Women and the Colonial State: Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942 (review)

Women and the Colonial State: Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942. By Elsbeth Locher-Scholten (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2000) 251 pp. $27.50

Once a little-studied theme, recent work by interdisciplinary scholars has established gender as crucial to the understanding of colonial encounters. Locher-Scholten's monograph extends the body of analysis on gender and the colonial state to the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia from 1900 to 1942. The study covers the beginnings of colonial modernization policy to the period of the late colonial state, primarily on the island of Java. Locher-Scholten focuses on both Indonesian and European women—their relationships to each other and the colonial state—and how colonial authorities perceived women of both races in formulating legislation. Her essays address a range of subjects—legislation of Indonesian female labor, domestic servants in colonial households, European fashion and food, suffrage for Indonesian and European women, and legislation of monogamous and polygamous marriage. Locher-Scholten frames this volume as "an analysis of how gender differences were constructed, reconfigured, and maintained in close (dis)harmony and, or intersecting with the differences of race, class, and . . . religion" (14).

Locher-Scholten utilizes her analysis of gender, as it intersected with other forms of difference, to reconfigure some fundamental idioms of colonial studies: Said's Orientalism, Anderson's nationalism and citizenship, and the general literature on whiteness and modernity.¹ Locher-Scholten analyzes these themes in a manner that allows her to demonstrate the ambiguous dimensions of European and Indonesian subjects' lives and the multiple ways in which gender and cultural politics reveal the internal fragmentations of colonial discourses and projects. She argues that there was no uniform colonial or "Orientalist" discourse and that the line between colonizer and colonized was often blurred. The first essay on parliamentary regulation of female Indonesian labor argues that representatives of the colonial state held opinions about colonial modernization policy that were class-specific—distinct policies for elite and rural Indonesian women. In the first two essays on representations of race and gender, she argues that European women simultaneously espoused both "Orientalism" and "familisation" toward the Javanese—notions of "whiteness" constantly shifted as Indonesian, Indo-European, and European women interacted with each other in intimate domestic settings (110). Her final two essays on suffrage and marriage legislation uncover ambivalent ideas about modernity and nationalism. Elite Indonesian feminists, Islamic communities, and colonial officials combined shifting images of Western culture, "tradition," and Islam to fashion multiple configurations of female citizenship and the modern Indonesian state.

Methodologically and epistemologically, Locher-Scholten's study is an impressive combination of cultural and social history—discourse analysis coupled with an attempt to reconstruct the lived experiences of historical actors from empirical records. Locher-Scholten innovatively combines an array of sources—domestic manuals for new colonial residents, children's literature, photographs, newspapers, and parliamentary debates and surveys. However, the first two essays focus more on European representations and only partially succeed in portraying Indonesian perceptions and experiences. One weakness is the lack of Indonesian primary sources, as Locher-Scholten tries to filter Javanese voices through colonial documents. The final two chapters on suffrage and marriage legislation are the most convincingly argued and supported. Locher-Scholten's theme of the ambiguity of gender, race, class, and religion and the colonial project is lucidly demonstrated in her analysis of colonial legislative debates, accounts of Muslim advocacy groups, reports of Indonesian nationalist parties, correspondence of European and Indonesian women's groups, and Indonesian newspapers.

In her quest to provide a multivalent portrait of colonial encounters in the Dutch East Indies, why did Locher-Scholten not conduct oral interviews with Javanese who were alive during the colonial period or those who remember their parents' histories? Locher-Scholten's monograph provides only the views of elite literate Javanese...