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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 02/03
Gender And Politics Under the Suharto Regime 1966 - 1998
Norma Sullivan
December 2000
Abstract
This paper describes the relationship between gender and politics in Indonesia under the autocratic Suharto Regime. It provides an historical context for a future study of gender relations under the democratically elected Wahid government.
The paper is divided into seven sections headed respectively:
- National Development and Women under the Suharto New Order State;
- Conceptions and Contradictions in PKK (Pembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga - The Applied Family Welfare Program) Ideology;
- Suharto's Official Line and Academic Influences;
- The Concensus Thesis: Javanese Men and Women Separate-but-equal;
- The Conflict thesis: The Hidden Power of Javanese Women vs The Hidden Subordination of Javanese Women;
- Forms of Resistance; From within PKK;
- Resistance from within urban kampung community.
In the first section the role of women in politics and government during the Suharto years is elucidated, as is the role of the national 'non-political' women's movement (PKK) in national development. Following is a section highlighting contradictions in this relationship. The next three sections establish links between scholarly and state planning discourses about the relations between women and men and their proper roles in national development. Section six describes methods women devise within the PKK women's movement to resisted State ideologies while section seven discusses effects in, and responses from, the community.
The paper concludes that during the Suharto period structural inequality existed between men and women in Indonesia. This reality was to some extent concealed by the political ideologies of the Suharto state, that argued, from a functionalist/consensus perspective, that while men and women played different roles in different social spheres, these roles were complementary and equal. Such gender stereotyping made it difficult for men and women to operate outside their prescribed roles and fields. It also denied that at the level of everyday life women and men found themselves in contradictory situations where sex-role stereotyping was irrelevant.
Findings indicated that the newer female stereotypes and task allocations written into Suharto's Second Five-Year Plan did not promise to remedy older problems or those still emerging in the modernization process. Rather, they put an official stamp on the belief that women's primary place in Indonesia was in the home not in the fields, markets, or other significant spheres of activity.
There was ample evidence that state planners attributed little real significance to women's possible economic and social contributions. In this light events like the 1974 Marriage Law did not seem at all progressive, whatever Congress and other female leaders said to the contrary. In principle, the 1974 reform promised to make women less dependent on men, and better placed to take up decisive roles in national development. But the vast majority of women had been systematically excluded from decisive roles in any spheres outside the home. In this context too, it could be argued that decision-making by many women was heavily circumscribed by men. Men (as household heads) delegated to women (as household managers), the power to make decisions, particularly about the amount of income expended on food and clothing, and about the socializing of the young into dominant values. Geertz and Koentjaraningrat described these and other effects of this delegation as female dominance in domestic spheres. White & Hastuti suggested the decisions women made in this regard invariably were in conformity with the known wishes of their husbands.
At the level of personal experience many men could happily delegate this power in the knowledge that their wives were careful managers. However personal experiences of these kinds generally have some structural basis and ideological supports. At the level of formal politics during the Suharto period women were part of the state through their movement (the PKK). But the nature of this relationship between politics and gender was best explained by a masters and managers model. Hierarchy is an unmistakable feature of Javanese society. It embraces all areas of social life including relations between men, women and children within families, and in public life. The ideology of equality (expressed in the "separate-but-equal" thesis) has been an effective way of camouflaging these structural inequalities.
Certainly the majority of Indonesia's kampung women did not accept their subordination as inactive victims. As I have described earlier, within the PKK and in their communities they devised a range of tactics to deflect the most negative effects of state ideological programs without drawing attention to themselves. Having witnessed the brutal manner in which the Suharto Regime dealt with those who opposed it in any form, their forms of resistance to State-imposed ideologies and programs were decidedly low key and unorganised. In retrospect the responses from 'inward-looking' PKK leaders and their auxiliary members must be seen as extremely effective in ensuring communal, familial and individual survival under a harsh regime. Under these circumstances achieving gender equity was not their primary concern.
