Women and Work in Indonesia

This book examines the meaning of work for women in contemporary Indonesia. In focusing on women’s life experiences, we assume a broad definition for the word ‘work’, including not only those activities that bring in income but also home duties, child care, healing and civic work that fulfils obligations for maintaining social and community networks. This in turn impels interrogation of assumptions about economic activity, remunerable activity, divisions of labour, state and other formal definitions of work, and ultimately about the public and private spheres. The contributions to this book discuss women’s work in a range of different settings, both rural and urban, and in different locations in Sumatra, Lombok, Java, Sulawesi
and Kalimantan, and in Singapore and Malaysia. A wide range of types of employment are considered, including agricultural and domestic labour, industrial work, and new forms of work in the tertiary sector such as media and tourism, demonstrating how capitalism, globalization and local culture together produce gendered patterns of work with particular statuses and identities.