The women around us

Every generation owes a lot to the previous generation, as each step they took made life easier for the next. There's the e- mail and running water; rice cookers and cars. And for tomorrow's women there is easier, more equal access to at least elementary education, an achievement for which we have gained recognition from the United Nations. This is thanks to campaigns targeting parents who once thought that investing in girls' formal schooling was pointless; campaigns which were supported by many a mother or teacher, who stood up for a girl to remain longer in school.

The annual commemoration of Women's Day, which falls on Dec. 22, is an appropriate time to remember the contribution of women, and men, who made a difference for today's women and our daughters; and to reflect on where we are when it comes to the lot of half the society. Women have clearly come a long way, while many remain neglected in various areas. For instance, the UN also notes that many here still die during childbirth, one cause being difficult access to essential health services.

There are many women in this country who have strived to respond to crucial needs in their surroundings; one could mention the peacemakers in Maluku who worked in the face of death threats, and those who managed to push through the country's first law to end violence against women. Sumarsih, a woman who lost her son in the student shootings, has been awarded the Yap Thiam Hien human rights award this year, for her work in binding together fellow victims of violence.

Closer to many of us, our mothers earn high honors for their tireless task of raising a family through thick and thin.

But also within our homes, there is a large group of anonymous people left out of the commemoration of Women's Day, often mistaken here as "Mothers' Day", and even in the reformasi movement toward democracy and liberty. These are the women working in our homes, the maids, whom we'd like to think have fair employers.

Seventy-six years ago on this day, women gathered in a congress in Yogyakarta to reassert their contribution to free their people of colonial rule and to free fellow women from abuse. With better education and even a directly elected president, likely unimaginable to those activists of 1928, we're much better equipped to make life a lot easier and more humane for many of our women.

Apart from the benevolence of employers, there is actually nothing much here that has changed that form of employment, the characteristics of which embarrassingly resemble modern-day slavery. If such a description includes no right to determine pay, no legal protection and little if any freedom of movement, no right to a holiday and being available at their employers' beck and call around the clock, this means that the maids in our homes are only at the mercy of their employers -- many of whom are decent working people, and hopefully few of them cruel.

Yet many of us do abide by rules on domestic helpers and nannies, as their agencies require that the sitters are paid a certain amount of overtime if they do not take their scheduled day off.

This shows the irony of enjoying the continued luxury of having no rules for the working conditions of the domestic help provided in abundance from the kampong, while we raise hell over the abuse our women receive while working in the Middle East and elsewhere. Our migrant workers in Hong Kong have managed to set up a union, while the only maid's union in the nation's history might be the fictitious one pioneered by "Inem", the star in the 1970s comedy film on maids.

Recognizing maids as part of the family, as many Indonesians do, is not the solution. The family is a private domain, where no outsider can intervene in the case of maids being abused, or having to be ready day and night for any odd task. Legal recognition of maids as employees would at reflect state policy that all workers have undeniable rights -- apart from recognizing the demand of women that work in the home be given its proper due.