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Chiara Formichi, "Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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Podcast Host Intro/Outro
I oh, let's go.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
good, so good, so good.
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Podcast Host Intro/Outro
welcome to the
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
New Books Network
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Leah Cargan
hi everybody. Welcome back to the New Books Network. My name is Leah Cargan. I am the podcast coordinator on the editorial staff of the Journal of Women's History. Today I am joined by Dr. Chiara Formicki to discuss her most recent publication, Domestic Muslim Women, Health and Modernity in Indonesia. The monograph was published in 2025 by Stanford University Press. Forumicki is a scholar of Asia with interests in religion, politics and society. She uses archival research and ethnography to answer questions of modernity in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has published prolifically in both academic and public presses. She is professor of Southeast Asian Studies in the Department of Asian Studies at Corporate Cornell University. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Formicki.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here.
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Leah Cargan
First, I guess can you just tell us a little bit about yourself? What are your research interests and what brought you to this book project? Yeah, sure.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
So I'm trained as a historian and my background is in Islamic studies. My first book was an intellectual history of an Islamist leader who in late colonial Java, so late colonial Indonesia and the Dutch East Indies establishes an Islamic state during the revolution, the anti colonial revolution. So it was archival based Java. Very. I don't want to say narrow, but specific. And there were no women and I put that out there of the outside. Because this book inside is all about the women who inhabited the same spaces and the same time and seem to a certain extent equivalent or complementary ideological spaces. But then from there I moved to an ethnohistorical project on Muslim minorities. Something very different. I felt that after my Ph.D. i had to do something different, but always exploring this nexus between religion, politics, society. My second monograph was much broader scope. It was a history of Islam in Asia that came out with Cambridge University Press and kind of undergraduate and general audience friendly. But after tenure I really wanted to go back to my comfort zone. And I thought I was going to do that with this book that became Domestic Nationalism. I'd been thinking about this idea of modernity and Islam and colonialism, independence for a long time. And I, working on the Cambridge book, I'd really started thinking more deeply about the role of women, which I sometimes I feel really embarrassed to say. But it never occurred to me, nobody had ever pointed out to me, say, hey, where are the women in this story? And I'm not saying it should have been the owners should have been on somebody else, but it hadn't happened. It wasn't the intellectual milieu that I was inhabiting. And so I decided I wanted to explore this question of modernity, colonialism and anti colonialism from the point of view of women. That was a very explicit intention when I got into the archives. And that was fall 2019. So right before the pandemic started, I had no idea and I also didn't know that the sources were going to shout at me that the key for the questions that I was asking was going to be health and hygiene. But six months later I found myself in the middle of the pandemic and I realized there were. So I don't know, it wasn't anymore just what the one of my sources, these women's magazines were telling me. It was also what our daily life was telling us, that women do a lot of work in the house by taking care of hygiene and children and other family members. And that is really important for society, is inform important for nation states, whether in colonized or post colonial independent states. And so that's where the book came from. It was partly very intentional and partly just a response to what I was seeing in my sources.
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Leah Cargan
Yeah, I also think the pandemic put a lot of his scholars onto health related subjects because that for me is a major influence.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
Yeah, I like to say that for me it came before the pandemic because the core of my field were before, but it was it was an interesting conversation right between the sources and what I was seeing around me on a daily basis. It's really changed the way that we also think about scholarship, I think. Oh, absolutely, yeah.
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Leah Cargan
Early in the book you introduce us to the scientific theory of tropical hygiene. And this plays an important role throughout, especially the colonial eras of Indonesia in the book. So can you tell us what is tropical hygiene and how was this theory used to rationalize race based control by the colonial authorities in Southeast Asia and Indonesia?
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
Yeah. So technically tropical hygiene is or was a field of medicine.
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Leah Cargan
Okay.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
But as one can sort of guess from the, from the very name of the field, it was never meant to be neutral. And since the very beginning it embodied these, well, imperialist powers. Fear of the tropics. Right. So you think thick jungles and malaria, for example, and the fear of dirt and pollution, which could be, we can think of it as physical germ based pollution, but also racial pollution.
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Plan B Advertiser
Right.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
And the field was called upon hygieia, who was the Greek goddess of cleanliness. So it was about health, but it was very specific about this idea of cleanliness and purity. So these assumptions of racial superiority and more broader civilizationism were really embedded in the field from the very beginning. And when we focus on Asia, it's also really important to think that and to remember that it was not just a whole white non white binary, but it was also, you know, because within, well, within Euro America itself, the division was classed. And so you had upper classes versus the rising urbanizing proletariat. And so you had this classed distinction. But in Asia it also was stratified along self perception of assimilation to European models. So when the Japanese, when Japanese doctors, during the Japanese expansion take over Taiwan, they think of Taiwan as the tropics and establish a school of tropical medicine because there was malaria, which in Japan did not exist because the temperature was different. And then Southeast Asia becomes another space specifically for the Japanese empire to, to deploy this idea of tropical hygiene. And again, this sense that Japan was better was superior to Southeast Asians and to Southeast Asia as societies, as political confirmations. Japan has never been formally colonized and so on and so forth.
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Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
Right.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
The other assumption, which was not unrelated was the one about the superiority of Euro American scientific knowledge.
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Plan B Advertiser
Right.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
So we have the personal subjective aspect and then there is the scientific aspect and knowledge. And so with the discovery of germs, for example, or the idea that the discovery that germs were the vectors of certain diseases and then the consequent craze about sterilization, Euro Americans in the colonies felt totally entitled to promote policies that were aimed at stigmatizing local practices and local knowledge, which, of course, usually were held by women who helped with birthing and childcare without really ever stopping to consider the possibility that these traditional practices, which had been pursued for decades, centuries, might also be safe and appropriate to the context in which they were. And this becomes all the more evident when we start talking about nutrition, and I use question mark in the sense of the science of nutrition and the science of food through the new vocabulary of vitamins, which may be something we can talk about later if it comes up, but really, in terms of hygiene, just to make a brief example, slaughterhouses became an iconic site. So traditionally, animals would have been slaughtered on very special occasions in dedicated spaces away from homes, and was a communal activity. Right. There would be very few concerns about storage of uneaten or uncooked meat or the disposal of parts that were not being eaten right away, because everything would be cooked, eaten and used right away. But when the European presence comes in in more substantial numbers at the early. At the turn of the 20th century, when women, so European women, Dutch women also are invited to come to the colonies, meat consumption increases dramatically, and it shifts away from the ritual practice that is embedded in communal occasions and becomes much more of a commercial enterprise. And with this shift, then the Dutch become concerned about hygiene, both during slaughtering and at the market. Because it's not that everything that was being slaughtered was being eaten right away. It was being slaughtered and then sold. But how is the raw meat preserved in the meantime? Is it refrigerated or not? And is the blood draining properly, or is it festering in these slaughtering spaces? And so this is where, for example, the need for slaughterhouses and markets as dedicated buildings that could be regularly washed, cleaned and monitored by health inspectors emerged.
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Leah Cargan
Right.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
And so these are. This is like one micro example of how we can see how the science of tropical hygiene plays out in the colonies with these cultural and different practices. Really? Yeah.
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Leah Cargan
Yeah. You briefly touched on the importance of women as reproducers of culture. And. But I want to. I want to dig into that theory just a little bit. For people that might not know what is social reproductive theory. Like, how do you define it? And then how does it relate to Indonesian women in health? Yes.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
So this was one of those things that was not on my horizon as I was. As I started my project. As I said, I wasn't very well versed in women's history and gender studies, but this is something I started that as I started having conversations about my project with colleagues. It started coming up quite often and say, it seems to me that this would fit very well. And so I feel that I went back to being a student and learning. So in my own. My understanding of what social reproductive labor and social reproduction theory is in the very most essential ways, right. It's. It's a gendered analysis of capitalism that really argues that alongside what the capitalist system perceives as economically productive labor, which is usually pursued by men in the public sphere. And I mean it in a very literal sense, not Harper Mason sense of discursive, but really very physical public sphere, there is a whole other realm of efforts that are assumed to be exerted by women and which, despite being pursued in the private space of the home, the domestic space should be equally considered as labor. As while they apparently don't produce added value in economic terms, if we take a purely capitalist approach, it really reproduces. So in that sense, it's social reproductive labor.
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State Farm Advertiser
Right?
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
It reproduces the social order that then enables a capitalist system. So it's as important, if not foundational, to the whole system. So in a nutshell, it was the very fact that by birthing and caring for other humans, who would be the workers, women are a pillar of capitalism, but they're also invisible, and the labor is unrecognized and definitely unremunerated. So I found this framing or this theory very helpful as I was exploring the relationship between government institutions in Java and Sumatra and really the daily work of women. And I start with the assumption that, yes, it's true that women in the Dutch East Indies and then later in Indonesia might have had limited, let's say limited opportunities because of the patriarchy.
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Leah Cargan
Right?
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
It was a patriarchal state and society, and to a certain extent, it still is, both because of European colonial presence, but also local realities nonetheless, because of the importance of health and hygiene to the ruling elites. And this was true again during the colonial period, during the Japanese imperial period, and during revolution and independence. In the absence of wide and deep healthcare infrastructure, domestic activities were pillars and foundations of public health and state formation. So even if women's primary space of action was the home, the work was not just de facto relevant, it was also recognized as such. And I think that's one key aspect which since the 30s, we start reading, and increasingly so in the 40s and 50s, we start reading about the recognition of women's domestic work always grounded in political economic calculations. I mean, that's always in the background there. But women were receiving training, they were being educated. And they also found employment, which ultimately meant that they could gain independence from their family members and do what they wanted to do through this domestic gendered sphere of activity. And in the post independence period, this becomes also a space in which they gain an authoritative voice.
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Podcast Host Intro/Outro
Right?
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
So there is always, of course, a class, certification and socioeconomic status that creates difference among these women. And I try to show this in the book, that not everybody, not all the women, had the same opportunities and the same outcomes in their efforts. But because the very foundation was the daily labor of care in the home, and because the vast majority of the population, in fact, had not received much education during the colonial period, differently from other colonies, for example, British India had a much broader and deeper education plan. Let's say for colonized subjects. Once we transition from the colonial to independence, it was really women from across the socioeconomic spectrum that could find the these opportunities. And even lower middle class women who might have had three, four years of elementary education could enroll in schools that would professionalize them as healthcare professionals. But the framework of social reproductive labor was very interesting in terms of both to think with, but also to think maybe to a certain extent against and trying to figure out how this plays out in a colonized and then decolonized context, and how different the experience from a European perspective would be vis a vis, again, an Asian Muslim colonial perspective.
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Leah Cargan
I think using that social reproductive labor theory really helps you show how those different factions, or like the sections of indigenous women, different classifications of indigenous women, are interpreting scientific knowledge themselves. And I think it does a really good job for framing all of that. And I love a historical monograph that lets us wade into theory. So thank you for that. But let's dive into a couple of the chapter specific examples here. So in chapter two, which is called labor, you show us how the colonial state and indigenous women were frequently at odds with each other about their interpretations of health, hygiene and modernity. So my question is, how did literate elite Indonesian women in the 1920s, who were working as publishers and writers, how did they integrate themselves within the colonial establishments of hygiene, mothering and progress to resist and then reframe gendered public discourses of imperialism?
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
And first of all, also, I'm glad that it's kind of the historic the that the book works in doing both a little bit of theory and doing the historiography work. That was also a new thing for me compared to my previous work. So it felt very daunting and overwhelming, but it was very interesting endeavor, let's put it like that. So the question about how colonial ideas or conceptions of knowledge versus indigenous knowledge worked, it's really one of the threads across the book, and sometimes I wonder whether they were really at odds or whether we're thinking about different ways in which they intersected or they were interpreted right. But I think the one space in which colonial voices and indigenous voices could not see eye to eye was their understanding of the relationship between mothering and progress in the sense that Dutch female writers, more than the colonial state itself, really expressed fairly conventional, let's say, patriarchic commentaries on maternalism. Being of Italian, being Italian, I would say, you know, fairly fascist in the sense of being mothers of the nation, in a very conservative sense of 1920s European worldviews, right. Which promoted the idea of the idea that biological reproduction was a woman's really only expected contribution to the nation. Also because there were schools and so much of the social reproductive work was being done by institutions that were controlled by the states, but much more than the family or the mother. Right. And so young women needed to be educated in matters of pregnancy and mothering to prepare them to become soldiers.
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Leah Cargan
Right?
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
Really earnest soldiers, but as mothers, not on the battlefield, in the home, and so instilling in their children the love for the motherland and the patria and all of that. And what I found interesting is that this discourse was not rejected per se by indigenous women in Java and Sumatra, but it came through as being much more nuanced. And so there's this 1919 newspaper from Sumatra that is the earliest source that a work was, because there wasn't that much women literacy in the Dutch East Indies at the time. And so 1919 is pretty early for the women's press. But so in this article, in the very first issue, the editor, who's a woman, makes very clear that. And she states that the, you know, women's interests ranged and encompassed, right, all of the following. The house, infant feeding, child rearing, hygiene, religion, and what she defines native feminism or indigenous feminism. And in the article, you know, she goes on, and then she says that she really hopes that the magazine would, as an exclusively indigenous platform, because this was not being subsidized by the state, was being paid by private funds, would really contribute to women's emancipatory efforts, right? So the newspaper was publishing international political news, would publish on the women's movement, and she really hoped that it would contribute to expand readers knowledge. Now, the way that she writes is very interesting because the gendered concerns were described with Dutch words, right? And so the childrearing and hygiene, all of these words were Dutch. So in part you can think, oh, she's just echoing European ideas of imperial maternalism, and that's just parodying whatever the Dutch women were writing. She's using the language of the colonizing authority. But to me, she went so much further than that, right? Bringing in religion, bringing in the idea of an indigenous form of feminism, which obviously is different from other understandings of feminism, and then putting all of these categories of action on the same level and importance. So intertwining, I don't know, medicalized domestic literacy, gender emancipation, Islamic ethos through a process, an autonomous process of knowledge production for me is one way to pursue really a project of epistemological resistance. And I can't think of another way to think about it, right? Is really to push back and pulling some things from the, from the worldviews and imagination of what women were supposed to do, but also infusing them with their own perspective as colonized subjects. And so we have this combination, right? Literacy, worldly understanding, autonomous processes of knowledge production and transmission that become the threads that connect the domestic sphere of mothering and care work to gender emancipation, but also public engagement and national progress, right? And so this is not what the Colonials were imagining when they put mothering and progress together. But this is how some of the women whose voices I work with came up with.
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Podcast Host Intro/Outro
Right.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
This is the way that they re articulated it. Yeah.
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Leah Cargan
How they interpreted it. Like that thread that we're pulling at throughout the text, another fascinating thread that connects with indigenous interpretation of scientific knowledge, but also with another thread that you have in the book is food. Um, and I want to talk about it. We talked. You just. We talked about it a little bit, but I want to talk about more. You write. I'm going to quote you to you. You write that, quote, food was situated at the intersection of hygiene, nutrition and imperial imperialist concerns, end quote. And that it eventually, quote, came to be associated with womanly domestic matters, anchoring it to the expectations of modern mothering. So we're kind of talking about. We're expanding on what we just talked about. So you look at food choices, food preparation and then nutrition as centered in conversations about the differences between colonizers and their colonized subjects. But what are some of these tensions that you discuss that existed between the Dutch colonizers and indigenous women about food but not breastfeeding yet? Because I want to get to that next.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
All right. Well, yeah, so I found it absolutely fascinating myself how food, to me brought everything together. It's the middle chapter. And as I sometimes say, if you had to pick one chapter to read, I would suggest reading chapter three, which is food, because it brings together. It kind of really builds on chapters one and two. And then it kind of has its own entity, is a single chapter.
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Prime Originals Advertiser
Right.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
If you had to assign it in a class. Um, but also because food is everything is about food and food is about everything, conversely.
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Prime Originals Advertiser
Right.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
And it's also about the fact that people tend to care much more about what and how they eat than some other things. And it becomes very high stakes. So zooming in on the colon, you know, colonizer, colonized dichotomy, what emerged most clearly to me was that they really had a different vocabulary and points of reference. And that's where indigenous women and largely male colonial scientists were butting heads. My absolute favorite example is this article from. I think it's 1931 from. From a women's organization's magazine. Right. So this is largely middle class women who are organizing and getting together to do all sorts of things, but also educating each other. And the article is on vitamins. It's multi part kind of. It goes over two or three issues. And the point of this woman who I couldn't find anything else about her except for her name, know, she, she signs off the article. So I don't know whether she was trained, you know, whether she had,
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State Farm Advertiser
she
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
had been a doctor or a nurse or just quote unquote, somebody's wife or somebody's daughter.
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Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
Right.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
And so she had gained access to education or whatnot. But her argument is fascinating because she goes on to say pretty much her bottom line is it's great that now we have this new body of knowledge. We have discovered vitamins. Everybody should know about this. All women should know about vitamins and how important it is to have a nutritious diet. But can we please remember that we have been having a nutritious diet all along in Java, in the countryside. It's great that you know that, you know, Dutch scientist, German scientists discovered Eichmann, he discovered thiamine, or vitamin B, which is lodged in the husk in the outer layer of the rice grain and it gets lost through industrialized milling. And so white rice does not have vitamin B. And so if you have a white rice heavy diet, you will have vitamin B deficiency, which brings beriberi, which was a very common and debilitating disease across Asia at the turn of the 20th century because traditionally people would have eaten hand milled rice. And so Sukharmi, she argues, says, you know, we always eat brown rice, we don't eat white rice. We don't have Betty Betty problem because that's our diet. And when we see a baby, that is, who's failing to thrive, we would give it bananas, okay? We didn't know that it has a lot of vitamin A, but that's what we do. And it's great that vitamin A does this work. But we didn't have, you know, we don't have these words, we don't have this vocabulary, we don't have the scientific knowledge. But the village diet, the, you know, you can say, quote, unquote, traditional diet is extremely nutritious. And so she makes this very strong argument for, you know, traditional knowledge against European scientific knowledge. And they were not at odds in the, in the results, but they were odds in the way in which they were framing it. Another realm where food becomes charged and really important and we see how the priorities are sometimes different, comes out in margarine. I write a lot about margarine, in particular Blue band, which still today is a pretty common product across Southeast Asia and it had been marketed and sold in the Dutch East. It was originally a Dutch product incidentally, that currently I think belongs to Unilever or is One of these multi corporation items, but it had been marketed in Dutch east indies since the 1880s, so had been on the market for decades. But by the early 30s their ads, and by the early 30s their ads had started stressing how the product was hygienic. The very production was hygienic. And at some point when synthetic vitamins start being produced, you would have these ads with added vitamin A and D, right? And the message is always this food is really good, it's healthy. Feed it to your children and husbands. Of course. And to me what becomes really interesting is that whereas nobody there had never. I have not come across any letter to the editors saying, is Blue Band really hygienic? Is it really nutritious? Do we really need these added vitamins? The moment in which they start advertising it as being halal, so permissible to Muslims, you start having this kind of pushback and saying, how do we know that it's truly halal? How do we know that it fits compliance that is truly compliant? And everyone gets involved in this. So you have the religious scholars writing fatwas, so opinion, legal opinions about it and having to do research too, so visiting the factories in order to write their opinions. You have religious leaders that are appointed by the colonial state issuing statements about the fact that this is true. The colonial government makes chemical analysis of the product and publishes the results as advertisements to say that it is truly compliant, that there is no trace of alcohol or pork, or actually says nothing that is forbidden to Muslims. And of course the manufacturer who continues to, to advertise it as such, now they go to so much to such great lengths to convince consumers that the Blue Band is halal. But most interestingly, their target audience is the women. So we think about religion, and often Islam in particular, as a space in which men have authority. And it's interesting that the voices are male, but their audience is the women. And so you see that these legal opinions and reassurances are printed much more widely on women's magazines than on general audience magazines. And, and to me, I, I really take this to. To think about food, going back to. To think about how food brings everything together as a space that, yes, is domestic, is mundane, if we don't want to say profane, but is mundane. And yet it is a space which, in which piety can be assessed. And so it is the women who choose which brand of margarine to purchase and is their trust that needs to be gained in believing that the product is halal or not, because ultimately they are the gatekeepers of Islamic compliance and religious piety within the home. And so to me, it's yet another way to think about how domesticity doesn't necessarily equate domestication of women.
- [37:26]
Leah Cargan
Right.
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
In which women actually have a voice and have power and authority to determine what is okay and what is not okay, not just in daily life, but in the mundane, but through the mundane also in these other realms, whether it is nation building or religious piety.
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Leah Cargan
Right. I love the use of the word mundane to talk, to explore those. Those activities that, yes, are deemed by society at large as minimal, but they really aren't. And when we start to tease them out and dig into them a little bit, we see how much more complex that these processes actually are. But you've coached me perfectly into talking about the breastfeeding, which I thought was a fascinating portion of this chapter, is another point of contention between indigenous women and how they are interpreting scientific knowledge. So can you just walk us through that process of how these indigenous women are. Are taking issue with. With colonial narratives or instructions of. Of infant feeding?
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Dr. Chiara Formicki
Yes. So I know I think I mentioned this before, but this is one of the other things that I never thought I was going to write about. I never thought I was going to write about infant feeding and the debate on bottle feeding and breastfeeding part because having had a child at the time, my daughter was three. I know that, you know, that's one of the things that different things work for different families. And you don't go around telling people what they should do. It's just like, I'm not, why am I writing about this? But surely Indonesian women had a lot to say about what was best for the child in the 1930s and 40s, and then it continues into the 50s. And this was largely in reaction to images, quite literally images of colonial modernity. So by the mid-20s, colonial public projections of gender modernity were really set on this image of bottle feeding. There is this advertisement from Lactogen from 1926, where the image of. So it's a drawing, the drawing of an indigenous woman bottle feeding a baby who is shaded so you can tell that is not meant to be a European child, but is meant to be her own child. And the caption says in Dutch, who says that the native is backward? Question mark. And kind of really flipping this narrative and say, oh, who says this native woman cannot be backward because she's bottle feeding her child? So when you flip it and you think about the Dutch language, educated upper classes, indigenous upper classes, JJ Is. If I want to Fit in as a modern colonized subject who aspires to colonial modernity. I must bottle feed my child. Deep breath after this. Because it's, you know, it's very powerful. And the same image is used, exact same image is used for advertisements on the Malay language press, so the vernacular press, but never with that caption. That caption only appears in the Dutch language. And personally I've only encountered it once. Okay, on a fairly conservative publication. So the reason why bottle feeding arrives in the Indies as the marker of modernity is largely because this is what. This is what Dutch women who were young women who were moving from the Netherlands into the colony, their peers, if they were having children in the motherland, right in the metropole of empire, they would likely be having wet nurses. The early 20th century is a time in which women's bodies start to be resexualized. And this idea of is not even, of course, it's not reclaiming your body for yourself is reclaiming your body from pregnancy for your husband's pleasure and desire. But the result is, in a sense, I don't want to say the result is the same. But you know, wet nurses in Europe were respected and respectable. They were entrusted the children of the. Of the middle classes. And it was a good way for lower class women to gain employment, receive a good diet because they were feeding the babies.
- [42:13]
Prime Originals Advertiser
Right.
- [42:14]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
So it worked quite well for everybody all around. This is not possible in the colonies because of racist assumptions. The idea is that which goes back to Roman beliefs, but that through breast milk, the woman passes on her own characters and characteristics to the child who's drinking the milk. Which in an imperialist context, that was absolutely not acceptable. Because the very reason why Dutch women had been quote unquote, invited to start come to the colonies was to purify the colonial elite and stop practices of concubinage or interracial intimacies to ensure racially, culturally, linguistically, morally white European colonial elite. And so what? Nursing wasn't going to work. Similarly, animal milk, such as dairy, such as cow milk and goat milk, which was a little more common, encounter major issues. There's a whole parallel story which I talk about in the book, but that was not really viable because of the tropical weather and other concerns about again, pollution and food pollution, germ pollution and racial pollution. And so European women settle on formula. But they could afford proper, quote unquote, formula. They lived in neighborhoods Batavia, the capital, largely, largely in the capital, where they had piped water, they could boil and they could sterilize the bottles and so they could follow safe handling practices of bottle feeding. Now this was not the reality for indigenous women who would have found themselves in a position of not being able to breastfeed because these were largely lower class women who had to work in settings where the infants were not welcome, which largely meant in colonial spaces where the worker is the worker, you don't take your infant that needs breastfeeding with you. And so they would leave their infants at home, likely with an older child who would be in charge. And I talk about some of these manuals that were being taught in vernacular elementary schools on how to teach young girls how to care for their siblings. And it talks about sterilizing bottles. But this reality is just completely fictional, right? And they wouldn't have had access to clean water and likely they wouldn't have been able to afford proper baby infant formula. They would be using sweetened skimmed condensed milk which had no vitamins and had no nutrition and was the likely with unclean water would have been at the source of many illnesses and likely infant deaths.
- [45:38]
Podcast Host Intro/Outro
Right.
- [45:39]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
And so this is the, and this is a long setting up, setting up the stage. But it is against all of these reality that you have articles over articles written by upper middle class literate women in Java and Sumatra installing, you know, the advantages of modern mothering such as scheduled feeding, making sure that a baby wouldn't eat for too long and the mother and child would sleep in separate beds and weighing the child. So we're talking about women who would have access to clocks, they would have access to scales and they would have had multiple rooms in their dwellings.
- [46:30]
Nordstrom Rack Advertiser
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- [46:31]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
Or multiple beds. So we're talking about upper class. So they could have, they would have had access to clean water and they would have been able to afford infant formula. But they were set on the fact that the proper way of feeding a baby baby was breastfeeding. Breastfeeding. And they argue this through three different channels. First of all, they argue it's more nutritious than anything else that you can artificially put together. Second is more hygienic because you don't have to sterilize things. And third, and this was really the bottom line was the I, I read it as the argument I had to kind of seal the deal. The Quran says so, says so.
- [47:16]
Leah Cargan
Right.
- [47:16]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
The Quran says that it's a mother's duty and more importantly is a child's God given right to be breastfed by their mother for at least two years. Which if we think about women's health in general, we think about how breastfeeding releases hormones that are less likely to to allow for pregnancy. Also means that breastfeeding for two years means that women would not get pregnant, would space their pregnancies in a natural, quote unquote way. Right. A biological way. And so this argument framing what does it mean to feed your child or to take care of your child in a quote unquote modern way is partly, and we go back to this integration of Western knowledge and modalities and indigenous knowledge because it's sure, yes, you should, the baby should eat every two hours up to this age and three hours up to this age and six hours and you start weaning at a certain time. These are the good foods for winning and everything being really mirroring scientific motherhood as it was being articulated in Europe at the time. But then there were other elements that also played an extremely important role. Some of them were pragmatic hygiene coming in, but others were seen as moral and saying, well, this is your responsibility as a mother is to feed your child. And some women would say, you know, you have the best possible food in you and it is your is your duty to pass it on to your child. So that's how I see infant feeding. Fitting in with this question about re articulating scientific knowledge and absorbing and reframing it.
- [49:21]
Leah Cargan
Yeah.
- [49:21]
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Podcast Host Intro/Outro
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- [51:03]
Leah Cargan
No, it's absolutely fascinating the ways that no that you have written Scientific knowledge, interpretation through food consumption, thought preparation. It is a compelling chapter. You're right. Chapter three is a good one. So we're moving on in the timeline to, I believe, Japanese occupation. And so from 1942 into the 1950s, I believe Indonesian women's labor was politicized and engendered with by war, occupation and revolution. You demonstrate that care, work and hygiene were primary fields for employment of female labor and domestic work, and it was recognized as a fundamental goal of independence. And you've hinted on this throughout our conversation. But I want to talk specifically about this occupation period and how did Indonesian women enter professional healthcare spaces? And how does their participation in medical, scientific and hygiene hygienic professional spaces show this continued process of domestic, national, excuse me, domestic nationalism?
- [52:24]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
Yeah, sure. So the 1940s are a very interesting decade in Indonesian history because there are. They're rarely analyzed as a unit of time in itself because you have the very beginning of the decade. The Dutch are still in power, the Dutch colonial state is still present. In 1942, the Japanese army invades and occupies the Much of the narrative liberates the Dutches Indies and Indonesians from European colonialism. But of course it imposes its own imperial priorities. In 1945, with Japan, loss of World War II defeat, in World War II, they surrender and they give independence to Indonesia. And so there is Indonesia declares independence in August of 1945, but the Dutch, with the support of Australian and British troops, tries to regain control of their colony. And so between 45 and 49 there are four years of revolution, what is called revolutionary struggle, in which the Indonesians organized a whole different number of guerrilla groups and factions. You have the communists, the Islamists, the Republicans, the separatists that are from each different regions. There's all sorts of things, but they're all fighting sometimes among themselves and sometimes, I mean, and all of them against the Dutch. And So this is four years of revolution. And then at the. In December 1949, after major international pressure, the Dutch finally recognize Indonesia's independence. And there is this symbolic or formal transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands onto the Indonesian Republic. And so at the end of 1949, like the last couple of weeks of 1949, Indonesia is recognized as an independent nation state internationally. And all of this is happening in 1940s, right? So you go from going a colony to being an independent state, but through all of these transformations. And so it's very hard for all of us historians of Indonesia to think about the 1940s as a historical or historiographical unit, as a unit of historical analysis, because you have so much to contend with. What I found fascinating was that once you step down in a way from politics with capital P, the formal hallway of power and who is in charge at the highest level, there was so much continuity instead and the everyday experiences, especially when we think about the role of women in health and everyday activities of care, work. And that to me has been very interesting process for thinking about this chapter, which I titled War, because it's a whole decade about war and the opportunities that women were able to carve or grab for themselves. And before I go more into that, it's. It was also very hard chapter because during the Japanese occupation, there were many women who, who were abused or who became victims of sexual violence. They were often through, I mean, always through deception, if not grabbing and kidnapping. Enlisted, I'm always lost for words in here, but they were taken and put into Japanese barracks and in brothels that served the Japanese military. And one of the interesting things is that one of the ways in which these women were falsely, you know, were recruited on a. Under false pretense was by advertising jobs and training opportunities as nurses and first aid respondents. Which if you think about it in the flip side of things, it meant that those opportunities were also real, right? Women were being recruited for training and employment in the health profession during those years of Japanese occupation. And for some women, this ended up very badly. For others, it turned into a profession, into a professionalized experience as an opportunity as workers in the healthcare profession. And in terms of thinking about the recognition, the 1940s is really the moment in which because the men were being conscripted and they were drawn to the battlefields, just like in Europe and North America. The women were left to do everything else. And it was recognized that it was the women who kept the show on, right? The men were engaged in literal war and women were also engaged in war, but also kept doing everything else that they used to do before war started. The famous first and second shift. In a way, it might sound crazy to think about it that way, but the factories needed to run and wounded soldiers needed to be cared for and children needed still to be taught and cared for, and food needed to be found and cooked because the soldiers and the doctors and everybody else needed sustenance. And this is where the home front becomes the front line, right? This is where women continue doing their domestic activities. And the importance and the relevance at this point, literally for nation building, for, to achieve independence is very tangible because of the specific political, military circumstances. And into the 50s, since, you know, you were inviting a reflection on the 40s into the 50s, what is, what is interesting again is that even as the men go back to civilian life, these women are not stepping back. The women who had run public kitchens during the war in cities that were under siege with blockades and had still managed to find enough rice and grass to cook, as, you know, for as vegetables and whatnot, some of them found, I mean, all of them remained very active in a women's movement, but some of them who, yes, belong to more elite families, found a ways in ministerial committees in charge of developing nutrition policies for the country. Because in the 50s, public health becomes an absolute recognized and acknowledged pillar of nation building for Indonesia, with infant care. So birthing, infant care and nutrition being the three pillars of this one pillar, the three most important things within healthcare. Because the new nation needed soldiers, needed clerks, needed farmers, needed everything, and women at home were doing that. And women needed to be, at that point, put in a public space in the hallway of powers to institutionalize change and institutionalize policies that would work for the new nation. The last part that I want to add to this, that this was not only a domestic national matter for nation building, right? To ensure that the population was well fed and that maternal and infant death rates would decrease. It is the 1950s at this point. Indonesia has the second largest communist party in the world, and its president, Sukarno is emerging as one of, if not the leader of the Non Aligned Movement, right? So you have China and the Soviets who haven't split yet. They're interested in supporting Indonesia. Sukarno accepting some help, but also pushing back on other aspects, and America and the Western bloc not wanting to risk the domino effect. So USAID, which at the time was the 0.4, Truman's 0.4 program, is very eager to enter. Indonesia is a politically sensitive matter. So Sukarno is sort of on the fence there and says, well, yes, you can help us. But literally in one of the memos, he says, no way. No flag waiting. You can send advisors, but you can't really write about this. This can't be public. It can't be visible. And so the home becomes the primary arena both for nation, like domestic nation building and for international political jockeying. So you have the who, fao, American doctors, professors, you know, finding their ways as advisors in multiple fields, including what was becoming home economics. And women are at the center of all of that. And so that's where really the framework of domestic nationalism becomes the strongest right is in this understanding and this realization that is important for the nation state. But it also is much bigger than that because of Cold war politics. And the home, the privacy of the home is a space where also outside actors can find space to maneuver themselves.
- [63:22]
Leah Cargan
I want to pivot a little because we didn't quite get to it, but I want to ask about your sources. You use a lot of magazines and advertisements as sources throughout the book, and we talked about them a little briefly in some of the questions before. But I want to know specifically, how did women's magazines express the importance of healthcare, hygiene, and good nutrition as women's responsibilities?
- [63:47]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
I can keep this answer very, very brief because, in fact, it was overwhelming. That's the reality.
- [63:54]
Plan B Advertiser
Right?
- [63:54]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
So all the ads from the 20s onward, whether in the Dutch language or in the vernacular, were just fixated on marketing products as clean, healthy, and nutritious, and specifically to women as mothers, because food, that was a woman's matter. And so these range from Quaker Oats, which we can understand, milk, meat extract, but also comes to include chocolate drinks, margarine, of course, butter, it's a healthier counterpart. And beer, the importance of beer in helping breastfeeding mothers in producing milk, for example. And then there was a big debate over that is actually acceptable or not. Some women's group get a little concerned about that marketing. But again, even beer is being promoted as nutritious and important to women as mothers. And I'm just gonna conclude this with thanking the editor at my editor at Stanford University Press, because he. He actually agreed to print a lot more images than we had originally agreed on because the advertisements are just so powerful and they really enrich the narrative. So, yes, thank you to him.
- [65:17]
Leah Cargan
There are quite a few images in the text, but they're, they're really revealing and helpful to actually see the images. Sometimes it's frustrating to have to talk to about them without seeing them. So it was very nice to be able to see them. This is a big question, but maybe we can get a brief answer. But I just would like if you could speak on how the public dialogues about health and hygiene changed after independence. And you don't have to take us to today because that's, like I said,
- [65:48]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
a big no, I would not do that. Now this is relatively another easy question and could be very short in sense that it didn't.
- [65:56]
Prime Originals Advertiser
Right.
- [65:57]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
There is so much continuity. And to me, when I think about health and hygiene from the 20s and 30s into the 50s and early 60s, there are some things that obviously change, but it is mostly a story of continuity. You know, health had been so important to the colonials as a pillar of their, you know, exploitative practices and their economic model of being colonial power. The Japanese had done the same because they needed strong soldiers and support staff for their military endeavor. But again, also Sukarno's choice of a political economic model that was grounded on mostly manual subsistence agriculture really demanded home based health promoting practices, right? To keep everyone strong enough and healthy enough to work the land in a context of very scarce resources. Now, the real problem, which is something that I bring up in the epilogue, is that in this line of priorities, within a patriarchal society and a state that is increasingly in the late 50s, early 60s, is increasingly militarized, women's health is absolutely marginalized, right? So the women, women are responsible for the health of the nation, but their own health is not a priority. And so they're propped up as healthcare providers in the home, in the professional sphere. But the health of women's own bodies was really seen as disposable. And we see this with family planning, for example, right? Which becomes an absolute taboo in the late 50s and into the 60s with one. And I just share one anecdote and I talk, the whole epilogue is about family planning. In fact, Dr. Julia Sulianto, who had, you know, she changes. She changes. She ends up changing her specialization because when she starts talking about women's health and pregnancy spacing, the president and vice president tell her publicly that she should stop talk about this if she wants to still have a job, because that was not acceptable from a political, economic platform point of view. And so a lot changes. But we also see that so Much doesn't change. But we also see that the position of women is. Clarify. Is made very clear that they are a pillar of promoting health, but that their own health is not part of that discourse.
- [68:52]
Leah Cargan
Yeah, yeah, devastating. Because that's definitely a narrative that carries through a lot of other public health programs in the mid century of propping up the infants and putting the mother's actual corporeal beings in the back or towards the back. I think everyone dreads this question, but what are you working on now? Are you still in this health and hygiene vein or are we pivoting another way? What's percolating?
- [69:29]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
So I just started a new project which is going to feel like a marathon. So really is.
- [69:35]
Leah Cargan
It's.
- [69:36]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
It's not even baby stage, it's really embryo stage. It has very deep roots in my own past and some connections to the framework of gendered care, work, religion, and very broadly speaking, health, but is a very different project. So I'm looking at sacred landscapes in Bali, so still in Indonesia, but Bali, Hindu majority religious landscape. And I'm asking questions about how cosmological worldviews intersect with nature, particularly in response to what we as humans, you know, care, why we care for the environment around us, how do we balance? Or not mostly, I mean, history has shown us multiple pressures from economic prosperity, health, religious values, but also religious fears of, you know, how do you relate, how do humans with specific worldviews relate to the environment? And it's a combination of ethnographic research, historical archival work, but also I'm collaborating with colleagues in environmental engineering. So it's a very steep learning curve, but I hope that I don't have pressure to get this done anytime soon. So. Yes. More to come. Yeah, more to come at some point.
- [71:06]
Podcast Host Intro/Outro
No.
- [71:06]
Leah Cargan
Incredible. It's nice to see the very beginnings of a project from a. See how that, See how that creates itself. But just thank you for being here and thank you for a wonderful conversation about your book. I'm really glad to have read it. It's like I said in private, it's a little outside of my. My general reads as a Latin Americanist, but I'm really glad that I. That I did, and I'm happy. I'm very happy with our conversation. Thank you for joining me.
- [71:38]
Dr. Chiara Formicki
Thank you so much for having me. I truly appreciate it. Articulating all, all of these things outside of an Indonesian or Asian studies audience and context. And I hope that it is useful and helpful to think about these broader theoretical questions from a fairly different geographical point of view.
- [72:01]
Leah Cargan
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Once Again, thank you Dr. Formicki for joining me on the podcast. I had a great conversation learning about things which I research in my own work, but from a completely different geographical perspective, which is an invaluable conversation to have. So listeners, I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did and you can find more episodes on New Books in women's history@newbooksnetwork.org and more updates on the Journal of Women's History by following us on Instagram, bluesky or or on our blog at jwomenshistory.org thank you
- [72:41]
New Books Network Outro
for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ewbooksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substrac newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.
- [73:22]
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