A Singular Woman (29 page)

Within a week or two of starting at Ford, Ann flew to India on a trip that would end up shaping her approach to her job from then on. A young program officer in New York, Adrienne Germain, who had been working with the international program staff to increase Ford's involvement in the advancement of women, had invited Ann to join her on a trip she was taking. Unlike Indonesia, India already had a movement to improve the condition of poor working women. Ford was in contact with groups organizing street vendors and other self-employed women. Germain, who several months later would become the foundation's first female country representative and be sent to Bangladesh, had extended the invitation, she told me, “as a way of collaborating with Ann—to say, ‘Look, these are the kind of women-specific programs that are going on that are really quite impressive and that you won't yet see in Indonesia.'”

They met with leaders of the Self Employed Women's Association, a then nine-year-old trade union based in Ahmedabad with roots in the country's labor, cooperative, and women's movements, which has since gone on to create a network of cooperatives and India's first women's bank. They visited the Working Women's Forum, started by a former Congress Party activist named Jaya Arunachalam, which within a decade would become not just a union of poor women but a network of cooperatives encouraging entrepreneurship by making low-interest loans. They met washerwomen, known as
dhobi
s, in the slums of Madras. Germain had first worked abroad while still an undergraduate at Wellesley College, tagging along for six months on a household survey in Peru that took her to the slums of Lima; she had strong feelings about how one should behave when working in other people's countries. Ann impressed her, Germain remembered many years later. She listened well—not to get information to do her job but because she wanted to learn. She was not, Germain said, “thinking at the top, which is where a lot of Ford was: ‘Let's build our universities and let's get our intellectual capital going.'” Ann seemed to believe that you could not help people unless you learned from them first. “It was the most interactive way of being and of taking time,” Germain recalled. “A lot of times, in all kinds of jobs, people didn't feel like they had that kind of time; they were there to make grants and move money. Often they didn't think much about: Could the project really be implemented the way it was? What would be the consequences? They weren't going to be around to learn the consequences. Ann was never like that. Ann was very aware that money doesn't necessarily solve problems.”

What Ann saw in India left a deep impression. For years afterward, she would point to the organizations she had seen on that trip as examples of what might be possible elsewhere. Occasionally, she would use Ford grant money to send Indonesian activists to India to see for themselves. The size of the women's organizations in India astonished her. “She thought to herself, ‘Why can't we do more than these itsy-bitsy NGOs? Why can't we take this to scale?'” said Richard Holloway, her friend from Semarang. Back in Jakarta, Ann wrote to Viji Srinivasan, a Ford colleague in New Delhi who had traveled with her and Germain: “The India trip certainly set my mind moving in some new directions. Could Indonesian women in the informal sector be organized a la the Working Women's Forum? (But where will we ever find a new Jaya Arunachalam?) Could a SEWA-like cooperative bank for women be organized in the Indonesian context?”

Anyone interested in the condition of poor women in Indonesia faced a shortage of data. Only a handful of Indonesian researchers were interested in women's issues, William Carmichael, Ford's vice president in charge of its developing-country programs, would write several years later in a Ford report; and most of those scholars had studied urban middle-class women. The exception was Pujiwati Sajogyo, a sociologist at the Center for Rural Sociological Studies at the Bogor Agricultural Institute. Married to one of the country's top experts on rural development and poverty alleviation, she had studied rural women in West Java in the late 1970s. The Sajogyos were “two of the more original and interesting researchers working on issues that the government thought were sensitive,” Kessinger told me. Pujiwati Sajogyo's research, funded by Ford, was among the first to shed light on work patterns by gender in rural households and villages. In 1980, Ford gave the agricultural institute another $200,000 to develop detailed data on rural women outside Java and to increase the country's capacity to carry out that sort of research. Under the grant, young researchers from the provinces were to be trained and sent out to study the lives of village women. A project specialist from Ford would help analyze data from village studies and run workshops in field research for graduate students and junior faculty. The aim was to build a national network of researchers on issues involving women, increase the supply of data, and make it available to program designers and policy makers. During her first two years at Ford, Ann was the project specialist assisting Sajogyo.

Twice a week, Ann would be driven south from Jakarta to Bogor, the hill town where generations of colonials, including Thomas Stamford Raffles, the British lieutenant governor of Java during the brief British occupation of parts of the Dutch East Indies, had repaired in the early nineteenth century to escape the swelter of summer. The university lay alongside a wide boulevard, facing the Bogor Botanical Gardens, conceived a century and a half earlier by a Dutch botanist with the help of assistants from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. With fifteen thousand species of trees and plants, the Bogor gardens surrounded the Indonesian president's summer palace. “I might mention that I'm in Bogor every Tuesday and Thursday at Pujiwati's office,” Ann wrote in 1981 to Carol Colfer, an American anthropologist working in Indonesia, who had sent a letter proposing that she and Ann meet. “I see from your itinerary you will also be in Bogor on Tuesday, March 17. We could have a picnic in the garden.”

That summer, Ann flew with Sajogyo to Sumatra, where they spent a week visiting universities, giving presentations on women and development, explaining field research methodologies, and interviewing candidates for the training workshop they planned to hold in Bogor a month later. Finding the right researchers was not simple. At the University of North Sumatra in Medan, all eleven candidates were unsuitable: Either they were from unrelated fields, such as art, or they had no experience in villages and had never done research on rural women. In Padang, the capital of West Sumatra, the university rector preferred hiring men as instructors because, he said, women went off on pregnancy leave or balked at leaving their husbands. Traveling alone in South Sumatra, Ann found that the cultural complexity of the region presented additional research challenges. There were four distinct ecological zones and fourteen indigenous ethnic groups, each with its own dialect or, in some cases, language. There were also migrants from elsewhere in Indonesia, some relocated by the government from densely populated parts of the country. The experiences of women varied widely from one ethnic group to the next; one, for example, kept teenage girls in purdah. “With all this complexity, the difficulty of selecting truly representative sample villages is enormous,” Ann wrote in a report on the progress of the project.

By late September, Ann and Sajogyo had enlisted eighteen researchers from eight universities in seven provinces to meet in Bogor for the workshop in preparation for heading out into the field. Twelve were women. Ann and the Sajogyos taught seminars on a dozen topics, from theories of social structure to the role of women in small industries and petty trade. Well-known Indonesian social scientists gave guest lectures. The government's junior minister for women's affairs spoke on the connection between policy-making and research. The young researchers were to collect data on three subjects: time and labor allocation, income and expenditures, and decision-making. Each also chose a special area of interest. They would be working in Sumatra, Sulawesi, East Java, and Nusa Tenggara Timur, a group of islands in eastern Indonesia. They would be studying a half-dozen ethnic groups—from Bataks to transmigrant Javanese—in villages that made handicrafts, farmed fish, harvested forest products, and grew such things as rice, coconuts, coffee, rubber, and cloves.

Ann went into the field, too. Bill Collier, whom she had known since the early 1960s at the University of Hawai‘i and who had known both of her husbands, was working on a separate study in tidal-swamp areas of South Sumatra. His team was studying agricultural systems and the condition of several ethnic groups, including indigenous Malays, Buginese migrants, and Javanese transmigrants. Ann joined the group, moving from village to village on a grid of rivers and canals, traveling by night in wooden boats in crocodile-infested waters. The group slept on the floors of village leaders' houses, built on stilts. Because the Buginese distrusted the Javanese, Collier told me, the Javanese members of the research team would insist that he and Ann step out of the boats first in every Buginese village. In one area where Ann was hoping to conduct interviews, the local leader was said to have a long arrest record for robbery and a murder, committed ostensibly with the help of his wife. He had returned from prison, and everyone in the villages deferred to him: “If you wanted to go anywhere, you had to tell him first,” Collier said. The man assigned his wife and alleged co-conspirator as Ann's escort—to convince the Buginese to talk. Through flooded rice fields and swarms of mosquitoes, Ann and her escort crossed from one canal to the next on foot. “Ann ended up up to her chest in water and mud,” Collier remembered. “She loved it. She could create a rapport with these people very easily, because she was sympathetic and she liked them. They realized that she was there trying to find out things to help.”

Indonesia was “a country of ‘smiling' or gentle oppression” when it came to women, Ann would write in a Ford memo the following spring. Extreme forms of anti-female behavior, such as infanticide or nutritional discrimination, were nonexistent or rare, but there was a “social reward system” that led middle- and upper-class women to marry early, forgo further education, and pass up careers. Educated women often stayed out of the workforce to avoid giving the impression that their husbands could not support them. Most Indonesian women worked for little money: In village industries and farming, they made about half the income of men. Yet their income was crucial to the survival of poor households—especially the one in five households on Java that were headed by women because of divorce, desertion, and the departure of men looking for work. Government programs, however, addressed women as homemakers, not breadwinners. Women were required to attend family-planning and nutrition programs, but they were rarely chosen for projects that might help them make money. As a result, young women were leaving the countryside for the cities—where they were ending up as servants, factory workers, or prostitutes. All three of those jobs involved economic and sexual exploitation, Ann said. Ford was working with grassroots organizations that focused on women, she said, but the government viewed organizing as subversive. “While Indonesia has many women's organizations, it cannot be said to have a real women's ‘movement,'” Ann wrote. “In comparison with a country like India, for example, the capacity of Indonesian women to articulate their problems, organize themselves and use political or other channels to improve their condition is still minimal.”

As Ann had noticed several years earlier in her dissertation fieldwork, development was not necessarily benefiting poor women. In 1982, she helped persuade Ford to award a $33,000 grant to a legal-aid organization, the Institute of Consultation and Legal Aid for Women and Families, to hold a seminar and workshop on the effects of industrialization on female labor. In preparation, a team formed by three other organizations studied women workers in fifteen factories on Java, looking at the division of labor by gender, differences in treatment, legal literacy of women workers, and enforcement of labor laws regarding women. The team leaders and their assistants were young well-trained female social scientists, one of whom later started her own organization focused on women workers. Their report quickly became “our best reference on the condition of women workers in the formal sector in Indonesia,” Ann wrote afterward.

Ann was a feminist, by all accounts, but not inclined toward fiery pronouncements. As Sidney Jones described her, she could more legitimately be called a feminist than could anyone previously assigned to the Jakarta office. She had strong convictions on the rights of women. “But she wasn't at all in your face or belligerently ideological,” Jones said. Two of Ann's close friends in Jakarta in the early 1980s were more immediately identified as feminists: Georgia McCauley, whose husband worked for Ford, was a former president of the Honolulu chapter of the National Organization for Women, and Julia Suryakusuma, the flamboyant daughter of an Indonesian diplomat and wife of a film director, would later quote a friend's description of her as a “feminist and femme fatale.” According to James Fox, an anthropologist based in Australia and working in Indonesia, who was friendly with both of them, “Ann was never out there in the same way that Julia was, but they were close.” As Fox saw it, some feminists were earnest and literal, and could constantly be teased. You could not do that with Ann, he said, because she would just play along. Her feminism was tempered, he said, by the fact that her overriding commitment was to the poor, regardless of gender. Occasionally, Ann would make jokes about feminists, said Pete Vayda, a close friend of Ann's who was working as a consultant for Ford. Which is not to say she would necessarily overlook a remark she considered demeaning.

“Have a good weekend, honey,” said one Australian consultant.

“Don't call me honey,” Ann growled in response.