Power, Change, and Gender Relations in Rural Java

Chapter 6 - Men’ s Rib: Women’s Power and Empowerment

Chapter 6 M en ’ s R ib Women’s Power and Empowerment In general, women and men are different in their kodrat. No matter how high women’s position in society or career, at home it is the husbands who take the lead. They should submit to their husbands’ leadership. They will always have the second position in the household. It is because women are created out of men’s rib. —Bu Miniwati, Bantul1 Bu Miniwati is the only woman head (dukuh) of a subvillage in Bantul. She applied and was appointed by the bupati (at that time also an appointed position) during the New Order in 1988 after gaining the approval of her husband and father to take such a bold step. For more than twenty years she has worked tirelessly to create and run programs to improve the social and economic lives of Tanah Kaya villagers in Pedukuhan Tengah. She has been especially diligent in finding ways to assist women in developing new income sources, and she has also worked to provide activities for the youth of the area to keep them out of trouble. As a woman dukuh, she has no wife to take care of the substantial burdens created by the traditional responsibilities of a government official’s 192 Chapter 6 wife, tasks that include running the local chapters of PKK and Dharma Wanita and providing support and labor for social activities required by this position. Nevertheless, she identifies herself as a housewife and reaffirms a very traditional view of women’s place in society. In the village, Bu Miniwati is both a pioneer for women’s empowerment and a standard-bearer for traditional values. She embodies the same contradictions in the village that Megawati represents for the nation and Midiwati represents for the district. Accurate statistics on women’s representation in leadership roles are hard to come by, especially at the lower levels of local government. In our study, Desa Danau in Sleman also has one pedukuhan with a woman dukuh, whom we interviewed, even though her subvillage was not formally part of our study. Women in these positions were rare under the New Order and remain exceptional after Reformasi, despite efforts by and for women to increase their political power and participation. In this final chapter, we examine the extent and limits to women’s power and empowerment before and after the new political era ushered in by Suharto’s resignation and the end of the New Order. Despite great change in the political order and new efforts to empower women in national politics, they remain marginalized in the political sphere. The same contradictions found in the household and the community are reproduced in the political arena, whether at the village level or the national level. We examine these contradictions to show how they are yet another manifestation of the inconsistencies embedded in women’s status in Indonesian society and mark the limits of their power, whether in the household or in the nation. At the same time, these contradictions provide the key to understanding opportunities as well as barriers for women’s empowerment in Indonesia’s future. Women’s Power and Empowerment 193 Political Reformation and Decentralization In 1999, after the fall of the New Order government, Indonesia passed legislation to decentralize its highly centralized political system . The hallmark of the New Order system of governance was hierarchically organized, autocratic, centralized authority. Despite, or perhaps because of, the diversity and dispersion of Indonesian territory , population, and culture, the thirty-two years of Suharto’s rule were marked by extreme top-down rule from Jakarta, regardless of local practice or tradition. During this period the imposition of a secularized state ideology of national unity (Pancasila) was matched by a tightly controlled administrative structure that extended the absolute authority of the central state bureaucracy down to the smallest local level in virtually every corner of the archipelago. A facade of nominally democratic procedures at the national level that gave only very limited electoral choice to citizens had even fewer counterparts in the periphery, where administrative units were appointed and supervised from the center. Although much of the democracy movement was directed toward the center with demands for an end to repression and corruption and increased representation in the national government, there were also strong pressures to reexamine the relationship between the center and the periphery, particularly the amount of autonomy given to regional...