Women and Work in Indonesia

Michele Ford, Lyn Parker, Michele Ford, Lyn Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415402880
• eBook ISBN: 9781134142347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: International Economics
• Index: Economics

This book examines the meaning of work for women in contemporary Indonesia. It takes a broad definition of work in order to interrogate assumptions about work and economic activity, focusing on what women themselves see as their work, which includes not only paid employment, home life and child care, but also activities surrounding ritual, healing and religious life. It analyses the key issues, including the contrasts between 'new' and 'old' forms of work, the relationship between experiences of migration and work, and the ways in which religion – especially Islam - shapes perceptions and practice of work. It discusses women's work in a range of different settings, both rural and urban, and in different locations, covering Sumatra, Bali, Lombok, Java, Sulawesi and Kalimantan. A wide range of types of employment are considered: agricultural labour, industrial work and new forms of work in the tertiary sector such as media and tourism, demonstrating how capitalism, globalization and local culture together produce gendered patterns of work with particular statuses and identities. It address the question of the meaning and valuing of women's 'traditional' work, be it agricultural labour, domestic work or other kinds of reproductive labour, challenging assumptions of women as 'only' mothers and housewives, and demonstrating how women can negotiate new definitions of 'housewife' by mobilizing kinship and village relations to transcend conventional categories such as wage labour and the domestic sphere. Overall, this book is an important study of the meaning of work for women in Indonesia.

1 Not your average housewife

Minangkabau women rice farmers in West Sumatra

Evelyn Blackwood

Farming and farm labour are contested domains for women in Indonesia. In state assessments of labour, women landowners are frequently subsumed under the category of housewife. When women perform farm labour, they are usually considered to be part of ‘family labour’, or an extra hand in the field, due to state assumptions about families and ‘nuclear’ households. State representations of women as mothers encourage them to direct their labour toward their husbands and children; other work, even farming, is considered secondary. The women-in-development literature tends to represent Indonesian women farm labourers as poor, down-trodden workers in need of liberation from their wearying toil. West Sumatra is an area where women participate in a wide range of labour relations, including farming one’s own land, agricultural wage labour, collective labour and sharecropping. By examining women’s farm work and, more broadly, their labour practices, in West Sumatra, this chapter explores the contestations over the definition of women’s ‘work’, asking how women’s ‘farm work’ in West Sumatra is both integrated into and resists notions of ‘work’.

Defining women and work

A brief analysis of the way women’s work is understood in Indonesia reveals a number of inconsistencies. Labour force statistics and studies show increasing numbers of women in the industrial labour force and a displacement of women from agricultural labour (Robinson 2000). But these statistics tend to exclude paid work that is seasonal, home-based or domestic-oriented, such as sewing, cooking and cleaning, thereby ignoring large numbers of women engaged in money-making activities in their homes (Sullivan 1994). During Suharto’s New Order era, ‘work’ came to be seen as something done outside the house (and by men), leading many married women to describe themselves as housewives, despite being engaged in a range of income-producing activities (Blackwood 2000; Sullivan 1994). Sen notes that during the early New Order, state officials claimed that only men ‘work’, despite the fact that women have always worked to support their families, either by providing for subsistence needs or producing income (Sen 1998; see also Brenner 1998). Consequently, the range of women’s income-producing activities in Indonesia is under-represented (Sullivan 1994). The definition of ‘work’ as paid labour outside the home excludes not only some of women’s income-producing activities but any productive and reproductive activities oriented to subsistence needs.

Within the development literature, Indonesia’s women workers were synonymous with working-class women, the under-paid, highly exploited factory workers and maids of global development (Sen 1998). These women were viewed primarily as victims, the reasons for their labour charged to neglectful or absent husbands or to poverty. The suggestion by even some feminist scholars that women work because of material dictates, although intended to show the difficulties women face in earning a sufficient income, helped to solidify a view that women as paid workers are primarily victims of economic conditions rather than historical agents shaping their productive labour (see, for example, Papanek and Schwede 1988; Wolf 2000).

Many of the problems associated with women and work in Indonesia arise from state constructions of the domestic domain. The New Order state represented the ideal woman as a mother devoted to her husband and her children, as a number of feminist scholars have attested (for example, Robinson 1998; Tiwon 1996). During this period most of the attention given to women’s issues by the state centred on women’s ‘domestic’ role in child care, nutrition and health. The New Order insistence that women’s primary duty was to husband and children marked women as domestic denizens first, workers second. ‘Work’ for women was redefined as non-essential, only something to be taken up in time of need, while the more important duties were their domestic responsibilities, which were broadly defined as non-productive. Work done by ‘housewives’ within the realm of family and home disappeared into a newly defined domestic domain, making productive labour and a domestic domain mutually exclusive. For instance, Weix (2000) suggests that elite women’s entrepreneurial practices in Java are hidden from view because they are home-based. Further, the association of the term ‘housewife’ with middle-class status, which was encouraged by the state, led women engaged in home-based income-earning to deny that they worked (Blackwood 2000; Sullivan 1994). This redefinition of work as something separate from households gave rise to a sharp distinction between housewives and working women.

Although women are still popularly represented as ‘housewives first’ in Indonesia, Sen (1998) argues that a new ‘working woman’ is replacing the housewife as the paradigmatic female subject. This working woman, however, is not a labourer but a professional woman, wanita karier, exemplified by affluent middle-class women who work in professional, white-collar jobs as teachers, civil servants, managers and administrators (see Brenner 1998; Nilan and Utari ch. 7 of this volume). According to Sen (1998), the Indonesian state is promoting the professional woman as a new symbol of Indonesia’s modernity. With the new visibility of the career woman, Robinson (2000) suggests that women’s work is fracturing into professional and proletarian classes, the proletariat represented by the growing numbers of women in Indonesia’s industrial labour force—in clothing, footwear, textile and electronics factories—and by women wage labourers in agriculture. The division between professional and proletariat establishes important class distinctions for women’s work but it too creates a binary distinction that tends to conceal the complexities of women’s work, particularly in reference to women’s farm work.

Much of the literature on women’s farm work comes from peasant studies, which, as Stivens (1994, 1996) has pointed out, ignores women and considers the farm household, like other households, to be a black box. Not only was the head of household assumed to be a man, he was synonymous with farmer. Women have been invisible in peasant households, their labour categorized as unpaid ‘family labour’ and therefore not counted or examined (see also Saptari 2000b). Even the category ‘peasant’ helps to disguise the multiple forms of productive labour and income-earning activities in which most farm households engage (Stivens 1994). Use of the term ‘peasant’ has come under increasing criticism because of its association with a homogeneous form of supposedly ‘traditional’ production in which ‘peasants’ control their own means of production and produce for themselves (see Kearney 1996). Kearney argues that the category ‘peasant’ has essentially disappeared in this global era. I prefer to use the term ‘farmer’ or ‘farm household’ to avoid the assumptions associated with the term ‘peasant’ and to allow room for thinking about the multiple relations that are present in Minangkabau households studied here (see also Hart 1992).

Several studies focused on Indonesian and Malaysian farm women have been instrumental in furthering analysis of women’s farm labour, associated landholding rights, and the conditions of labour for poor women farmers.¹ I expand on those analyses to examine the complex ‘work’ relations among women within one village in West Sumatra. Women in rural agricultural areas are not just ‘wage labourers’: they often occupy multiple positions, for instance working simultaneously as labourer, sharecropper and owner. Because this ‘work’ does not fit neatly within categories of paid or unpaid labour, professional or proletariat, I use the Marxist-inflected term ‘production relations’ to represent the multiple, intersecting and dynamic relations that occur in farm work. Three aspects of women’s farm work are discussed: first, the intersections of landowning, sharecropping and wage labour for individual women; second, the tensions between well-off farmers, sharecroppers and workers; third, women’s views of farming and householding in light of the Indonesian state’s models of women as housewives and career women. This chapter examines the way women’s productive activities converge with household, kin and labour relations to make categories of home and work, owner and labourer problematic. It brings into view not just individual women landholders and their decision-making processes but also inter-relations among wealthy women farmers, medium- and small-landholders, and those women farmers without land. As farmers, these women complicate any simple boundaries between working woman and housewife, or professional and proletariat.

History and setting in West Sumatra

The Minangkabau of West Sumatra are citizens of a post-colonial state that since the late 1960s has consistently emphasized ‘development’ based upon integration into the world capitalist economy. To hasten its progress toward this goal, the state formulated an ideology of modernization aimed at creating a citizenry in step with the ‘modern’ world. At the same time it instituted a concerted drive toward agricultural development. However, the penetration of capitalism has not resulted in a peasant proletariat dispossessed of their land and living off wage labour. Numerous case studies reveal the continued presence of smallholder farming and sharecropping in Southeast Asia (e.g. Bray 1983; Hart et al. 1989). In West Sumatra, despite the transition to double-cropping and the use of new technologies, smallholders and sharecroppers continue to dominate the landscape. The adoption of Green Revolution technologies by most farmers has meant that farming ancestral rice fields continues to be a viable economic strategy.

Since 1965, agricultural development has transformed the way the land is worked. Most farmers have switched to high-yielding varieties of rice that they sell as a cash crop to local rice millers. In the early 1980s, walk-behind motor-driven tractors became available for ploughing. Large equipment such as the combine harvester has not been adopted because rice plots are divided by bunds, making access to the fields nearly impossible for large machinery.² Rice farmers in the central highland district of Lima Puluh Kota produce many tons of rice for regional and international markets every year. The technological requirements of the new strains of rice make access to cash essential to farming. Although farmers now produce two crops per year, with a resulting increase in income, cash requirements have increased the difficulties of farming for smallholders. Several women complained to me that now they have to pay for everything, the seed, the fertilizer and all the labour, whereas under the old system, they did not need cash for farming. Cash requirements mean that many more farmers operate on a credit basis than in the past, borrowing cash from rice merchants at the beginning of the growing season to pay for seed and fertilizer, as well as labour, and repaying the loan at harvest by selling the harvested padi (unhusked rice) directly to the lender.

Rural Minangkabau villagers participate in and are shaped by the strategies and technologies of agricultural development and global capitalism. As such, they typify many rural communities in Indonesia, yet at the same time they contain intriguing contrasts. While kinship in Southeast Asia tends to be bilateral (cognatic) or patrilineal (Hüsken and Kemp 1991), the Minangkabau are one of the few ethnic groups that practise matrilineal kinship. In Minangkabau villages, matrilineal practices form the basis of social, land and labour relations. Women landholders dominate the landscape as heads of households, which are built around matrilineal ties, and holders of ancestral land.³ They actively farm their own lands (with the help of husbands, if they are also farmers) and comprise most of the labour for tasks such as planting, weeding and harvesting, while men prepare the rice fields for planting and assist with harvesting. The changes in technology have meant that more men are involved at harvest-time cutting and threshing than in the past, a trend common throughout Southeast Asia (Hart 1986; Robinson 2000; Wolf 2000), but the expected displacement of women from farming due to the switch in technologies is inconsistent at best in West Sumatra, where women continue to work in (and oversee) all phases of rice production.

The following discussion of women farmers is based on research in a rice-producing village in West Sumatra located in a fertile valley between volcanic Mount Sago and the mountains that form a barrier between east and west Sumatra.⁴ Taram has a long history as a rice-producing community, a centre of Islam and a stronghold of matrilineal practices (see Blackwood 2000). In 1989, Taram had a population of 6,800; over 75 per cent of all households in Taram were farm households; and the total number of farmers and farm labourers exceeded 85 per cent of the adult population. My research focuses on the 125 households in the hamlet of Tanjung Batang; 106 are farm households, defined as those that depend on income from farming for some or most of their household expenses.⁵ Of these households, 83 per cent hold rights to some rice land, either as landholders or through use rights to land owned by kin.⁶ Only 17 per cent of farm households in the hamlet are landless, their income deriving primarily from sharecropping or agricultural wage labour.⁷ Of the 188 adult women in the hamlet, 72 per cent are involved in farming in a range of capacities, another 14 per cent have businesses that provide their main source of income, and the rest are civil servants, non-agricultural labourers, unemployed or unable to work due to age.⁸

Terms such as proletarian or semi-proletarian do not adequately convey a sense of the economic relations within the village. Proletarianization suggests a linear movement from peasant production, in which peasants own the means of production, to wage labour, in which households have only their labour to sell. Farm households in Tanjung Batang rely on farm income from rice sold on the market, but also draw on additional sources of income, including agricultural and non-agricultural wage labour, civil service, petty trade, sale of petty commodities, and remittances from family members who have migrated to jobs in other areas. Both women and men migrate from the village to find wage labour opportunities elsewhere, but the labour lost to farm households by migration is replaced by labour from landless households.⁹ Many individuals migrate on a temporary basis; others return to the village permanently only after they have retired from jobs or careers elsewhere. Nearly one in four daughters (usually elder daughters) temporarily migrated from the village at the time of my research, compared to only 7 per cent of women in the 1920s and 1930s, reflecting the greater availability of jobs for women outside the village than in the past.¹⁰

Due to differences in access to land among farm households, Taram households evince some variation in wealth. Villagers speak of households as kaya (rich), biasa (ordinary or common; also sederhana, of modest means), or miskin (poor). Roughly following these designations, I developed three class divisions to distinguish among the 106 farm households in Taram: well-off (26 per cent), average (32 per cent) and poor (42 per cent). I call the middle group of households ‘average’ rather than ‘middle’ class to avoid the common associations with the term ‘middle class’. ‘Ordinary’ is a better translation of the colloquial term ‘biasa’ but that term too has certain connotations that speak to people’s own ideas about what is normal or acceptable in their community. My choice of the term ‘average’ is meant simply to signify those in the middle in terms of resources and income. These divisions are based on the amount of rice households produce per harvest; rice production is a good predictor of how much land they control. The three divisions align with other research on Southeast Asia that ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of contributors
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction: thinking about Indonesian women and work
• 1 Not your average housewife: Minangkabau women rice farmersin West Sumatra
• 2 Keeping rice in the pot: women and work in a transmigration settlement
• 3 Dukun and Bidan: the work of traditional and government midwives in Southeast Sulawesi
• 4 Poverty, opportunity and purity in paradise: women working in Lombok’s tourist hotels
• 5 Industrial workers in transition: women’s experiences of factory work in Tangerang
• 6 Bodies in contest: gender difference and equity in a coal mine
• 7 Meanings of work for female media and communication workers
• 8 Makkunrai passimokolo’: Bugis migrant women workers in Malaysia
• 9 Making the best of what you’ve got: sex work and class mobility in the Riau Islands
• 10 Straddling worlds: Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Singapore