Introduction

For the vast majority of young Indonesian women maidenhood is a journey, beginning with the surrender of their childhood at menarche and culminating in their arrival at the adult destination of marriage and motherhood. Women’s passage from girlhood to womanhood encompasses the social, emotional, spiritual and physical development integral to the formation of female sexuality and subjectivity. The terrain traversed on their journeys to womanhood is shaped by hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ideologies of sexuality and gender, by women’s pursuit of competing desires, and by the dangers inherent in negotiating female sexuality independently of marriage. The following pages map the experiences and development of young Muslim women in the specific life-stage of maiden-hood. This approach privileges a conception of female identity that is grounded in women’s own understandings of their social status prior to marriage. Speaking of maidenhood offers an alternative to the scientific/academic terminology so often used to define young women and their health-related experiences. Standard demographic and epidemiological categorizations of youth, as adolescents (15-19 years) or young adults (20-24 years), fail to capture the significance of social status, sexual reputation, virginity and marriageability in shaping the identities of unmarried women. While the numeric variables represented by age groups enable the study of populations, they hold less salience for understanding how gender identity and social status are central to the lives and health of young women. This is particularly the case in contemporary Indonesia when the life-stage of maidenhood varies considerably in duration and is increasingly prolonged.