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Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Women

Something by which I have been lately impressed in talking to several young Indonesian women lately is an appreciation of the strength upon which they have arrived as a result of coming from where they have been. As women in this developing nation, whether of Muslim or Hindu heritage, they have long been counted as second class members in society, burdened and hindered by male oriented expectations and role restrictions. Of course, it is a dynamic with which women everywhere are intimately acquainted, and yet the modern western woman must cast back fifty years or so to recollect a time when so many doors were still quite firmly closed, so many avenues either strictly forbidden or fraught with threat and negative consequence. 

A female in the Balinese culture, for instance, upon marriage becomes a member of her new family and no longer of her birth family, which holds no further obligation or responsibility. If she divorces her new husband, she cannot simply 'go home', for her home is exclusively the house of the new husband and family. To her birth family, she is a shame, and in society an object of scorn. No surprise, then, that a bad marriage is quietly endured. 

But even in a happy situation, the expectations of a woman are rigidly focused on child-bearing and meal preparation, the satisfaction of religious roles and functions. The wide world, its freedoms and rewards, its challenges and intricacies, is left to men.

It is exactly for these reasons, through struggle, through stubborn, tireless effort, through striving against the current, through the character and mind steeling exercise of the ambition to succeed in freedom against all odds that the Indonesian woman has formed in herself a creature of superior character and strength to that of the man who has simply trod along the well marked routes of tradition. 

And what I very often see is that the emancipated woman, along her difficult way, has essentially left the typical man behind. She is now smarter than he, wiser than he, more emotionally sophisticated than he, more able than he. Is it any surprise that so many now seek to depart the country all together? What a strange thing it must be--to have wanted only to be equal, but to have ended up more than equal. 

Of course, there's a serpent in this garden as well, that being the inheritance of the peculiar burdens of men--but that's a nuther story all together, ain't it. 

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