An alternative family: An elite christian girls' school on Java in a context of social change, c. 1907-1939

Abstract

The Koningin Wilhelmina School was a prestigious Dutch-language Protestant school for the daughters of the Javanese nobility in Yogyakarta. Opened in 1907 through the efforts of a group of elite Protestant women in the Netherlands, supporters of the Dutch Reformed mission saw the school as a tool to reform the spiritual and moral lives of young Javanese girls. At the same time, the school presented local parents with an opportunity to anchor their daughters more firmly in the Javanese colonial elite. This article investigates how the Dutch teachers at the school tried to provide their Javanese students with a surrogate Christian family to create distance from their milieu of origin. An analysis of letters by Koningin Wilhelmina School graduates shows how this particular effort to partly remove children from their own culture opened the door for highly diverse life trajectories.