Postcolonial solidarity? Dialogues between Dutch and Indonesian Women’s Movements during the Cold War (1960s-1970s)

During the final decades of Dutch colonial rule, a politically and religiously diverse Indonesian women’s movement developed, culminating in the First Indonesian Woman’s Congress in Yogyakarta in 1928. Indonesian women often looked towards other Asian feminist movements for inspiration and solidarity. From an early stage onwards, Indonesian activists built contacts with other Asian feminists: an Indonesian delegation, for instance, was present at the 1931 All-Asian Women’s Conference in Lahore. Since many activists in the Indonesian women’s movement adopted an explicitly anticolonial standpoint towards gender justice and equality, there was little engagement with women’s organisations in the West, much less with Dutch women’s groups. The long and painful decolonization process opened up new opportunities for Indonesian women’s groups to engage in contacts with Western feminists in the context of the Cold War. Postcolonial engagements between Dutch and Indonesian women’s organisations, however, have not received scholarly attention so far, even though there were initiatives: in 1972, for instance, a delegation of the Kongres Wanita Indonesia [Indonesian Women’s Congress, Kowani] paid a visit to the Nederlands Vrouwen Comité [Dutch Women’s Committee, NVC]. Analysing the contacts between these two organisations, this paper asks how Dutch and Indonesian women tried to (re)establish a political dialogue at a time when decolonization was still a recent memory.