Wives, Slaves, and Concubines by Eric Jones

Author:Eric Jones [Jones, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, Southeast Asia, Social Science, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9781609090616
Google: i628DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2011-12-15T01:10:37+00:00

5

Gender, Abuse, and the Modern World System

Female Violence in Eighteenth-century Jakarta

The demographic constraints and financial priorities of the Dutch East India Company that brought some Asian women into its “family” also brought the rest of the Asian women in the colonies under its legal authority. The following cases focus on women who abused their inferiors. Either the violence they meted out or the responses it invoked landed them in court, along with a host of witnesses and co-defendants, to tell their stories. These stories demonstrate an important tension within colonial society and highlight a critical moment in the modern world economic system. The shift from the spice economy to the plantation economy tore away the “sentimental veil” from the familial relationships between slave and master, slavin and mistress, and “reduced the family relation into a mere money relation.”1 Slaves and slavinnen who had once been incorporated into the lower rungs of the family ladder were kept at bay. Masters and mistresses no longer felt vertically bonded with their subjects in terms of reciprocal relationships of dependency. Instead, their interests in their underlings had come to rest in notions more connected to chattel ownership, and their behavior followed suit.

The occasional woman from the Asian underclass resorted to excessive violence when dealing with the men and women who were her social inferiors and ended up telling her story to the Court of Aldermen. The following cases of female violence share important traits, clues about the construction of female violence in Batavia. First, regardless of their own status, the women usually abused their social underlings. Second, this almost always happened against someone who performed his or her compensatory labor outside the household: a coolie slave or slavin. Third, if their abuse was “continual” and extreme, as opposed to occasional and fair (if unpleasant), slaves and slavinnen could be pushed over the brink. Fourth, when the victims could no longer bear the abuse, there initiated a gendered response from the men and women, who fought back in very different ways. By comparing six cases similar to Tjindra’s (the very first case presented in this study), not only are we given a glimpse of the early plantation economy, we also gain insight into the nature of female violence in a slave society and the construction of gender and mistress-slavin relationships in an early colonial context. More broadly, we are allowed an intimate look at what life was like for underclass women in an early Southeast Asian urban setting, specifically the poor women, slavinnen and concubines, in Indonesia.

Cases of Female Violence

Oetan and Tjindra

This book began with a fragment from the tale of misery involving the slavin Tjindra van Bali, who, when near death, recounted a gruesome tale of abuse meted out by her mistress, the Chinese mestiza Oetan. In a normal criminal proceeding, Tjindra would have delivered a formal deposition as soon as possible after the incident. As an indication of the severity of the beating, Tjindra was not well enough to testify for a full week.

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