MORE THAN THE WEDDING RING : Engaged Women of the Indonesian Nation-State Formation, 1940s-1960s

Indonesia formed its own particular context compared with other former Dutch – or – European Colonies. The process through which this new nation became defined and established was immensely affected by the intersection of the decolonial movement periods and the Cold War, which intertwined with the formation of the Third World (or in Soekarno’s term, ‘the New Emerging Forces'). Most studies on Indonesian history, nevertheless, tend to treat the decolonial movement of Indonesia post-1945 and the Cold War as two separate courses of history, even though they were roughly parallel in time. The studies have also been dominated by male historians’ and/or male scholars’ perspectives, focusing on the roles of elite men as what counts as historically significant. By focusing exclusively on engaged women, this thesis aimed to bring women to the forefront of the analysis, highlighting the different forms of their engagements in the Indonesian Nation-Sate formation, mainly throughout the intersecting periods that fueled dynamic changes in public and personal domains. It will not merely provide chronological accounts to connect the three given narratives: Indonesia’s decolonial processes, the Cold War, and the Third World, but will contribute to the Indonesian and/or transnational women’s history, unhinging the national framework.

The term “engaged women” is deliberate, not merely to refer to those women whose lives became entangled in the decolonial processes in Indonesia and during the Cold War, but also to acknowledge their marriages to Indonesian leftist nationalists. The thesis bears the names of the select group of ‘engaged women’: Molly (Warner) Bondan (1912-1990), Trees Soenito-Heyligers (1915-2003), Carmel (Brickman) Budiardjo (1925-2021), Francisca Casparina Fanggidaej (1925-2013), and Francisca Pattipilohy (1926), who came from diverse backgrounds, classes, races, ethnicities, religions, and nationalities. It analyzed the life stories of these engaged women, the entanglement of their life stories with the decolonial movement, the Cold War, and the development of the Third World, and their engagements with respect to notions of love, hope, future, and citizenship. It addresses these issues by asking what each might mean to them, what kind of discourse they added to the related episodes and ideas, and how their stories have been omitted from historiography. The biographical approach based on archival research and interviews became the central tenet of this thesis.

This thesis reveals how the decolonial movement managed to disrupt the existing social structure. It is evident when the society in this distinctive period was less antagonistic to the more liberal arrangement of their love/life, providing men and women with the freedom to choose their ideals of affection and empathy, as well as of free choices in marriage and family life, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, and nationality. The intersections of various socio-political categories initiated a discovery of “who they are”—the untangling of the complexities of their identities, statuses, ties, networks, and engagements. Further, their engagements show that the decolonial movement that emerged after the Second World War was emancipatory in various ways, providing us with sufficient evidence that a substantial fraction of the women from the new nations played a role in the transnational women’s movement. This evidence has even challenged conventional historical narratives of transnational feminism that originated in the struggle for women’s suffrage in Europe and America, where merely two periods of this movement were identified: the first and second waves in the 1930s and the 1960s, respectively, blatantly excluding the role and experiences of the women of the new nations. Thus, in the Indonesian women’s movement case, the second wave of feminism actually took place earlier than in the West. It was a “wave” that became entangled with the decolonial movement.