An excellent and comprehensive comparison of how women were viewed in Javanese court culture and the historical reality. The authors explain the importance of Durga symbolism within the Javanese courts and how this symbolisim was "personified" in certain queens and other important women: "[Ken Dhedes and the princess of Pejajaran of the Singosari kingdom in the early 13th century] were so "hot" in the magical sense, that flames issued forth from their wombs, and only men of unusual potency were able to possess them." (15). He goes on to show how these women as well as others were seen to have the power to "confer suzerainty" and other forms of legitimacy upon spouses and other partners. Likewise, they are blamed for acts of extreme violence and destruction.

Moving into the 18th and 19th centuries, the authors focus upon the huge numbers of women in the Javanese courts (up to 10,000) and the armies of female soldiers who served as the king's private corps, noted for their excellent shooting skills. The authors focus upon what they call "Srikandi figures," women who follow the model of Arjuna's wife Srikandi (the warrior and skilled archer) rather than Sumbadra, the faithful stay-at-home co-wife. In other words, because of this model provided in the Mahabarata, women were able to "act like men," acquire skills associated with men and live out independent lives. Moreover, women (presumably of the aristocracy or having married into it) were able to amass large amounts of wealth on their own.

Despite these interesting images and examples of women, however, it is clear that, for the most part, polygamy, concubinage, forced marriage and the use of women in power-plays between men continued to place the majority of women in an extremely subordinate position.

Colless, Brian E. 1975. "Majapahit Revisted: External Evidence on the Geography and Ethnology of E. Java in the Majapahit Period." JMBRAS, Vol. 48, 2 (October 1975), 124-161.

**Useful list of outside sources, repeats much from Groeneveldt.

(147) Ma Huan's desciption of a Javanese wedding (pre-Islamic)--man goes to woman's house to consummate, 3 days later he escorts her "home." Note difference with Ma Huan's description of Indragiri/Jambi (of Sumatra) found in Groeneveldt, in which a man marries at his wifes house then becomes the "property" of her family to work on their land.

*polygamy practiced

(148) On full moons, Javanese women would go singing and strolling in groups of 20 or 30 women, make calls on people who gave them copper coins, and walked in a procession with one hand on the shoulder of the one in front.

(150) mention of "female physician" who tended to the queen

Groeneveldt, W. P. 1960. Historical Notes on Indonesia and Malaysia Compiled from Chinese Sources. Jakarta: Bhratara.

(10) Descriptions of Sumatra in 502-556: walled kingdoms, Buddhist kings, Sanskrit

(13) Mention of "poisonous girls" in kaling (Javanese kingdom) "when one has intercourse with them, he gets painful ulcers and dies, but his body does not decay..."

(52) Description of concubines killing themselves on funeral pyres when rich men, chiefs, or men of rank died (Java, 1200s)

(77) Indragiri/Jambi weddings: husband goes to the house of the wife and afterwards belongs to her family, therefore, they prefer getting girls to boys

(79) 1436, in Bangka: widow burning, other widos live, but never marry again

(107) Banjarmasin: adultery punishable by death

(123) Malay peninsula in 1416: women enter husband's household

(128) women holding a night market in Malacca in 1537, but if they pass the curfew time, they are killed by "orang kaya" (title for someone like a "burger" or rich person).

Hostetler, Jan 1982. "Bedhaya Semang: The Sacred Dance of Yogyakarta." Archipel 24, (127-142).

Jones, Antoinette M. Barrett 1984. Early Tenth Century Java from the Inscriptions (A Study of Economic, Social and Administrative Conditions in the First Quarter of the Century). Dordrecht-HollandL: Foris Publications (KITLV, 107).

(96) a section on "Titles and Functionaries" which includes a discussion of gender mainly of the aristocracy in the 10th Century:

*women could inherit or acquire titles in their own right (or share husbands' titles)

*women attended Sima functions (Sima: placing areas of land under the control of the village unit), received gifts such as kain (batik material)

(97) women included in feasting and dancing

*women could enter into contracts without the knowledge or permission of husbands; husbands not responsible for wives' debts

(98) women could own property and dispose of it as they wished

*women could inagurate Sima, but they are still typically called "the wife of" or "the mother of"

*one example of a woman not called "the wife of"

*polygamy of hugh officials--more than four wives

(138) prostitution, class structure and collection of taxes, use of corvee labor

*discussion of the role of the mangilala drwya haji, the "collector of the lord's due" who collected the "dues" or taxes of the village (keeping a large portion and giving a prescribed amount to the next aristocratic level.

Jordaan, Roy E. 1984. "The Mystery of Nyai Lara Kidul, Goddess of the Southern Ocean." Archipel, 28, (99-117).

Not explicitly historical, although refers to the Babad Tanah Jawi, a text from the (?) century. Links suggested to Cham empire and Po Nagar, the snake deity of the Cham area (reference to 1907 French text by E, M. Durand). Important themes: skin disease, snakes, crops and possible chthonic nature of the figure of Nyai Lara or Roro Kidul, or, more likely, relationship to Uma/Durga.

Jordaan, Roy E. 1987. "Skin Disease, Female Ancestry, and Crops. in Indonesian Women in Focus: Past and Present Notions. Eds Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Anke Niehof. Dordrecht-Holland: Foris Publications.

Examples of skin-disease links in Mainland-Island Southeast Asia: includes examples of legends of the mainland that mention kings who suffered from skin diseases (Po Klong Garai, mythical Cham ruler, known there as inventor of irrigated rice-cultivation), the Khmer "Leper King" identified with Angkor Thom, the Siamese "father of the founder of Muong Tep," and others from Vietnam, Laos, and South China. By locating the skin disease motif as something chthonic, and related to rice and snakes, the author suggests that perhaps Uma/Durga was only later identified with this belief system in which fertility, rice, snakes, skin and the shedding of it are linked. This suggestion can be expanded to include the argument that "Southeast Asian" cultures share a chthonic background in which women were at least given a powerful role in terms of fertility.

Sears, Laurie Jo 1984. "Epic Voyages: The Transmission of the Ramayana and the Mahabarata from India to Java." in Aesthetic Tradition and Cultural Transition in Java and Bali. Eds Morgan, Stephanie and Laurie Jo Sears. Madison, WI: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin (1-30).

Provides and excellent overview of theories regarding this transmission to Java.

(14) Sears argues that the "Great and Little Traditions" of the Ramayana and Mahabarata were disseminated in the 800s and embraced by people of the upper and lower classes.

*discusses the role of the "sastras" in India: "lawbooks on every conceivable facet of life from caste regulation to sexual pleasure." The basic statement is usually given in a pithy, aphoristic form called sutra, which is then "dialated" by the commentaries.

Steenbrink, Karel 1993. Dutch Colonialism and Indonesian Islam: Contacts and Conflicts 1596-1950. (Trans: jan Steenbrink and Henry Jansen). Amsterdam: Rodopi.

(28) Mentions the observations of Pires (see Suma Oriental below) of "hermits" in Java in the early 1500s who belonged to "three or four different orders all of which observed the vow of chastity." (This points to the role of Sufist doctrine, which would evetually lead to the development of Muslim brotherhoods [tarekat] which in turn developmed strict codes of conduct and theories on the polluting qualities of women and other segregationist ideology).

*Another Poruguese observation in the mid-1500s that, although women walk around almost naked at the ages of 16-20, "they remain chaste and decent, which seems quite ipossible among such a depraved people."

(67) This odd sentence, referring to the onset of Dutch role: "Capital punishment was not only taken over from the orientals in instances of illicit sexual relations, but it was sometimes also applied in the case of apostasy."

(71) Mention in Dutch texts of the 1600s of "temple women" who were thought to be "pagan dancers" who "sing at weddings, banquets or otherwise festive occasions, dance and perform skillful and amazing jumps as a means of civilized entertainment."

Stoler, Ann Laura 1991. "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia." Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Ed, Micaela diLeonardo. Berkeley: University of California Press.

(54) Stoler make the point that "sexual images illustrate the iconography of rule, not its pragmatics." (While she is refering to the colonial encounter, the same might be said of the pre-colonial period). She goes on: "This analytic slippage between the sexual symbols of power and the politics of sex runs throughout the colonial record--as well as through contemporarycommentaries on it. Some of this may be due to the polyvalent quality of sexuality; symbolically rich and socially salient at the same time. But sexual control was more than a convenient metaphor for colonial domination; it was, as I argue here, a fundamental class and racial marker implicated in a wider set of relations of power."

(57) "From the early 1600s through the twentieth century the sexual sanctions and conjugal prohibitions of colonial agents were rigorously debated and carefully codified. It is in these debates over matrimony and morality that trading and plantation company officials, missionaries, investement bankers, military high commands, and agents of the colonial state confronted one another's visions of empire, and the settlement patterns on which it would rest."

(59)Referred to as nyai in Java and Sumatra, congai in Indochina, and petite epouse throughout the French empire, the colonized woman living as a concubine to a European man formed the dominant domestic arrangement in colonial cultures through the early twentieth century. Unlike prostitution, which could and often did result in a polulation of syphilitic and therefore nonproductive European men, concubinage was considered to have a stabilizing influence on political order and colonial health--a relationship that kept men in their barracks and bungalows, out of brothels and less inclined to `unnatural' liasons with one another."

*"Handbooks for incoming plantations employees bound for Tonkin, Sumatra, and Malaya urged men to find a bed-servant as a prerequisite to quick acclimization."

*Many colonized women combined sexual and domestic service within the abjectly subordinate contexts of slave or `coolie' and lived in separate quarters" (rather than cohabitating).

*Discussion of 16th and 17th centuries in Malay world, focusing specifically on Jambi, northern Sumatra.

*Text is somewhat problematic in that Andaya takes both colonial sources and Malay court texts at face value: this sometimes leads to misinterpretations. Overall, however, this is balanced out by the proliferation of sources.

(22) Daughters welcomed, as they were important economically.

(25) The figure of a loyal wife is most clearly exemplified in Sita, (from the Ramayana), but it was a model reinforced by Islamic teachings.

*Quotes an early malay/Islamic text, the Hikayat Sultan Ibrahim Ibn Adham which states that: "we women believers should be devoted to our husbands...". (Note: written by a man using the voice of a woman).

(40) Importance of establishing hinship networks among traders through marriage: local men, marrying off daughters to traders; later, Dutch did the same.

(57) "Women and the Gift Economy"

(59) Lineal proximity to royal females could be signficant factor in claims to power (Like Angkor: see Cambodia,

(67) According to Dutch sources, in the early 1600s, men commonly had only one wife. But by 1650, the sultan told nobles to take another wife--wanted to be both Islamic and "like Java."

(78) Bad relations between upstream and downstream revolve around women, or are blamed on women. In one example, a sultan had to have access to all women first (1650); in another, women would go upstream to take attractive village girls as slaves.

(117) An example from the literature of sexual relations (a king sharing out his wives and concubines with men in the court) bringing the court together

*perhaps more important: a way to prove someone was a bad leader or generally a bad person was to accuse them of abusing women, of incest, and of not being able to produce sons

(158) Problems of what to do with wives and concubines after the death of the Sultan: sometimes passed on to the next sultan, passed out to local area leaders, or neglected by the following sultan and forced into poverty

(96) The increasing influence of a full monetary system at the beginning of the colonial period meant that women were more likely to be sold than "given" as they had been in the past.

(28) report from Chinese traveller: adultery was the only crime that brought capital punishment (by strangulation)

(95) Expanding pirate/slave trade created difficulties for women: a ship that was foundering or run aground was open season for pirates: women on ships taken as slaves, women bought by the VOC and other colonists.

(135) mention of village women who had to resume their weaving trade after stopping weaving in the late 1600s because they made enough money through the pepper trade.

(207) Andaya makes the distinction between stories of romantic love that were prevelent in the court traditions and the reality, in which wives and concubines were constantly struggling for power