Fearless Speech in Indonesian Women’s Writing

Fearless Speech is a landmark study that explores the manifold ways and means by which Indonesian women workers reflect on, and advocate to improve, their living and working conditions. Through speeches, legal texts, essays, and fiction, these women wield their pens and engage creatively and critically with issues of work, family, activism, emotion, and writing. In so doing, they not only bear testament to, but are themselves the makers and promoters of, a vibrant, resilient working-class culture.

-- Caroline S. Hau, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University

This is a unique and invaluable book. Historians, sociologists and anthropologists of labor or Indonesia will gain access to a treasure trove of new material based on the personal accounts of Indonesian female workers from the 1980s to the present day. These provide new avenues through which to understand recent social and economic change in Indonesia, based on the experiences of a segment of Indonesian society that is all too often overlooked by analysts more typically focused on middle class or elite males.

-- Vedi Hadiz, Professor of Asian Studies, Asia Institute, University of Melbo