of artificial destinies and enduring cycles: a century-old legacy

Text by Ivo Pradipta

When you look at the woman in the picture, there is a sense of majesty behind the stillness.

She sits, half-leaned, onto the arm of the chair, facing forward, almost regal with her earrings and the brooches on her complicated kebaya.

If you were Indonesian and lived in Java, you’d know that she was very rich.

The average Indonesian woman at the time would not have been dressed like her. She would not have been able to afford the brooches or the fine, velvet kebaya she seemed to be wearing, let alone a printed photograph.

We wonder then, who this woman might be, and what role she might have had in society.

Time places us in the middle of the 19th century and early 20th century, at the precipice of the national awakening, and just in time for Kartini to have written her letters. We are able, then, to perfectly visualise what this woman’s life might have been like.

The fate of Javanese women at that time period in particular was painful to reminisce. Marriage was expected after a girl turned 16, followed by childbirth. Obedience was expected in all aspects of life, obedience to your husband, to your parents, to your elders, to rigid customs created before your parents were even born. Acceptance to polygamy was not only expected, but was an irrefutable fact. A woman was only good for reproduction, to continue the family line. Many children were seen as fruitful, regardless of the fate of their mothers.

It was worse for women of the lower class. If you were a servant, or born to farmer parents, you not only had to obey your parents, but also had nobles to answer to. You were a serf. You lower your head when you meet royalty. You walk on your knees in front of them. Your chances of being raped by the nobles you were serving and of being plucked out of your life and made a gundik to a Dutch man were infinitely higher.

Indeed, we wonder what life must have been like for the woman in the photograph.

As she seemed to be of noble standing, she might have gone to school, like Kartini did. Then again, she might have differing views from Kartini. Maybe she accepted her position in the world. Maybe she went along with the near-house-arrest phase before her marriage. Then the wedding with a man twice her age. Children, next. Grandchildren, if she was lucky enough to stay alive. Eventually, she would have become a perpetrator of the inescapable patriarchal norms that confined her, having turned bitter with age and time. She would have been strict with her daughter, stricter still with her granddaughter, upholding the rules she’d only known as law all her life.

Or she could’ve gone through life fighting tooth and nail against man-made fate, only to be beaten down by it eventually, going through everything all the same, with much more suffering. Always wondering.

She could’ve heard about the girl from Rembang near the end of her life, and could have wondered, wistfully, if there was a world where they could have met and talked. A world where they were free to do so.

Whatever her attitude towards life might have been, it wouldn’t have saved her from her destiny. At the end, the system beat her, and she faded away into nothingness, leaving us only a single picture to ponder about.

The bare bones of the patriarchal system that ensnared her are still very much alive in Indonesia today, stubbornly clinging to the everyday lives of our women, riding the coattails of choice and religion. We have been ‘liberated’ into the work force, yet all that does is privatise our suffering, pushing it behind the closed door of our so-called nuclear family homes. Reproduction and serfdom are still expected of us within the home and in society. At work, you lower your head for your superiors, walk on your proverbial knees, as Indonesians do not say no to their bosses. At home, you obey your fathers, brothers, husbands. You cook, you clean, you make their world go round. You only pursue education so you can teach your children, which you must have, with the husband you must marry before a certain age.

A hundred years have passed, but women in Indonesia are still confined to one role: a means of reproduction.

It’s made worse with the scale of ecological destruction happening within our borders and outside of it. Women are the most impacted group as the Earth heats up. A study done in Indonesia showed that women experience an increase in gender-based violence where water is scarce1. What’s more interesting is the lower you are in the social class, the more you experience violence. Wives are abused by both their husbands and mother-in-laws. It’s a heartbreaking validation of what we have always known, a cycle repeating a hundred years in the future. The lower you are in the social and economic strata, the more prone you are to abuse.

Ultimately, class is what divides us and the woman in the picture. If she existed today, she would have been a descendant of nobility, profiting off of generational wealth. The changes made to our laws on property ownership would have benefited her. Though the same capitalism that gives her that benefit would have still dictated that she produce children to maintain her family’s hold on power. She wouldn’t have been able to escape that one devastating role, but she would have enjoyed the privilege of money and connection. She would have been very content. Unlike us serfs, who, still on our knees, are only able to wonder wistfully.

Reference:
1. Cole S, Tallman P, Salmon-Mulanovich G, Rusyidi B. Water insecurity is associated with gender-based violence: A mixed-methods study in Indonesia. Social Science & Medicine. 2024 Mar;344:116507. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.116507

Artist Statement I approached the prompt presented to me like a detective deducting their latest case. What came out of that, I put into words.
My immediate thought was that she must have been some form of nobility, the second was class divide. So I wrote about these things, trying not to undermine the suffering and oppression she must have gone through back then, even as a noble. I also tried to describe how things have changed for women in Indonesia. In the process, I discovered that some things have stayed the same.
The last time I worked with Myra for a feminist publication seven years ago, I gave them a poem. Today, equipped with more knowledge, I presented them with an essay. With both, I still hope for the same thing.
I hope this ignites within you a sort of fire, an anger that is unquenchable except through justice and betterment of the world. I hope you demand equity, and uphold your fellow women. To my Indonesian sisters: I hope you demand everything. In this world, you turn the wheels of life with your weary, calloused hands. Both in the workplace and in the home.