Book Review

Asia

With these six essays exploring women's lives in the colonial Dutch East Indies, Elsbeth Locher-Scholten makes an important contribution to Indonesian history. Focusing on Java, where the majority of the population lives, the essays address the situation of both European and indigenous women and, in the process, reveal the racial and class divisions that kept them apart. The colonial state, in particular its half-hearted gestures toward democracy, appears here as a significant background against which women's lives unfolded. Locher-Scholten's materials come partly from the archival spoors of that state (its Labor Office and the People's Council or Volksraad, for example) but also from household manuals aimed at Dutch women on their way to the tropics, and from advertisements and children's literature depicting life in the colony. The glimpses of life in the Indies thus include how women appeared in legal discourse and public media, but also how race, gender, and class shaped even the most private spheres such as marriage, dress, and cooking.

1

Little noticed outside the People's Council where it transpired was the debate about women's night labor that took place in the mid-1920s. The "progressive" view of this matter was that the weaker sex, and the children who depended on her, merited the law's protection against her working at night. Businessmen in the sugar and tea industries that utilized such labor countered that Javanese women worked primarily because of adat (tradition) rather than from simple economic need, and it was best not to meddle with the dictates of tradition. On this point, Locher-Scholten examines three surveys from the 1920s and 1930s showing women's participation in agriculture, including plantation agriculture. The numbers varied considerably by locale and by the availability of other income-generating activities, but it seems fairly clear that women's agricultural labor on Java, like that of men, was motivated in the first instance by economic factors, although the necessity to work had surely become traditional, especially for poor women.

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