ABSTRACT
In recent years considerable attention has been given to the nature of women’s writing and how women have managed to give public voice to their experience. In particular, this question has been posed with regard to the doubly marginalised, women of the working class, and of colonised and enslaved nations. Research into the provenance of women-authored texts and analysis of how women have appropriated or subverted dominant discourses in their effort to be heard, have suggested that for women, particularly colonised women, to speak publicly is rarely unproblematical. This chapter draws on such approaches in examining the writing of a ‘well-known’ figure in Indonesian history, Raden Ajeng Kartini. It is concerned to explore the constructed layers of gender and politics in which Kartini’s voice is entangled and which governed her experience of education in her particular colonial context. It then proceeds to examine her responses to that experience.
