Synopses & Reviews
Woman and the Colonial State deals with the ambiguous relationship between women of both the European and the Indonesian population and the colonial state in the former Netherlands Indies in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on new data from a variety of sources: colonial archives, journals, household manuals, children's literature, and press surveys, it analyses the women-state relationship by presenting five empirical studies on subjects, in which women figured prominently at the time: Indonesian labour, Indonesian servants in colonial homes, Dutch colonial fashion and food, the feminist struggle for the vote and the intense debate about monogamy of and by women at the end of the 1930s. An introductory essay combines the outcomes of the case studies and relates those to debates about Orientalism, the construction of whiteness, and to questions of modernity and the colonial state formation.
Table of Contents
Preface I. By Way of a Prologue and Epilogue: Gender, Modernity and the Colonial State II. Female Labour in Twentieth Century Colonial Java: European Notions--Indonesian Practices III. 'So Close and Yet So Far': European Ambivalence towards Javanese Servants IV. Summer Dresses and Canned Food: European Women and Western Lifestyles V. Feminism, Citizenship and the Struggle for Women's Suffrage in a Colonial Context VI. Marriage, Morality and Modernity: The 1937 Debate on Monogamy Bibliography Glossary Index