woman warden

Taipei's Wanfang community offers a happy example of having a woman as borough warden. Hsu Shao-hua, the woman warden of Wanfang Borough, has become famous both because she is one of Taipei's few women borough wardens and because she has been applauded for her community improvement work. "Most women community workers have common characteristics," she says. "Originally just housewives, they are passionate about doing things for the public benefit and very principled about how they do them. Other people, however, don't know this about them, until one day these women boldly deal with some matter and suddenly their brilliant character is exposed."

The Wanfang community is an old public housing project built on a hillside that has continually been plagued with erosion problems that deeply worry its residents. Because there is steep slope right behind Hsu's house, every time it rains she is acutely aware of the instability of the hillside. She fears that a landslide will bury her home. Five years ago, she discovered that the Department of Public Housing was still planning on constructing more public housing on this hillside. Terrified, she pushed other local residents to join with her in protest at the Department of Public Housing. Eventually, they were able to convince the city government as to the seriousness of the problem, and the city temporarily scrapped plans to build more public housing there.

This incident moved her to protect her home and also caused her to reflect upon other community problems, such as garbage and resident consciousness, and it emboldened her to stand for election as borough warden four years ago. Her way of doing things earned her the recognition and support of Liu Yu-hsiou, a professor in the department of foreign languages at National Taiwan University.

"I have some views about the community and the environment that I thought I could try to bring into being in the place that I live," says Liu, who has worked hard for women's causes for many years. She couldn't stand the problem of garbage in the Wanfang community. Working together with Hsu Shao-hua, they were able to start environmental cleanup and recycling work.

Lonely women migrants to the city

Liu Yu-hsiu points out that women are the main caretakers of the home, and they are more able to get close to the actual needs of a community's women and children.

Starting from the angle of women, Liu has deep observations about the interaction between women and the community. For the last several decades, Taiwan's cities have grown rapidly and there has been tremendous movement of population. For reasons of education, work, marriage and so forth, many women have migrated to the greater Taipei metropolitan area. As the structure of families and communities changes, the old intimate relations where one would raise the young and care for the old amid the sounds of cocks crowing and dogs barking have been replaced by cold impersonal relations in the urban sea of concrete buildings. As a result, many women have been confined to live lonely lives in their communities.

"Women in the community are not all housewives; there are also many working women, single mothers and single and older women, and there may even be women who live under the threat of violence at home," Liu says. "They are in great need of such resources as child-care, after-school care and job training, and even safe houses in the case of battered women." She points out that if these resources were provided right in the community, it would provide the most direct assistance.

Two years ago the Wanfang Community began offering courses to "develop women's talents." The curriculum was totally different from the traditional flower arranging, cooking and folk dancing classes that are traditionally offered in classes for mothers. The curriculum was arranged around various issues involving women including the law, sexual harassment, and violence. And it encouraged them to respect themselves and voice their opinions.

"My voice used to be very hoarse, and I often felt that I couldn't catch my breath. Later, after I took various speech and body-language courses, I realized that I had always been under the false impression that men were the only ones who could speak loudly, and that women ought not to debate with them. The result of this is that you would feel wronged but don't dare to speak up, and your emotions get caught in your throat," says one housewife who just finished the course.

The women's job training class has been offered already three times, and each term 30-50 women have signed up. Women who have completed their training have recently formed a "I love My Home Association." With Liu helping to provide rent, they have established a permanent activity center in a city apartment. The air conditioning and tables have all been contributed by members themselves, and it is decorated like a coffee shop. "When you're feeling bored, you can always come here and find someone to talk to!" Many housewives are very happy to have this opportunity to get out of the house.

Utopia is self-built

The activism of some modern women goes beyond an unwillingness to just sit back and watch the environment deteriorate and a resolve to stand up and fight for change and their share of resources. Some of them are actually struggling to put their ideals into practice, boldly trying to find and create their own utopias.

Wang Kuei-mei, a lecturer in interior design at Chung Yuan Christian University, originally went to Hong Kong for the sake of her work. Four and half years ago, because she didn't want her children to live under the shadow of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, she returned to Taiwan. A single mother, in order to find a safe and care-free living environment for her children, she looked at various different neighborhoods in Taipei, but because she found them all too noisy, with bad air and cramped apartments, she went far from Taipei and selected a community on a hilltop in Yangmei.

"Back then, there weren't any apartment buildings here, and there was green space everywhere," Wang recalls. "The community was well supervised, and the houses were well designed." So as not to be lonely, she also encouraged and convinced several college friends to come and live here.

"I never expected that one day I would suddenly discover that the developers were planning on building an apartment building on the lot where they had said they would build an activity center." With a strong sense of crisis, in order to prevent the developer from destroying the community planning and trampling upon the rights of the residents, she actively organized the residents to protest and resist the developers' plans.

Her childhood was spent in Taiwan's countryside, and she developed a close relationship to the land. Later, education, marriage and career brought her to Taipei, the United States and Hong Kong. "I've been around the world, but I still feel that the best place to set my roots is here in Taiwan," she says. It was this idealism and determination that kept her on an unwavering course during the period of protests, when the development company used connections to force her from her job and even threatened her with violence.

Her concern about her children's growing environment and the land is not displayed merely by her participation in such protest activities. She and other residents of her community are expending great effort to reawaken people's feelings for nature. They have organized an exhibition of old photographs of the community, published materials about local flora and fauna in a newsletter, and sponsored a "mountain landscape" painting activity in order to get residents to observe the natural world around them and experience Mother Nature's abundant resources.

"There are many women here who have similar ideals. Everyone makes their own special contributions. By combining our resources, our lives and activities have become much more varied," Wang says. To publish the newsletter, professional botanists living in the community provide information about plants, those who studied art provide the graphics, and those who work for magazines write and edit the copy. The result is an impressive newsletter that is a major resource for keeping people informed and for building a sense of cohesion within the community. Wang manages a "Mountain Forest Reading Room" that is largely used for reading group meetings. This has become a principal place for women in the community to get together, discuss their ideals and grow.

Recently, she too has announced her candidacy for borough warden. "Now I can only protect the safety of children in the community, but I cannot guarantee anything about the quality of schools or transportation to the outside. Now I can make a protest about one developer, but I can't stop other developers from building in the neighborhood." Having discovered that the borough warden has power and can supervise and coordinate local facilities and construction, she hopes that the position will allow her greater opportunity to realize her ideals.

A coooperative of small families

She's not alone. Recently the Ministry of the Interior held its first annual evaluation of "excellence in apartment building management," and Taichung's "Chuanyu Chenglung Community" took first place. It is also a community where a group of women are working together to make their living environment reach their highest standards.

Because the developer of this apartment complex used community management as a major selling point, it attracted a high proportion of families with similar character. The entire apartment building complex has 89 apartments, in almost all of which live small families of similar age and background. With the assistance of the developer, the tenants' committee of the complex often holds excellent holiday celebrations. Amid the festivities, everyone gets to know each other and draws closer.

In particular, the housewives work together to provide excellent after-school care and educational programs in order to help out financially strapped small families. Take Chu Hsiou-ying, who once taught English at a children's language school and then left the labor force when she had children of her own. Since she's moved here she's been able to make the most of her strengths. So that children will embrace Chinese culture, she teaches a class in which they learn to recite from the Chinese classics. Other mothers teach ceramics, painting and poetry classes. This gives the reception room of the building a scholarly and artistic air.

"We men are very lonely inside and need opportunities for growth and exchange," says resident Chang Chih-pin, a physics instructor at Hung Kuang Institute of Technology. He used to be introverted and taciturn, but after moving here and getting involved in management committee work, he has been molded by his fellow committee members' soft and maternal ways, and has gradually opened up. In school he never joined any clubs, but for the sake of his work on behalf of the committee he has begun to study photography and writes and edits their newsletter. His great diversity of talents has startled even himself.

New model

Whether motivated just by a simple desire to make one's neighborhood safer and cleaner or by more utopian long-term aspirations, the effects of these women's community work is not limited just to their home and the surrounding neighborhood; they also have given social workers great inspiration.

"This may be a turning point in the relationship between the sexes," says Hsia Chu-chiu, a professor a National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of Building and Planning. Hsia is very supportive of this wave of women's community groups because "the groups represent a method of organization that has come out of women's collective struggle to create resources. They challenge the established power structure, and so stimulate the activism of women and citizens in general."

Women's hard work in the community also provides another kind of experience and model than those provided by traditional male-dominated management of public affairs. The Young Women's Christian Association of Taiwan, which has frequently offered courses aimed at cultivating women leaders, has observed the special characteristics of women's community work: "Although women over the course of their educations have fewer opportunities to develop their organizational abilities, they are in fact very good at using the group to make the best of a situation, establish networks and combine resources."

Yet there is one thing to fear. As Liu Yu-hsiou notes: "Although great expectations are being placed on the roles women play in the community, in order to discourage an inflexible sex-based division of labor, responsibility for community work should not belong exclusively to women."

Having started by improving the living environment near their homes, these alliances of women concerned about the direction of their communities have started to make noise in society at large, as they demand fairer and more reasonable distribution of resources. Thus they are shaping and encouraging the design of a comprehensive social safety net. Two thousand years ago the mother of the Chinese philosopher Mencius moved three times so that her son wouldn't grow up around bad moral examples. If women could have been elected borough warden back then, perhaps the moves would have been unnecessary.

The loving mothers of the Wuchang school district have joined with businesses to establish "loving safety stations" that promote public safety and recycling work.

Getting involved in community work allows a woman's outstretched arms to embrace and protect her own children as well as many others.

The Professional Borough Warden Alliance, which seeks professional management of communities, stresses making the most of women's talents. In Taipei it h as nominated 20 women tostand for election as wardens.

The growing importance attached to community work has made this round of borough warden elections fiercely contested. Residents too have a greater sense of participation.

Women are usually practical and attentive to detail. One woman candidate for borough warden has established a flea market in a corner of her campaign headquarters, making elections part of life rather than just part of politics.

Even if the times are changing, the longing in the human heart for a warm home is the same as that of old. Rather than just hoping for others' warm beams, why not light your own lamp? Everyone can bring light into their own communities.