No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2025
This Forum reflects the stimulating conversations we had as participants in a roundtable at the 2023 Boston meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. The discussion centred on the position of women (as both contributors and subjects) in competing visions of modernity in Southeast Asia. Our overall goals were to explore how women contributed to these visions and the extent to which their hopes were realised. In the process, numerous questions arose: What were women's experiences in these modernities? How were their roles influenced by class, ethnicity, religion, and age? And, finally, how do analyses of women-centred involvement inform broader understandings of social, cultural, economic, and political transformations in the region? The contributors reflect on their own trajectory in the study of women's history, the sources they have been able to leverage, the intersection between ‘modernity’ and nationalism, the related issue of women's position in postcolonial nation-states, and the question of how ideas of sexuality (in the family, society, politics) were changing. Throughout the Forum, we argue that the experience of women, and their (often but not necessarily agentic) contribution, is necessary to fully grasp the region's multiple entanglements with ‘modernity/ies’ in a variety of fields.
1 Christina Firpo, ‘Beauty and the Nation: Women, Culture, and the National Image in Interwar Vietnam', New York: Columbia University Press, 2025; Chiara Formichi, ‘Domestic nationalism: Muslim women, health, and modernity in Indonesia’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025); Guo-Quan Seng, Strangers in the family: Gender, patriliny, and the Chinese in colonial Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023); Chie Ikeya, InterAsian intimacies across religion, race, and colonialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024); Taomo Zhou, ‘Finding Francisca: Becoming and unbecoming mother in a decolonized world’ (forthcoming).
2 Guo-Quan Seng, ‘Disputed properties, contested identities: Family law, social reform and the creole Chinese in Dutch colonial Java (1830–1942)’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015).
3 Hersi Setiawan and Francisca Fanggidaej, Memoar perempuan revolusioner (Yogyakarta: Galangpress, 2006).
4 Francisca Fanggidaej, diary entry, 16 Mar. 1986, Francisca Fanggidaej papers, Institute of International Social History, Amsterdam.
5 Laville, Helen, ‘Gender and women's rights in the Cold War’, in The Oxford handbook of the cold war, ed. Immerman, Richard and Goedde, Petra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 523–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Wieringa, Saskia, Sexual politics in Indonesia (Houndmills: Institute of Social Studies; Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Ibid., p. 17; Julia I. Suryakusuma, ‘State Ibuism: The social construction of womanhood in the Indonesian New Order’ (master's thesis, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, 1988).
8 McCarthy, Helen, Double lives: A history of working motherhood (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)Google Scholar.
9 See, for example, Armstrong, Elisabeth, ‘Before Bandung: The anti-imperialist women's movement in Asia and the Women's International Democratic Federation’, Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, 2 (2016): 305–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chase, Michelle, ‘“Hands off Korea!” Women's internationalist solidarity and peace activism in early Cold War Cuba’, Journal of Women's History 32, 3 (2020): 64–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; de Haan, Francisca, ‘Continuing Cold War paradigms in Western historiography of transnational women's organisations: The case of the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF)’, Women's History Review 19, 4 (2010): 547–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGregor, Katherine E., ‘Indonesian women, the Women's International Democratic Federation and the struggle for “women's rights”, 1946–65’, Indonesia and the Malay World 40, 117 (2012): 193–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nasser, Yasser Ali, ‘Finding “Asia” after imperialism: Transnational visions of the “Asian woman” in China and India, 1949–1955’, Twentieth-Century China 46, 1 (2022): 62–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward bound: American families in the Cold War era (New York: Basic, 1998)Google Scholar.
11 Suzy Kim, ‘Revolutionary mothers: Women in the North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 52, 4 (2010): 742–67; and Chase, ‘“Hands off Korea!’’
12 Manning, Kimberley Ens, The Party family: Revolutionary attachments and the gendered origins of state power in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2023)Google Scholar; Suryakusuma, State Ibuism.
13 See, for example, Arlie Hochschild, The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home (New York: Viking Penguin, 1989); Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of feminism: From state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis (London: Verso, 2013); and Caitlyn Collins, Making motherhood work: How women manage careers and caregiving (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
14 May, Homeward bound.
15 Zhou Taomo, ‘510 not found: The reterritorialization of Sino-Southeast Asian relations in the Chinese hinterland’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 43, 3 (2022): 325–46.
16 Honig describes similar dynamics among the general Chinese population during the Cultural Revolution. See Emily Honig, ‘Socialist sex: The Cultural Revolution revisited’, Modern China 29, 2 (2003): 143–75.