Indonesia and the Malay World

ISSN: 1363-9811 (Print) 1469-8382 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cimw20

The stigmatisation of widows and divorcees

(janda) in Indonesian society

Lyn Parker & Helen Creese

To cite this article: Lyn Parker & Helen Creese (2016) The stigmatisation of widows and
divorcees (janda) in Indonesian society, Indonesia and the Malay World, 44:128, 1-6, DOI:
10.1080/13639811.2015.1111647

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2015.1111647

Published online: 18 Jan 2016.

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 INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD, 2016
VOL. 44, NO. 128, 1–6
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639811.2015.1111647

INTRODUCTION

The stigmatisation of widows and divorcees (janda) in

Indonesian society
Lyn Parker and Helen Creese

This special issue is devoted to the study of janda (widows and divorcees) in Indonesia and
the stigma that they experience. The single word janda refers to both widows and divor-
cees in Indonesian, but can be made more specific with the addition of qualifiers: janda
mati (widow) and janda cerai (divorcee). The idea for the special issue grew out of a
team research project in which researchers from the University of Queensland and the
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University of Western Australia came together in three workshops held in April,

October and December, 2013, to study the social and cultural construction of janda-
hood. As far as we know, this was the first time that janda had been identified and
studied as a distinct social group and identity. The reason we proposed the project was
our understanding that janda, as individuals and as a group, suffered discrimination
and disadvantage in contemporary Indonesia. We knew of extreme disadvantage and
widow sacrifice in India, and in the precolonial Indic courts of Bali, though in Bali it
was only a small number of minor wives of royalty who committed sati (Creese 2004).
We were not proposing that widows in Indonesia share the plight of widows in India.
It was, rather, our knowledge of women in today’s Indonesia who are unhappily
married but remain married out of fear of the stigmatisation of divorce; of women we
know to be divorced but who keep it to themselves, as best they can, out of shame; and
of the rash of unflattering representations of janda in contemporary sinetron (Indonesian
soap operas), pop songs and movies.
The impetus for the project was thus the researchers’ awareness that janda are routinely
stigmatised in everyday Indonesian social life. Single and unattached, many with depen-
dent children and living in straitened economic circumstances, janda comprise a major
disadvantaged social grouping within contemporary Indonesian society. Some have lost
the breadwinner in the family and need to eke out a livelihood for themselves and their
children for the first time; for others, the loss of a husband is not felt as an economic
loss. There are an estimated 9 million Female Heads of Household (FHH) in Indonesia,
14% of the total of 65 million households in Indonesia (Akhmadi et al. 2010: 1). The
vast majority of FHH are janda. They figure disproportionately among the poor and vul-
nerable (Akhmadi et al. 2010).
Many janda are also vulnerable because of their uncertain marital status. Many do not
have legally recognised marriages and/or divorces, as is common in Lombok (Platt 2010).
Some were child brides, not meeting the minimum legal age of marriage for women of 16
years. Many were married secretly or unofficially (nikah siri – see Parker et al. 2016). Many
are poor and live remote from government offices and so cannot afford the cost of a formal
marriage registration or divorce (Akhmadi et al. 2010). Some have been abandoned by
their husbands. Although the concept of the Female-Headed Household is well established
© 2015 Editors, Indonesia and the Malay World
 2 INTRODUCTION

in development discourse internationally, in Indonesia the Marriage Law of 1974 makes it

clear that men are the heads of households. Thus, in Indonesia the Female-Headed House-
hold eludes both definition and legal status (Akhmadi et al. 2010: ix). Many janda are in
these ways living in a legal and economic limbo, neither supported by a husband nor
entitled to support for children; some want to remarry but cannot because of their unver-
ifiable marital status.
While we understood that janda often experience economic hardship and structural
discrimination because of their ambiguous legal status, we wanted to explore the cultural
roots and logic of the stigma attached to janda-hood, and what it means to be a janda in
contemporary Indonesia. Marriage and parenthood are the markers of social adulthood in
Indonesia. All people are expected to marry, and marriage ceremonies are generally large,
festive occasions, where families’ wealth and status are on display and the couple are pub-
licly announced as a new social unit. Marriage is also the only religiously and socially sanc-
tioned relationship in which people may engage in sex and in which children are to be
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raised. Because marriage is almost universal in Indonesia, not being married is anomalous
– whether by virtue of being not yet married, separated from one’s spouse, abandoned,
divorced or separated by death. However, this anomalous status is distinctly gendered:
30 year old bachelors are not rushed into marriage by their parents or labelled as stranded
and unmarriageable; divorced men are not blamed for their ‘broken homes’; neither
divorced nor widowed men are made the target of salacious gossip or of sexual harass-
ment, nor are they viewed as a threat to other marriages. The burden of not being
married is borne only by women.
In Indonesia, a woman should be attached to a man, by marriage; she should only have
sex with that man, within marriage; and she should bear children within marriage. Such a
woman is the ibu: the sexually contained, faithful wife, dutiful housewife and loving
mother – a paragon of virtue. A woman who strays from this path – whether by choice,
chance or circumstance – suffers stigmatisation. The janda stands alone: she is sexually
experienced and theoretically an unattached woman. This ‘unprotected’ status, according
to Indonesian cultural logic, means that she is sexually available. In turn, this presumed
sexual availability makes her vulnerable to sexual harassment and unwanted attention,
and then it is a small step to ‘presumed promiscuity’ (Mahy et al. 2016). The community
are ready to malign the janda as immoral, and this presumed immorality is the core of the
gendered stigma. Any female deviation from normative, reproductive heterosexuality
practised within marriage is strongly stigmatised in Indonesia. The stigma attacks the
moral identity and worth of a woman, and makes it hard for her to establish herself as
a respectable woman of good morals.
The ethnographic papers in the collection, based on fieldwork in sites as diverse as the
island of Wawonii, off the southeast coast of Sulawesi, and the city of Perth, Australia,
seem to show a nationwide stigmatisation of janda, though with local variations (Mahy
et al. 2016; Parker et al. 2016; Putra and Creese 2016). In Wawonii, for instance, the dis-
crimination is structural and precisely calibrated: the bride price for a single virginal
woman is 30 coconut trees, and for a janda, only 10 trees (Parker et al. 2016).
However, the socio-economic hierarchy in Wawonii is not elaborate, and it is quite a
‘flat’ society, with most people living at or near survival level. Apart from the bride
price, stigmatisation of janda is muted and widows are pitied. Generally in Indonesia,
we find that the stigmatisation of young divorcees, often described as janda kembang
 INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD 3

(literally, flower divorcee) is more sexually marked than that for widows; we also find that
sexual stigmatisation decreases with a woman’s age. The most extreme cases of stigmatis-
ation in this continuum are the so-called ‘communist widows’: those whose husbands were
killed in the 1965 massacres of alleged PKI (Indonesian Community Party) supporters
(Pohlman 2016). The bizarre sexual myths surrounding the women connected with the
PKI demonised these janda as dangerous and sexually voracious.
Thus, the ethnographic and historical record shows that the unhappy position of con-
temporary janda is variable. Precolonial and colonial data from Bali reinforce the idea that
the meaning of divorce and widowhood is constructed and therefore not immutable
(Creese 2016). Although Bali is unlike most of the rest of Indonesia in its Hindu religion,
patrilineal kinship system, virilocal residence pattern and agnatic inheritance, it shares
with the rest of the archipelago the ubiquity of marriage, which signifies the attainment
of adulthood and a concern with the control of ‘dangerous’ female sexuality when
women are independent (Creese 2016).
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The collection showcases the stigma experienced by widows and divorcees, but some of
the articles here also show how divorced and widowed women reclaim respectability. The
strategies that janda in Bali use to negotiate their difficult status include establishing econ-
omic independence, casting themselves as caring mothers, and meeting their social and
religious obligations (Putra and Creese 2016). While reclaiming the ‘good mother’ identity
is perhaps the most common theme in cleansing a soiled reputation, religious devotion,
hard work and reconnecting with family and community are also deployed by janda to
destigmatise their identity and ameliorate their position.
In the first article in the collection, Lyn Parker establishes the theoretical underpinnings
of the ethnographic and historical experiences of janda described in the individual articles
in this special issue. She first surveys recent social science literature on stigma in society
and then theorises and contextualises the stigmatisation of janda in the specific social
and cultural context of Indonesia. She traces the major socio-cultural transformations
in gender and family ideology of the New Order period that have resulted in greater stig-
matisation of women who fall outside the normative patterns of heterosexual marriage and
sexuality. As divorce rates have fallen in the face of powerful ideologies of family and
gender, and of the wife and mother, the ibu, as the ideal of Indonesian womanhood, so
too the non-marriage of women in Indonesia has come to be regarded as increasingly
oppositional to community values and has led to greater stigma for janda, and especially
for divorcees, who are denigrated as sexually available and active. The collapse of the New
Order has done little to ameliorate stigma for janda within Indonesian society.
The second paper by Lyn Parker, Irma Riyani and Brooke Nolan turns to ethnographic
data drawn from two contrasting Muslim communities to demonstrate the gendered and
moral nature of being a janda in parts of contemporary Indonesia. Set against the con-
struction of the ideal Islamic marriage, in urban Bandung, janda are seen to be sexually
available and promiscuous. There, Islamic pressures militate against divorce, while
widows may opt to keep their marital status secret to avoid stigma. Loss of face and
status and the impact on children ensures many women prefer to remain in an
unhappy or even violent marriage. In the Wawonii isolated village setting, on the other
hand, the possibilities for agency are greater. Individual women manage disadvantage
by drawing on social support from families that allows these janda to negotiate their
status in ways that avoid the levels of stigmatisation that are found in urban Bandung.
 4 INTRODUCTION

The janda whose stories are related in this paper actively seek to develop strategies to avoid
stigmatisation. In particular, by re-framing the moral category of janda-hood through
remarriage, religious service and especially through motherhood, they can hope to re-
establish respectability.
The next article is the contribution by Petra Mahy, Monika Winarnita and Nicholas
Herriman, which extends the range of ethnographic sites: their field sites are a mining
town in Kalimantan, an expatriate Indonesian community in Perth, Australia and a
village in East Java, respectively. This study demonstrates the different ways in which
janda experience the pejorative stereotypes of janda-hood in their daily lives. The perva-
siveness of these stereotypes is remarkable. Their discursive effect on social status, life
opportunities and self-representation are highlighted in the authors’ multi-sited and
multi-positioned exploration of the diverse experiences of a range of janda – from
young widows in a village community who are prey to male attention, to middle-aged
internal migrants who seek to distance themselves from their past by moving away
from their communities, to older women living outside Indonesia, who find the stereo-
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types cross international borders. Many janda remain vulnerable to the economic and
social difficulties experienced by unmarried women in Indonesian society, particularly
those with dependent children. However as this article explores, some are able to success-
fully circumvent stigma and marginalisation in their communities, particularly through
migration.
The collection takes an historical turn with Annie Pohlman’s article on the gendered
politics surrounding the derogatory social construction of the women who became
janda when they were left widowed by the 1965 massacres. This study draws on the life
histories and testimonies of a number of women who were widowed by the death, disap-
pearance or imprisonment of their husbands amidst the turmoil of that period. Many
women were themselves detained but even after their release experienced severe forms
of economic and social disadvantage as former political prisoners. For these women,
pejorative stereotypes of sexual availability and of widowhood more generally became
entangled with, and were exacerbated by, the demonisation of women associated with
the PKI as sexually voracious. The resulting double stigmatisation – of janda-hood and
of political links to the PKI – left such janda particularly vulnerable to sexual predation
and violence. Here, the impact of deviation from normative behaviours and idealised
norms, and the detrimental effects of janda-hood on social status, livelihood and repu-
tation, are revealed at their bleakest and most damaging.
The historical focus continues in a study by Helen Creese of the institutionalisation of
the legal status of janda in Bali as a result of colonial intervention and the development
of the complex pluralistic legal system in Indonesia. In the early 20th century, adat (cus-
tomary) law became the principal site for the regulation of social relationships, particu-
larly the forging of a marital relationship and its dissolution, either through divorce or
widowhood. In their efforts to improve the status of women by access to administrative
legal practices through the courts, colonial authorities reified the status of divorced
women in moralising administrative processes that entrenched patriarchal adat regu-
lations in what had previously been a flexible and transactional, indigenous approach
to the end of marriage. Formal recognition was only one factor shaping the determi-
nation of janda-hood in colonial Bali where Balinese Hindu religion and patriarchal
social and kinship systems circumscribed agency and autonomy in culturally specific
 INDONESIA AND THE MALAY WORLD 5

ways. Case studies drawn from the extensive colonial adat law documentation reflect the
structural and cultural disadvantage Balinese janda continued to face in spite of these
reforms.
In the final article, Darma Putra and Helen Creese link the historical construction and
stereotyping of Balinese janda with the ethnographic present through an examination of
the individual life stories of three Balinese janda. These ethnographic case studies demon-
strate the complex interplay in contemporary Bali between resilient and ever strengthen-
ing adat traditions and personal agency. Two crucial factors enable Balinese janda to
negotiate the cultural constraints that may threaten to alienate them from the communal
life that shapes Balinese society and religion. The first is family and community support,
particularly the capacity for religious and social reintegration into their natal families fol-
lowing divorce or the death of a spouse, and the second is adequate access to the often
hard-won economic resources that enable them to support themselves and their children.
In these ways, they are able to overcome stigma and to maintain social status and accep-
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tance within their local adat communities, while rebuilding new lives in ways that are cul-
turally and personally acceptable.
This collection of articles provides the opportunity to examine the status and stigma-
tisation of janda in Indonesia. The historical and ethnographic case studies presented
here bear witness to the common experiences of Indonesian janda across time and
across geographical and religious differences, but also to the variety of their circumstances.
These data highlight the enduring nature of the negative stereotypes and stigmatisation of
janda across communities and generations. They reflect the tension between stigmatis-
ation and agency in contemporary Indonesia, where colonial and post-independence his-
torical legacies, the increasing adherence to conservative religious tenets in Islam and
Hinduism, and the force of popular and social media all serve to enforce and reinforce
stigma. At the same time, these articles provide evidence of new avenues for resistance
and destigmatisation, played out in different ways in rural and urban communities.
These articles present just a sample of individual stories and perspectives on janda in
Indonesia and leave considerable scope for the exploration of further promising areas
of investigation, which, as Parker (2016) points out, might focus on the class dimensions
of stigma, evolving family structures, such as broken homes, and representations in
popular culture.

Acknowledgement
The authors wish to thank the UWA-UQ Bilateral Research Collaboration Awards which funded
the collaboration of researchers on this project.

Author biographies
Lyn Parker is a Professor and anthropologist in the School of Social Science, University of Western
Australia. Her most recent book is Adolescents in contemporary Indonesia (Routledge, 2013), co-
authored with Pam Nilan. Email: lyn.parker@uwa.edu.au
Helen Creese is Associate Professor in Indonesian in the School of Language and Cultures, Univer-
sity of Queensland. Her most recent book is Bali in the early nineteenth century: the ethnographic
accounts of Pierre Dubois (Brill, forthcoming). Email: h.creese@uq.edu.au
 6 INTRODUCTION

ORCID
Lyn Parker http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2218-9919

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