In mid-1919, assistant teacher Oepik Amin penned a poem that detailed how women teachers from Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra connected in the periodical Perempoean Bergerak and pleaded that their peers ‘hear this call’. Her contribution demonstrates one way in which women teachers who were geographically distant from each other forged a gendered professional identity through Malay-language periodicals. 

This presentation shares preliminary findings from a new project emerging from Bronwyn’s doctoral research about women and girls’ self-fashioning in Sumatran women’s newspapers. Taking up Oepik Amin’s call, the project investigates Minang women teachers and girl students who set out on and remade rantau pathways between 1910 and 1920, their embodied and emotional experiences of isolation and community, and how acts of movement were intertwined with the expansion of the colonial state.

Focusing on emerging findings about Jambi, Bronwyn first analyses prose and poetry by girl students at government schools in the decade after the Jambi War for how they narrated military presence and the expansion of plantations. Vernacular primary schools proliferated, primarily staffed by teachers from West Sumatra, and were the site of both local resistance and colonial anxieties, especially regarding high rates of absenteeism. Tracing contributors in the weekly Soenting Melajoe, the presentation identifies women teachers and teaching assistants who connected with existing networks and activist causes, particularly related to craft education, in West Sumatra.

Then, the paper turns to consider a protest by six women against slanderous remarks by a Minang woman, married to an official, about the morality of women in Jambi, arguing that this case reveals the co-existence of multiple meanings of education and reproduction of ethnic hierarchies. Throughout, Bronwyn offers reflections about the possibilities offered by slowly reading women and girls’ writings with openness to forms of incomplete historical narrative for a more fine-grained understanding of everyday life, power, and gender in colonial Indonesia.

Speaker

Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones is a historian of gender and colonialism in Indonesia, with a particular interest in print culture as a site and mode of world-making and activism by women and girls in the early twentieth century. Bronwyn teaches gender history and Southeast Asian history at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she also completed her PhD in 2024. She is currently a fellow at KITLV where she is commencing a project on networks of Minangkabau young women teachers in Jambi and Aceh

Moderator

David Kloos is a historian and anthropologist with a focus on Southeast Asia (particularly Indonesia and Malaysia), working as a senior researcher at KITLV. His main interests are religion (particularly Islam), gender, the politics of knowledge formation, visual methods, and the study of the social, political, and cultural aspects of climate change.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Thursday 22 January from 15.30–17.00 PM (CET).  

Image

Left: Extract of Sitti Adams Manda Ratna, “Perdjalanan sebeloemnja perang Bangko,” Soenting Melajoe 4 August 1917.
Right: “Een school (links) en woningen, vermoedelijk te Djambi,” 1918-1923, KITLV 119878. 

Flyer