Educate the East Indies: Western, Islamic and Chinese Morality in Womens Schools, 1900-1930

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Sebastian Conrad
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 256307734

In early twentieth-century Indonesia, social reformers began to compete with projects to educate and school the young women of the country. Hailing from three different communities (Javanese elites, Islamic groups and the Overseas Chinese) these educational efforts focused on womens morals as their central point of reference. Activists campaigned for new schools in order to create women equipped with a hitherto unknown set of morals. These educational reforms were intimately linked with debates about the desired cultural makeup of their communities: By envisioning and educating these new women, the reformers envisioned and attempted to educate their emerging ethnic, religious and national communities. Our objective is to analyse three distinctive educational projects for women, and the way they employed a language of morality in their quest for colonial modernity:Kartini Schools offered European Enlightenment-style female education for the aristocratic and westernized bureaucratic elite. Through the Kartini schools moral became a popular expression, promising the Javanese elite access to Western modernityAisiyah Schools offered instruction in modern Islamic religious law to women of the subaltern classes. Aisiyah schools redefined adat (custom, convention, literally: habit) in order to emphasize the Islamic character of the morals they wanted to imbue by schooling womenLi Hak Hauw Schools adopted the Chinese education format of the Hundred-Days-Reform. Seeing themselves as the successors of a Confucian philosophy of character cultivation, Chinese educators invoked and applied dàodé (moral, ethics, literally: path of virtue)This close-grain case study of Westernized, Islamic, and Chinese educational reform movements in the East Indies will explore hitherto neglected dimensions in the understanding of modern communities formation, contributing to three larger fields of discussion: First, this project explores the formation of modern communities as a gendered project, as defined and produced by female historical actors: How did female definitions of modern communities both resemble and differ from the well-known male perspectives? Second, this project explores cultural exchange and discursive entanglement as the explanatory factor behind the emergence of distinctive and rivalling communities: How was cultural exchange conveyed between communities that have been hitherto understood as autonomous units, and in what ways did that exchange facilitate processes of cultural adoption and societal modernization? And third, this projects case study considers communities with markers as diverse as modern Islamic nationalism, Chinese ethnical revivalism, and Indonesian cultural elitism; thus, our inquiry will enable us to ask how the Southeast

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Indonesia
• Participating Persons: Professor Dr. Vincent J.H. Houben; Dr. Sri Margana