Teaching indonesian girls in java and bali, 1900-1942:Dutch progressives, the infatuation with ‘oriental’ refinement, and ‘western’ ideas about proper womanhood[1]

Abstract

This article examines the Dutch ‘Orientalist’ romance that inspired the creation of a system of private schools for aristocratic Javanese girls in early twentieth-century Indonesia. By inventing and exalting a pattern of reciprocity that presumably characterized feudalism in both a European or Asian setting - noblesse oblige - Dutch progressives expected that the education of aristocratic daughters would naturally ‘trickle down’ to poor women in village communities. In the process, upper-class girls were incorporated into a social taxonomy that mirrored Western sensibilities about status and gracious manners, while peasant women and Eurasian girls, who lived on the other side of the colonial divide, were inscribed with ‘otherness. © 1995 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.