Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Diane Lauren Wolf is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis.

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"The book is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich. Wolf draws effectively on scholarship ranging from historiography about early modern Europe to recent analyses of the economic conduct of peasant families in contemporary Asia or Latin America. . . . Wolf tells wonderful stories about vibrant, even irrevent, young women." --Frances Gouda, Women's Review of Books

"Wolf's fine study is a model of theoretically self-conscious, empirically-grounded feminist scholarship on Third World women. She forces a bracing reexamination of received wisdom on household strategies, patriarchy, proletarianization, gender relations, the life, cycle, and the impact of factory work on agrarian societies." --James C. Scott, Yale University

"The author does an excellent job of blending together qualitative interview material with more quantitative survey analysis when the latter is appropriate. This work will be a significant contribution to a number of fields." --Carmen Diana Deere, author of Household and Class Relations

"Offers a wealth of important insights on changing gender roles in Southeast Asia, on the analysis of household economies, and on international processes of industrialization." --Choice

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Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java

By Diane L. Wolf

University of California Press

Copyright © 1992 Diane L. Wolf
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520070720


Introduction

If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories. As things are here, life outstrips our vocabulary.
John Berger, Once in Europa

Rini's Story

Rini is a factory daughter. She dropped out of school during the fifth grade, at age twelve, and helped around her parents' house. In 1978, at age fifteen, she looked for a factory job because, as she explained, she was "bored at home," where she spent her time performing household chores, taking care of her younger siblings, gathering fodder for the goat, and occasionally selling vegetables in the market. She had also helped her parents on their small parcels of wet riceland from time to time, but she did not like going to the sawah to do farmwork. She sought factory work on her own initiative, without asking her parents' permission. Indeed, her father did not agree to her new job; he "was angry and quiet for one month" before things returned to normal.1

In Java, strong emotions such as anger are expressed nonverbally, through silence and withdrawal. Directly confronting conflict is though to the highly disruptive to one's inner peace and to family peace as well.

I met Rini (a pseudonym) in 1981, when she was twenty-one years old. Lively, funny, friendly, and very outgoing, Rini challenges dominant notions of Javanese females as reticent and shy. While single, she sometimes flirted with the drivers as she went to and from work. And she was known to stand up to the factory manager, a tough, forceful, and intimidating former policeman.

After two and one-half years of spreading cream on sandwich cookies in the biscuit factory, Rini, who was afraid to walk alone into the village after dark, quit because workers were forced to stay overtime to produce cookies for Idul Fitri, the celebration after Ramadan.2

Young women like Rini avoid walking home alone in the dark because they fear robbery (which sometimes occurs) and spirits (see C. Geertz 1960 for an elaboration of types of spirits). Walking in groups avoids these problems.

After she quit her biscuit job, she started working in an export-oriented garment factory,

sewing pockets on men's cotton shirts made for the European market. She was paid one-half cent (3.3 rupiah) per pocket and earned about 46 to 77 cents daily, considerably less than the already low daily minimum wage of 625 rupiah, or 96 cents. Work hours and wages fluctuated, depending on production orders from abroad; sometimes workers went home early, and other times they had to work overtime.

Rini lived with her parents and three younger siblings in an agricultural village about five kilometers from the factories. Her parents—open, warm, hospitable, and animated people—enjoyed telling me that this, their "seventh marriage," was fated to stick. This was her father's third marriage and her mother's fourth, and it had lasted over twenty years.

Rini's family was poor by any standards. They owned one-eighth of a hectare of dry land (about one-quarter acre) and one-eighth hectare of wet riceland, half of which they rented out. They also sharecropped one-sixteenth hectare of wet riceland from the Carik (village secretary), and they were entitled to half of the harvest (1/32 hectare) from that piece of land. All in all, they received the harvest from only 0.2 hectare of land (less than half an acre), which was not sufficient for subsistence needs. In 1982, they lost their access to the Carik's land when he decided to rent his land to a middleman who would pay him cash.

Their home was of a generous size, made mostly from wood with thatched bamboo walls in the kitchen and a dirt floor. They owned a radio, a pressure lamp, a watch, and one set of store-bought furniture (chairs and a couch) for guests to sit on; the rest of the furniture consisted of the plain and simple sort that poor people buy or make themselves. Their goat, a form of savings, was tethered inside the house. Chickens ran in and out of the house, often interrupting our talks by jumping on the coffee table and pecking at the food the family had offered me—boiled cassava, fried ricecakes, or fresh fruit.

Rini used some of her salary for herself and the rest to help her parents buy rice and pay for her siblings' education. My first income survey showed that in addition to saving one-quarter of her salary (less than $2.00 a week) in a rotating savings association (arisan ), she gave her parents more than one-third; at the same time, she consistently borrowed money from them to pay for lunch and transportation. During the first survey Rini thus managed to overspend her salary by half.

Some family members had made various attempts to get Rini married before she finally agreed to marry a young man whom her uncle arranged for her to meet. Rini, however, was unhappy after her fairly costly wedding and claimed that she slept alone, leaving her husband to sleep in a

brand-new, expensive, store-bought nuptial bed that stood in one corner of her parents' living room. She was distant from her husband, avoiding him whenever possible. Her mother said: "I advised Rini's husband to be patient and quiet. I thought that if he isn't strong, she can marry again later, but the next time, I'm going to choose her husband!"

Rini, though, insisted that her husband was lazy: rather than working, he sat around the house all day and even asked her parents for money. She also told me that she was embarrassed to have such a physically unattractive husband.3

Rini often said, "Suami saya jelek, Mbak" (My husband is ugly).

This conflict quickly became primary material for village gossip. The more Rini rejected her husband, the more difficult I found it to interview other villagers, who preferred instead to discuss Rini's most recent reaction or pronouncement and the most recent story about her new husband.

Rini's parents made it clear that they would not mind if Rini wanted a divorce, since they had had five between the two of them, but they disliked her indecisive and angry behavior. Rini's mother was upset that her daughter wasn't fulfilling her wifely duties: Rini didn't sleep with her husband, nor did she take care of him by making him tea or washing his clothes. Out of embarrassment, Rini's mother washed her son-in-law's clothing.

Rini's husband waited for his wife outside the factory every day after work to escort her home. She so disliked seeing him that she stopped going to work a few days a week and instead went to a friend's house or a nearby market. Her already low weekly wage dropped even lower, and she began to ask her parents more frequently for transportation money; but since they were still burdened by wedding debts, they had nothing to spare.

The financial strain mounted, and finally Rini's parents forced her to quit her factory job. Her father began felling logs and sawing them into boards for sale, while Rini took care of household chores and her younger brother. (Until then, her father had taken care of the child.)

Everyone expected Rini's husband to leave her, but he stayed. When I left Java in early 1983, I thought that she would either get pregnant or divorced, or...