Kartini’s Legacy: Women of a New Era

Jakarta Globe, Rebecca Lake, Apr 20, 2014

The Anwar sisters. (JG Photo)

It’s been over 110 years since Indonesian heroine Raden Ajeng Kartini penned her thoughts on the emancipation of women.

Considered the pioneer of women’s rights in Indonesia, Kartini, whose birthday the nation celebrates on Monday, paved the way for many others in her wake to continue the fight for respect and equal opportunity.

Despite her revolutionary thinking for the time, Kartini was not immune to the social constraints, barriers and beliefs that were imbedded in early 20th century Javanese society. She was forced out of school at the age of 12 to marry into a polygamous relationship, which her writing reveals she was strongly opposed to. While the heroine achieved significant advancements for the rights of women, such as establishing the nation’s first school for girls, she died in child birth, ironically, at the age of 25, leaving her trailblazing efforts in the hands of the generations of women to come.

Today there are countless examples of Indonesian women who have taken on Kartini’s mantra. The Anwar sisters are three such noteworthy champions.

All highly successful in their own right Dewi, Danti and Desi are testaments to the notion that Kartini’s voice lives on, now more than ever.

“Clearly since Kartini’s day women have come a long long way, not just in Indonesia.… She grew up in a time when there were very few options for women,” says Dewi, the oldest of the three siblings, in an interview during one of the rare instances when all three busy women could be together at the same time in the same place.

As a highly respected professor and a senior advisor to Vice President Boediono, Dewi has had an accomplished career. But it hasn’t come without conscious striving to fulfill her ambitions and exercise her rights.

“She had a prenup before her wedding,” says youngest sister Desi, a senior Metro TV journalist, with a laugh.

“My husband comes from a more traditional family… so I had a prenup, I wanted to do my PhD and I did it,” Dewi says matter-of-factly. “We had a one-year-old daughter when I left to Australia to do my PhD.”

It was a challenge, she says, to be away from her young family, but one she felt was necessary.

Her sister Danti, the Ministerial Secretary of the Ministry for Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection, who completed her studies in England, endured the same situation in order to achieve her career goals.

“The challenges were when I was abroad for a certain time, if our kids were sick or stuff like that, of course we really looked to our husband to take care, but… that was very hard,” she says.

Indonesians Commemorate Kartini Day in 1953. (Wikimedia Commons)

Challenges remain

These “sacrifices” to obtain a quality education are among the many struggles modern women face in Indonesia.

“Indonesia being so big, we cannot claim that the benefits for women are universal,” says Dewi, who credits her upbringing in West Sumatra and the positive influences of her parents for much of her success.

“There are certain parts of Indonesia, particularly true for example in the remote regions where poverty remains a major issue and where access to education remains very limited, and those areas suffer doubly,” says the Deputy Chairman for Social Sciences and Humanities at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI).

A recent report by the World Economic Forum ranks Indonesia 95th out of 135 countries in terms of gender equality, scoring far below its neighbor, the Philippines, which ranked fifth.

“There are some areas particularly in the eastern parts of Indonesia where women have to continually defer to their male elders even when it comes to their own health. For example in certain parts of eastern Indonesia, a pregnant woman can’t make a decision to go to the doctor. That would be the decision for her husband to make and sometimes he will also have to defer to the view of the male elders,” says Dewi, adding that its situations like this contribute significantly to Indonesia’s appalling maternal mortality rate, the worst in Southeast Asia.

It is examples such as this, Desi says, that have rendered women “prisoners of the system created by humans and in this case by Indonesians.

“For me, when religion plays an influencing factor in how you treat women, you subscribe to a certain idea that a boy and a girl have certain roles… then that’s not very constructive because… you are creating certain limitations and ways of thinking.

“I mean Indonesia is one of the biggest Muslim countries. It’s very much influenced by the idea that women should not be the captains of the ship. You follow, there’s only one captain of the house and you follow. That is already a constraint.”

All three sisters credit their supportive father and mother, who despite having three children, unashamedly bucked social norms and left for America to study, leaving her “capable” husband to manage the household, which effectively shielded the sisters from gender stereotypes.

“There were a lot of malicious comments,” says Dewi, but this determined attitude is what the sisters admired most about their mother: “She turned the table around.”

Women in politics

Boosting female participation in Indonesian politics is not only essential to eradicate discriminatory policies and implement those that help to close the gender divide, but is also necessary for a legitimate democracy, says Danti.

“The number of men and women is equal so we need to have more equal access in all areas of development,” she says. “This is a real democracy.”

Enabling more female participation is of course the tricky part. Unrealistic expectations placed on women by themselves and by society to maintain a happy home pushes many out of the political arena. Other issues include outright marginalization and discrimination on the part of male counterparts and social stereotypes about gender and leadership.

But according to Danti, these issues are being addressed through a number of programs such as affirmative action and gender mainstreaming policies, which encourage all areas of civil society to welcome and employ more women.

All political parties are required to work toward having 30 percent of candidates as women.

While that goal has yet to be achieved, promising progress has been docmented. In the space of just two years, the participation of women in politics went up by 6 percent.

“There is progress but… this is male-dominated country,” says Danti, who emphasizes the enormous barriers women must surmount to enter politics, such as facing down patronizing and unsupportive male peers. “That’s why in the future we should have not just affirmative action but reserved seats like in other countries.”

Winning Women

Despite the setbacks for women in politics, media and academia, all three sisters say they have not personally experienced much direct discrimination.

It’s high time for women in the media, said Desi. “When I started in RCTI, for example, a video camera was quite heavy, it was like 15 kilos, so we tended to have camera men. But nowadays it’s lighter; technology actually opens up plenty of jobs and careers for women.”

“Maybe I’m just too thick skinned,” Dewi laughs, adding she has never seen her gender as a disadvantage. “I’ve noticed that being a woman is an advantage because they don’t know what to expect from you and then you can get away with a lot of things,” she says highlighting her ability to speak directly and critically without putting anyone off.

“If they patronize me,” she say, “I don’t see it as a threat to my integrity.”