1931 - 1932
Burmese women win the right to be represented at the London conference on their country's future
room United Kingdom
Miss May Oung (Daw Mya Sein) attended the 1931-32 Burma Round Table Conference in London. The Governor Sir Charles Innes had first selected 20 delegates from Burma - all men. Then, under pressure from various women organizations and others, and following a mass rally of Burmese women in Rangoon, he agreed to the inclusion of Miss May Oung.
Educated at Rangoon and Oxford, Daw Mya Sein was then 27 years old. She was the daughter of the renowned Arakanese barrister and nationalist figure U May Oung. She would go on to a distinguished career as a writer, educator, broadcaster, and representative of Burma at the League of Nations and later the United Nations.
At the Burma Round Table Conference she argued for universal suffrage and equal rights regardless of gender, race, or religion. The story of how she came to be invited to the Burma Roundtable Conference is recorded in the British Library's Untold Lives blog, pieced together from archival records, letters, and telegrams.
The first picture shows Miss May Oung (Daw Mya Sein), left, in London; the second shows the Burma Roundtable Conference 1931-1932, where she is seated far right in a room full of men; and the third the telegram sent by the All Burma Women's Conference to the Secretary of State for India saying it would be an insult to the "womenhood of Burma" if Miss May Oung was omitted from the proceedings (British Library, IOR L/PO/9/3 Telegram from All Burma Women's Conference).