Post #10: Feminist Anthropology as cultural critique

Women's labour activism is perhaps something that the current generation of women and men in the West had taken for granted as our industrialized society has taken significant steps in achieving a more egalitarian division of labour. But in the case of Indonesian women, the rise of women's labour activism stemmed from two rather different social class sources. On one side middle-class feminists in Indonesia who through the vehicle of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) were successful in raising national and international awareness of the problems that Indonesian women faced in general (link). These middle-class, privileged Indonesian women of the 90s used their social status and international NGO contacts in order to build up external pressure for local change. On the other hand the new wave of unions of Indonesian female factory workers, in calling for workplace gender equity, had acted as more of a self-help group/work group than a traditionally counter-cultural feminist organization of the middle-class women. The main struggle of these female migrant labourers and factory workers is to achieve better working conditions and not to further feminist agenda worldwide or reach some sort of solidarity with women in other countries (link). The two groups of Indonesian women present a case of defamiliarization by cultural juxtaposition in how they almost seem to outline the implicit western stereotype that all feminists are the same (pictures of angry hyperideological bra-burning American middle-class housewives of 1960-70s instantly come to mind) while at the same time giving the reader a glimpse at exactly the kind of everyday struggles (for better working opportunities, conditions and equal pay) that inspired the whole feminism movement in the first place. By looking at the similar case of female labour activism in the Philippines one realizes that not only are the feminists in other cultures evolving under different social pressures and norms but that these feminist movements arise while facing obstacles unique to that culture. So the poor migrant worker women activists in Indonesia are often ostracized and generally "considered as a threat"by their male Muslim coworkers and family (link). In the Philippines, the women's labour activism is an urban phenomenon in contrast to Indonesia's middle class-based feminism (which perhaps is more familiar to our western worldview) because Filipino feminists are concentrated in urban areas while the majority of poor female migrant workers still reside in the rural areas (link).