The New Order may have fallen, but women’s roles are still being manipulated for political purposes
Julia Suryakusuma
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In authoritarian contexts, the state seeks to control its subjects and deploy them to support regime goals. Indonesia’s New Order, often labelled an ‘authoritarian developmentalist’ regime, prioritised economic development. Politics was therefore seen as a risk to national stability, which the regime saw as a prerequisite for that development. Making up half of the population, women – including poor women – were depoliticised and mobilised to support the New Order’s developmentalist goals through a series of highly interventionist state institutions.
Under Suharto’s New Order, a corrupt and oppressive state therefore came to dominate all aspects of life – including the social construction of womanhood. In 1988, I wrote an MA thesis about this, called ‘State Ibuism: the Social Construction of Womanhood in New Order Indonesia’. The first gendered analysis of the New Order, the thesis was an attempt to look at the inappropriateness for poor village women of state-engineered programs imbued with middle-class values. In it, I argued that while women were not taken into account in formal politics, the social and political engineering of women was, in fact, an integral part of the New Order State’s stranglehold on Indonesian society. The dominant gender ideology defined women as wives and mothers, as epitomised in Dharma Wanita, the state-sanctioned organisation for civil servants’ wives. In the formal hierarchy of this
