88). The state women’s organization, the PKK
(Family Welfare Organization), established in 1973,
and the Dharma Wanita (the organization of wives
of civil servants) propagated a middle-class ideol-
ogy of womanhood in which women’s domesticity
in the nuclear household was paramount (Black-
wood 2000, 89). The media (advertisements and
television in particular) also reinforced state ideolo-
gies of domesticity. One popular television series,
Sinetron(from a government owned television sta-
tion), had as one of its underlying messages the
proposition that the good woman is a domestic per-
son (Blackwood 2000, 89, Aripurnami 1996, 252).
One of the writers for the series, Novaris Arifi-
diatmo, told Femina, Indonesia’s most prominent
magazine, that “the theme is that of the good
woman as a domesticperson” (quoted in Aripur-
nami 1996, 252) and of course its opposite, a
woman “not utterly domestic” was likely to be
intrinsic to the “bad” woman (Aripurnami 1996,
252). The Sinetrons considered “the best films
ever produced” endorsed the philosophy that a
woman’s place is in the home. Women characters in
the paid workforce were positively presented if
they conformed to traditional female occupations
such as domestic helpers. After all, the housemaid’s
role was within the framework of domesticity that
coincided with the government’s encouragement of
this type of paid labor (even if the women went
overseas) (Sunindyo 1993, 138–9). This ideology
extended to the big screen of New Order Indonesia,
where women played subsidiary roles. In films cate-
gorized as “women’s films” a common concern was
the definition of the destiny of women and this was
presented as “mother” within the space of the fam-
ily (Sen 1993, 117). In Indonesian films, men were
located in the paid public sphere while women were
confined to the roles of reproductive agents in the
unpaid domestic sphere (ibid., 119). In cinema
there has yet to be a re-evaluation of the position of
women because they are either depicted as mothers
in the domestic sphere or prostitutes outside it
(ibid., 130).
Islamic leaders in Indonesia have also interpreted
the woman’s primary role as wife and mother.
Indonesian Muslim women in high government
positions or who are leaders of women’s organiza-
tions endorse these same statements supporting the
state policy in which women are defined through
domesticity (Blackwood 2000, 90). These state ide-
ologies are so influential that even women who are
not technically housewives claim to be housewives
even if they are not the housewives of the state ide-
ology, prompting Evelyn Blackwood to label them
“contradictory housewives” (2000, 91).132 domesticity
In Malaysia too, both the state and religion
endorsed the view of men as heads of households
and families (Stivens 1998, 60). Maila Stivens
argued that “the desired effect of the state pronatal-
ism seems to be that women remain housebound,
co-ordinating the mass consumption their fecundity
is supposed to guarantee” (ibid., 60). Interestingly,
Malaysia’s preoccupation with modernity (post
1970s) isolated (if somewhat reinvented) women’s
domesticity as intrinsic to the new Malaysian mod-
ern woman.
Women are largely responsible for “the ‘domes-
tic’ construction of the Malay middle classes”
(Stivens 1998, 62), as women’s magazines give
instructions on household décor, child rearing, and
cuisine as well as specific advice on how to prepare
for Muslim holy days and festivals (ibid., 63). Since
the family is highly politicized in Malaysia, the
moral panic about working mothers producing
delinquent children heightened fears about the fam-
ily in crisis. The state responded in recent years with
campaigns about “happy families” in which the
father is head and protector of the family and
the mother is his warm and supportive helpmeet
(Stivens 2000, 26).
Singapore has remained since its independence
an unabashedly patriarchal state. State policies
applied to all women (whether Chinese, Malay
Muslim, or Indian) and thus, Singapore’s Muslim
women have been defined alongside their non-
Muslim sisters. The authoritarian nature of the
regime meant that the policies were implemented
quite forcefully across all classes of women. Men
were defined as heads of households and women
were to be wives and mothers morally bound to the
home. State policies on education, health benefits,
housing allocation, and citizenship all affirmed this
view of women: “The government defines women’s
primary role in the family as that of child raising”
(Chan 2000, 47). Educational policy for example,
made home economics a compulsory subject for all
girls whereas boys were enrolled in technical stud-
ies (1969) (Chan 2000, 47, Kong and Chan 2000,
522). Although the need for women to join the
workforce meant that the policy was relaxed in
1977 (girls could study either home economics or
technical studies, with boys studying technical
studies), by 1987 home economics was again com-
pulsory for girls and technical studies for boys,
advocating the premise that “girls should be girls”
and that boys’ priority should not be home matters
(Kong and Chan 2000, 522). What was more
alarming about this educational policy was that it
intended to fashion the new Singaporean woman of
the future as a homemaker (Kong and Chan 2000,