ABSTRACT
Women and Work in Indonesia is an edited collection of papers that aims to exam-
ine the meaning of work for women in contemporary Indonesia. The chapters inter-
rogate some of the formerly clear-cut divisions that even the rhetoric of advanced
capitalism is now questioning: the splits between work and life, work and family,
between paid work and housework, paid work and child care, and between produc-
tion and reproduction. In focusing on women’s life experiences, we assume a broad
meaning for the word ‘work’, including not only those activities that bring in
income but also home duties, child care, healing and civic work that fulfils obliga-
tions for maintaining social and community networks. This in turn impels interro-
gation of assumptions about economic activity, remunerable activity, divisions of
labour, state and other formal definitions of work, and ultimately about the public
and private spheres. The book thus seeks to make a significant contribution both to
empirical studies of the lived experience and meaning of women’s work in
Indonesia and to feminist thinking about women’s work in the non-Western world.
Dichotomies between paid and unpaid work and between work and other aspects of
life are largely unchallenged in the scholarship about women’s work in Southeast
