ABSTRACT
Farming and farm labour are contested domains for women in Indonesia. In state
assessments of labour, women landowners are frequently subsumed under the cat-
egory of housewife. When women perform farm labour, they are usually consid-
ered to be part of ‘family labour’, or an extra hand in the field, due to state
assumptions about families and ‘nuclear’ households. State representations of
women as mothers encourage them to direct their labour toward their husbands
and children; other work, even farming, is considered secondary. The women-in-
development literature tends to represent Indonesian women farm labourers as
poor, down-trodden workers in need of liberation from their wearying toil. West
Sumatra is an area where women participate in a wide range of labour relations,
including farming one’s own land, agricultural wage labour, collective labour and
sharecropping. By examining women’s farm work and, more broadly, their labour
practices, in West Sumatra, this chapter explores the contestations over the defini-
tion of women’s ‘work’, asking how women’s ‘farm work’ in West Sumatra is both
integrated into and resists notions of ‘work’.
