The place of women in Asian society

Wives, Mistresses and Matriarchs; Louise Williams; Allen & Unwen 1998; v + 302pp

JAKARTA (JP): The great economic miracle in Asia went bust. What has all this meant, especially to the women of the region? What do the famous, and the faceless, feel about themselves in these times of incredible economic and social transformation?

Louise Williams focuses on some of these aspects in this interesting book. An Australian journalist who moved to Asia more than a decade ago as a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, she listened to hundreds of tales both empowering and depressing of women around the region.

Although she found negative and positive stories in different countries of Asia, common everywhere is the inevitable social change taking place in all their lives. In a village near Surakarta, Ibu Sinem tells the author that the first goal of women before was to find a husband, but now it is to find a job.

Since the introduction of irrigation, Kepuh enjoys three crops a year but there are not enough young people left in the village to work on the land. People like Subiata have already left for the glittering lights of Jakarta, to join the other teenagers who are swallowed up immediately by factories that sew seams into kids' pajamas, put pockets on men's jackets and seal bags of cheap confectionery for the international market.

It seems factory owners prefer to employ young, single village girls.

They are cheap and easy to control. Labor agents even go to villages periodically to seek 20 or 30 girls at a time. According to a current study on the Indonesian labor market, the textile, footwear, garment, shrimp processing, toy manufacturing and cigarette manufacturing sectors are heavily dominated by young women. At least that was the case before so many businesses were bankrupted by the economic crash.

Asian-style industrialization has transformed societies in a single generation from subsistence rice farmers to armies of industrial workers. And Williams feels even the currency crisis cannot change the direction of that transformation, or turn back the demographic realignments. She believes that even more than men it is the lives of women that continue to change as polygamy is increasingly frowned upon, as factories open up millions upon millions of jobs outside the village structure, as contraception becomes widely available or compulsory in government family planning programs. And, above all, as more and more women choose not to marry.

As the Jakarta correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, it seems only appropriate that Williams devotes four chapters to women from Indonesia from different walks of life. The book opens with the story of Yurnilawati, the only daughter and heir in a Padang clan in Sumatra. Yurnilawati talks about her privileged position as a woman, but also the pressures that force the family home and property on her even though she would like to marry her American boyfriend and perhaps not want to live in the Minang area for a while.

Princess is the tale of a daughter of the fifth son of the Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX of the Yogyakarta royal family. At the age of 20, she rebelled against conservative rules to become the mistress of a married painter. After a roller-coaster ride up and down several emotionally devastating landscapes, the princess at the age of 48 seems finally at peace, selling her own line of Muslim women's clothing and living with her third husband, almost a decade younger than her.

Asked why Megawati Soekarnoputri is not among the Asian heroines chosen -- including Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, the Bandarnaike women of Sri Lanka, Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar and Cory Aquino of the Philippines, Williams said she wanted to feature the daughter of Indonesia's founding president.

She had planned a double profile of Megawati and Siti "Tutut" Hardyanti Rukmana, former president Soeharto's eldest daughter, similar to one on Aquino and Imelda Marcos. Williams even tracked down both Megawati and Tutut in Pelabuhan Ratu on Jan. 23. They were in the fishing village to pay homage to the goddess of the south seas on their shared birthday.

But after the much sought-after interview, Williams realized she got nothing substantial out of Tutut. Her tape recorder played back Tutut's answers that read like a Golkar Party handout. Megawati, of course, talked much more about herself but only about the past. She had little to say about her plans for the future, just like Bhutto whose visions also sound vague and academic.

The author found simply obsessed with her own personal battle, counting upon martyrdom to win elections. Williams gets the impression that Pakistan's leader of the opposition does not like to be pushed.

Bhutto impatiently explained away her government's utter failures. "The inheritance of a tottering and troubled economy made mistake-free management an impossibility. Yes, we made some mistakes." She does not elaborate.

It seems such a tragedy to the author that Bhutto continues to play the martyred patriot and champion of democracy, defending her noble family name against the dark forces of dictatorship. But the question is who is going to buy the histrionics again and again.

The most interesting portrait remains that of 81-year-old Sirimavo, widow of Sri Lankan prime minister Solomon Bandaranaike, who was assassinated in 1959. A housewife up to then, Sirimavo grabbed the leadership of her late husband's Freedom Party and led it to victory a year later.

"I think it was partly sympathy, or mainly sympathy. I was a widow and, when I spoke to them, the women were crying and I was surprised the men also. Otherwise I couldn't have won. I think they all realized that because my husband was so popular someone was coming to take his place," said the first female prime minister in the modern world.

She went on to anoint her daughter, Chandrika, as her successor over her son, allowing pragmatism to override her maternal ambitions for her only boy. Her daughter is better organized, said Sirimavo, who was known as the only "man" in her Cabinet. In South Asia, many widows and daughters have followed in her footsteps, creating an illusion for the rest of the world that all is well with half the population of the Asia region, half of the two thirds of the world's population.

-- Mehru Jaffer