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 Melbourne

In a meticulously detailed study, Suryomenggolo presents an intimate portrayal of working-class women from Indonesia. Through personal narration, the book details the experiences emerging from individual stories of women workers and connects them in an attempt to help the reader understand the struggles of female labourers beyond the much-publicised “economic miracle” of Indonesia’s industrial policy, first implemented in the late 1970s. By presenting individual experiences, Suryomenggolo sheds light on how working-class women reflect on the exploitation of labour as well as gender discrimination over the course of a period during which capitalism has been transforming into its most aggressive form. The result is a book that narrates the stories of female menial labourers who successfully air their grievances despite social, political and cultural limitations. A notable strength of the book is that it shows how individual events and non-academic narratives, written by underprivileged working-class women without a university education, can be studied and considered academically. The book was published at the right moment and remains highly relevant, given how current and yet underappreciated the issue is.

* International Quarterly for Asian Studi