The Education of Women: Gender and Family in Indonesia, 1970s-1990s

Mirna Nadia, Northwestern University

In this paper I explore the representations of women within the national family planning program in Indonesia. By examining the gendered and family rhetoric embedded within the program and other related state projects, I see women as both a normative category inundated by morality and a category of analysis. State-led family planning program were often enacted against the backdrop of postcolonial development projects such as that of South Korea during the 1970s and 1980s or India in 1950s. Similarly, in Indonesia, the gender ideology of the family-centered state conscripted women primarily as reproducers and as producers—supplementary to men—to support the economic development plans. Women were demanded to contribute to the development projects while at the same time being marginalized as secondary to men due to their purported role as sacrificing mothers and dutiful wives. Based on the premise that a low fertility rate was necessary for economic development, women were expected to fulfil their patriotic duty by supporting and committing to the family planning program. The family planning project in Indonesia not only constructed gendered subjects but also circumscribed moral citizen as one embedded in the nuclear family and determine the heterosexual family as the proper site for any sexual activity and procreation. Such entanglements between gender and sexuality are worked and reworked in different domains—the family, the nation, and the transnational. Neither stable categories nor empty signifiers, these “fragile” identities intersect with and mutually constitute each other. As women navigate the complex hierarchical relations in postcolonial society, the boundaries of what circumscribe women as a category are continuously negotiated and reiterated. Keywords: gender, sexuality, family, moral citizens, Indonesia

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 Presented in Session 134. International Perspectives on Women's Movements