Bronwyn Beech Jones

Bronwyn Beech Jones (PhD in History, 2024), Textual Worlds: Rethinking Self, Community, and Activism in Colonial-Era Sumatran Women’s Newspaper Archives

This thesis examines how women and girls from the island of Sumatra articulated their experiences and conceived of their selves, communities, and aspirations in three Malay language women’s periodicals published between 1912 and 1929. By privileging self-expression and paying attention to individual voices, my analysis provides new insights into the diverse selves and worlds of girls and women in colonial-era Indonesia. This is the first sustained analysis of these publications as archives of perspectives and lives, with a focus on authors and activism in West Sumatra, North Sumatra, and Bengkulu, as well as Jambi and Aceh. Soenting Melajoe (1912–21), published in Padang, West Sumatra, together with the Medan-based periodical Perempoean Bergerak (1919–20), and federation of women’s organisations periodical, Asjraq (1925–28), published in Padang, document the development of women’s political and social reform agendas and networks. This dissertation contends that these newspapers function as rich archives produced from the perspectives of Sumatran women. They contain traces, which I call shards, of women and girls’ senses of self, community, and world.

The dissertation argues that through letters, writers voiced and produced coalitional, proto-nationalist, and nationalist agendas which, while diverse, commonly demanded education and respect, and drew on multiple sources of knowledge, including Islamic faith, customs and colonial schooling. I contend that close reading of women and girls’ contributions reveals how they formed multiple intranational communities based on gender, location, ethnic and racial group, and common belonging to the archipelago of the Indies through letters, common languages, and advocating certain forms of knowledge. I argue that the production of craft, particularly weaving and lacemaking, underpinned a maternalist form of gender-based solidarity in the early-1910s that coexisted with and shifted into charged calls for rights and lay the rhetorical ground for more organised forms of activism during the 1920s.

Supervisors: Professor Kate McGregor, Professor Zoë Laidlaw