Dec. 22 is traditionally celebrated here as Mother’s Day. It’s not historically correct, but sending a bouquet to a mother today will save you from silent treatment – for there is no other special day here to honor the role of mothers and their often thankless labor of love.
What has largely vanished from public memory is what occurred on Dec. 22 – 25, 1928 – a congress of women’s organizations in Yogyakarta, held a few months after the Youth Pledge of Oct. 28. Both were significant parts of a growing nationalist movement, with its peak in the 1945 independence; but commemorating a day of women’s organizing for the needs of women and their communities was not convenient for the New Order.
The result has been the sole celebration of motherhood, which was only one issue of what the delegates at that Congress came for — mainly the vicious circle of backwardness and discrimination of women. Though mainly from cities across Java, researchers note some 600 delegates from over 20 organizations saw themselves as part of a future nation — which at that time, a delegate said, “comprises 50 million people and half of them are women.” She added, “ In reality we who are half [of that figure] create the Indonesian nation.”
Now, no less than the new state minister for women’s empowerment, Linda Gumelar, has reminded people of the difference between “Mothers’ Day” and Hari Ibu. Ibu is much more than a mother, being a title of respect for every woman, so Dec. 22 is every woman’s day.
Linda last led Kowani, one of the organizational symbols of the New Order’s engineering of “a woman’s place”, both in the home and as cheerleader for every “nationalist” cause including voting for the same old authoritarian rulers; but her remark reflects how everyone now wishes to be associated with reformasi and its critical corrections of the past Soeharto rule.
Advocates of women’s rights have thus much to exploit; they could use the tradition of exulting motherhood as one base to address other issues resulting from discrimination.
The participants of that Yogyakarta conference would be proud to see some 18 percent of women in parliament today, the higher enrollment of women in secondary and even university and college education, among others.
But Ibu Linda, along with others working for women’s rights and for democracy as a whole, have yet to unite in the face of a threat across the regions — attempts to impose a uniform identity through local regulations on morality and behavior.
Eighty-one years after that Dec. 22 gathering, we have yet to grasp how women realized the need to cooperate on common urgent priorities, while respecting vast cultural and religious differences.
Many of us think it might be natural today for regions to have “Islamic”-inspired bylaws; but the failure to revoke them would mean the failure to learn from our predecessors’ struggle to bring about unity in diversity, at the expense of hard-won freedom for women and minorities.
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