Women Workers, Migration and Family in Sarawak

Women Workers, Migration and Family in Sarawak In many parts of southeast Asia women’s lifestyles are going through en...

Author: Cheng Sim Hew

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Women Workers, Migration and Family in Sarawak

In many parts of southeast Asia women’s lifestyles are going through enormous changes as women move from traditional rural, agricultural lifestyles to modern, urban lifestyles, which often involve migration to cities, taking on paid work, and having quite different relationships with their families. This book – based on intensive research among the women of the Bidayuh people in Sarawak, all of them first generation migrant wage workers – explores the extent to which women’s lifestyles are changing, and the reasons which prompt women to make the changes. The women’s specific life choices in migration, wage work and marriage are discussed in the context of wider socioeconomic transformation. The author’s research includes detailed interviews in the field, and much of this interview material is included in the book, thereby enabling the Bidayuh women to tell their own stories as they grapple with the rapid changes swirling around them. HEW Cheng Sim teaches in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Malaysia Sarawak.

Women Workers, Migration and Family in Sarawak

HEW Cheng Sim

First published 2003 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2003 HEW Cheng Sim All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-22179-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-27630-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–7007–1744–7 (Print Edition)

Contents

List of illustrations List of tables Preface 1

Introduction

viii ix xi 1

Women, wage work and the household 3 Rural–urban migration 7 2

A methodological discussion

11

An anthropology of women 11 A feminist anthropology 12 Feminist ethnography 15 Positionality and the politics of representation 19 Conclusion 24 3

Doing fieldwork at home

26

Research methods 27 Problems and limitations 30 4

The socio-economic context of change Who are the Bidayuh? 34 Rural Bidayuh economy 36 Customary land tenure system 36 State discourse on the shifting cultivation of padi 38 Cash-cropping and the education of children 40 Bidayuh women in rural agrarian society 41 Transformation of village life 43 Rural–urban migration and urbanisation in Sarawak 43

34

vi

Contents

5

To market, to market: rural–urban migration and becoming modern

48

The desire to be ‘modern’ 49 Economic necessity and migration 59 Decision making about migration: a comparison 62 City or country? 63 Remittances and rural–urban relations 65 Conclusion 67 6

Overqualified and underpaid: wage work in the personal services sector

69

Some experiences of women in this sector of employment 73 Women’s and men’s work in the village 76 7

Sex and salaries: single women migrants in the city

87

Courtship and marriage in the village 90 Bidayuh weddings – then and now 91 Bidayuh households in the village 92 Sexuality and young women migrants 93 Marriage partner selection 94 Rejection of marriage 96 Conclusion 97 8

Marriage, money and men: working mothers and their households

98

Paid work and life-course squeezes 98 Working wives and their husbands: marriage in the 1990s 105 Autonomy through wage work? 110 Conclusion 113 9

The hand that rocks the cradle leaves wage work: Bidayuh housewives The Bidayuh housewife: a Western bourgeois family ideal or economic pragmatism? 116 For the sake of the children’s education 117 Domestic division of labour 123 Management of household finances 127 Conclusion 131

115

Contents 10 Holding their own: four women and their stories

vii 132

Making do, stretching limits 134 Submission and resistance 138 Dominated and dominant 141 From abused wife to modern woman 144 Conclusion 147 11 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

148 152 160 173

Illustrations

Map The location of Kuching in Sarawak, Malaysia

xiii

Photographs 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Squatter housing where some of the women lived (single dwellings) Double storey and multiple households Stacking goods in a mini-market Housekeeping in a local hotel Working in a photocopying shop Waiting (a) at tables in an eating mall and (b) for customers outside a souvenir shop 7. The work of (a) a domestic worker and (b) a petrol pump attendant 8. Dish-washing behind busy coffee shops in the evening

81 81 82 82 82 83 84 85

Tables

4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 8.1

Percentage distribution of migrant population involved in rural–urban migration by state in Malaysia, 1995 Distribution of Bidayuh rural–urban migrants by industry, 1995 Educational attainment of Bidayuh rural–urban migrants, 1995 Migration profile Women’s preference for living in the village/city Summary of the wage disparity between working wives and their husbands according to educational level, occupation and monthly wages

44 46 46 49 64

106

Preface

When I first arrived in Sarawak almost two decades ago, the urban population constituted a mere twenty per cent of the state’s population. I remember telling my visitors that if they wanted to sample how life is like for the majority of people in Sarawak, they would have to leave the urban centres and travel upriver to the interior bazaars and villages. Twenty years later, half of Sarawak’s population resides in the urban centres and the population of Kuching, the capital, has doubled. Hotels, restaurants and shopping centers have mushroomed and the once unheard of traffic congestion is now part and parcel of everyday life in the capital. Like the rural migrants in this study, my own research interest has also moved from the rural to the urban which has become the epicentre of transformative forces. History is being made as village girls are transformed into urban wage earning daughters and later into employed wives and full-time home-makers. In documenting the women’s experiences, I hope to shine a torch not only on their encounters with waged work in a genderised and ethnicised sector of employment, but also explore the implications that wage earning has on their positions in their households and their relationships with men. Although this investigation has resonance of similar work in the region, a review of other studies have alerted me to the enormous variations in women’s relationship to paid work, marriage and family. Hence, women’s experiences of rapid economic and social changes are by no means prescribed and are historically and contextually specific. In doing this study, I had to grapple with a myriad of issues concerning my own hybridisation. First, as a researcher whose social location is in the East but whose intellectual training was in the West, I found that nothing in the field fitted neatly into familiar pre-packaged concepts. On the contrary, they needed unpacking as what I confronted was ambivalent, ambiguous, contradictory and messy – just as life always is. Second, although my research question was sociological in nature, my research methodology was located in anthropology. Although these are not impermeable boundaries, it made the task more challenging. Third, the political issue of ‘insider/outsider’ knowledge is a concern as my own state of origin is in West Malaysia and Sarawak is my adopted state. Given state and federal politics between West Malaysia and Sarawak, I am considered an insider, outside of Malaysia and an outsider, in Sarawak. In constantly straddling two

xii

Preface

locations intellectually and culturally, I had to come to terms with my own position vis à vis the women that I study. In writing this book, I am indebted to the women who participated in this research, for their willingness to share their lives with me. In addition, a big thank you goes to my supervisor, Belinda Probert and my examiners, Janet Salaff and Martha Macintrye for encouraging me to publish this book. Without their encouragement and useful feed-back, this book will not be written. Financial support for my doctoral studies came from University Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) but moral support at UNIMAS for publishing this book came from Abdul Rashid Abdullah, Michael Leigh and Wan Zawawi Ibrahim. I am also grateful to Beverley Cox for her editing and word-processing skills in getting the manuscript into shape for the publishers. My appreciation goes to Peter Sowden of RoutledgeCurzon for narrowing the geographical distance between Sarawak and England with his efficient handling of this project. Last but not least, special thanks goes to Tang Tieng Swee for taking the photographs and the map which he reproduced for this book.

W. MALAYSIA

SABAH

Kuala Lumpur

A

A

N HI

TH

U SO

C

SE

Kuching

SARAWAK

M

SU A

R AT

KALIMANTAN

The location of Kuching in Sarawak, Malaysia

1

Introduction

This is a study of Bidayuh women working in the personal services sector in the city of Kuching in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. The Bidayuh are a minority indigenous group in Sarawak and they constitute 8.1 per cent of the state’s population after the Iban, Chinese and Malay in that order of population size. The Bidayuh live mainly in and around Kuching and the majority are farmers practising mixed agriculture. They grow rice for subsistence and various combinations of cash crops like pepper, cocoa and rubber, depending on global market prices. As a result of the great fluctuations in world market prices for these products, the Bidayuh are increasingly turning to market gardening; growing vegetables, mainly as secondary crops on their paddy farms, for the markets of Kuching. However, many of the younger generation with some secondary education are shunning the hard life of their parents who live off the land. With a buoyant economy until recently, many have been drawn to seek wage work in Kuching and beyond. It is with the Bidayuh women who have left the villages for the city that this study is concerned. Kuching is the capital and administrative centre for the state and has a population of close to 400,000, which makes it the largest city in Sarawak. It is essentially a civil service city and has a relatively small industrial base in comparison to the majority of the cities in West Malaysia. Many Bidayuh women now work in the personal services sector, as waitresses and kitchen aides in restaurants and coffee-shops, petrol pump attendants, assistants in nurseries and private childcare centres, supermarket assistants, cleaners in small local hotels and domestic workers. I consider their work in the personal services as employment in the formal sector (as opposed to the informal sector) because they have employers, fixed monthly wages and to a certain extent, clearly defined days off. The main reason for studying women in this sector of work is because very little is known about them. Unlike their factory sisters who have been propelled onto the international feminist stage,1 Malaysian women working in the personal services sector are a largely forgotten and neglected lot. Their employment and workplace practices are localised, not globalised, and they do not congregate visibly in transnational worksites. Their experiences of the labour process at the bottom of the service work hierarchy are non-sensational because the nature of their work is viewed as a continuation of women’s unpaid domestic labour and is

2

Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak

menial and lowly paid.2 It is because of their lowly position in the work hierarchy that I have used the term ‘wage work’ throughout the book although in the West, wages are usually paid weekly while the majority of the women receive their pay monthly and in some cases, bimonthly. This book also redresses an imbalance in studies of women in the Malaysian context. As observed by Stivens, a scholar with a long association with Malaysia, … the concentration on factory labour, to the exclusion of the many other forms of manual labour that contemporary Malaysian women perform, is clear evidence of the power within Malaysian social science of ‘workerist’ models deriving from the western experience. (Stivens 1996: 166) However, it is only fair to say that the manufacturing sector employs the largest number of women in Malaysia overall, although there is an increasing proportion of women involved in the tertiary sector. In 1996, community, social and personal services ranked second after manufacturing as a sector with the largest percentage of women employed (Cheng 1999: 219). In addition, Stivens pointed out that there has been a disproportionate number of studies of Malay women and much less work on other minority women in Malaysia (1992: 215). She suggested that Malay cultural hegemony amongst social science academics and government affirmative policies for the Malays have led to a lot more research on Malay women than on women of other ethnic communities. This study of Bidayuh women is a first in Sarawak because of its urban employment context. Even as these women confront the present in an urban setting, they draw upon their past. Previous anthropological work on the Bidayuh which investigated different aspects of their lives in the rural areas3 will be invaluable to an understanding of Bidayuh history and way of life in the hinterland. Although these studies will not be individually reviewed here, they will be referred to wherever relevant in the book. This study focuses on Bidayuh women because they are rural migrants and first generation women in their households to have migrated to the city for wage work. The women’s migration to the city will be examined and contexualised within the macrostructural forces at work and their individual motivations for migration. Apart from wanting to know what migration to the city means to the women, I am interested to know how wage earning in the capitalist economy has affected their relationships with men and how this is different from their mothers in the village. This research question follows a long tradition of studies by feminists and historians (Whitelegg et al. 1982, Tilly and Scott 1987, Seccombe 1993, Frader and Rose 1996) who have been interested in the consequences of such structural transformation on the lives of women. They studied the link between women’s wage work and their family life in the nineteenth century where industrial capitalism changed the economic and social landscape of the West.

Introduction

3

Women, wage work and the household Women The category of women needs deconstructing as there is no such homogenous, universal category. One example is that women at different phases in the lifecourse4 will have different options in their labour-force participation and work trajectory and also in their relationships to their households and men. An approach which contextualises their experiences at different phases of the lifecourse sharpens our understanding of the linkages between wage work and household and the constraints and opportunities that women face. Hence, I have selected to study single women, working mothers (this includes married women and single mothers) and housewives who have since withdrawn from the workforce. Using women’s position in the life-course as an axis of analysis does not imply that women at the same phase in the life-course would necessarily share the same experiences or perceptions. However, we need an approach which articulates both the diversity and commonality of women’s experiences. An interesting study using this framework is one by Pratt and Hanson (1993) which examined the employment patterns of various groups of women over the life-course in Massachusetts, USA. They explored the differences between younger married women, middle-aged married women and those divorced, separated and widowed. They linked domestic responsibilities to their labour force participation and looked at the way in which women with domestic responsibilities were constrained spatially by the local labour markets. Lamphere et al.’s (1993) study of sunbelt working mothers, set in Albuquerque in the United States and involving Mexican–American and Anglo women workers is another investigation of the relationship between gender, class, ethnicity and marital status in terms of women’s experiences in reconciling family and factory work. The book focused on the contradictions that working mothers faced in mediating their commitment to wage work, housework and child-care. It looked at both convergences and divergences in the strategies used by women of the two ethnic groups in resolving the tensions between wage labour and domestic labour and how they built supportive networks. Although my own work will not examine the geographical dimensions of the women’s entry into the labour market, the work of Pratt and Hanson and Lamphere is nevertheless relevant as I investigate how women at different phases of their life-course mediate the terrain of wage work and domestic responsibilities. Wage work The connection between wage work and women’s emancipatory project has always been of concern to feminist researchers. According to Engels, women’s subordination to men was a result of the development of the monogamous family as an autonomous unit of economic production. This change in family form was linked to the private ownership of the means of production. Men wanted to

4


transmit their accumulated wealth to their genetic offspring and monogamous marriage assured them of the paternity of the children. Women were therefore relegated to reproductive tasks of feeding, washing, cleaning and biological reproduction within the domestic sphere while men were primarily responsible for economic production in the public sphere. In this way, men appropriated women’s domestic labour and women did not control access to resources and the products of their labour. Within the framework of binary theorising which dominated feminist debates in the 1970s, a line was drawn between productive and reproductive work, public and private, modern and traditional, autonomy and dependence. Hence, as the agrarian economy changed to a capitalist mode of production and peasants were proletarianised, it was at first postulated that women’s participation in productive labour outside the home would be crucial to their emancipation from the confines of family and their economic dependence on men. Consequently in the West, women’s participation rates in the labour market are often used as indices for their status. However, the forms that autonomy and status take in the Third World may be very different from those in the First World. For instance, in certain parts of India where it is a dishonour to work outside the home amongst unrelated males, women’s status and autonomy may come from their ability to abstain from waged labour (Sharma 1990: 241). In addition, concepts of autonomy and status are difficult to operationalise in the field. For instance, how are they to be identified and how are they to be measured? These concepts are therefore highly problematic. The debates have moved on since then and the links between women, wage work and the household are now seen to be more complex, multilayered and shifting. Since the 1980s there has been an explosion of scholarly work on women in developing countries, especially in Asia. This is particularly so as globalisation and the international division of labour transformed the lives of women in these newly industrialising countries. Questions have been asked as to whether the exploitative nature of capitalist production had negative consequences for these women or had wage-earning increased their independence and autonomy (Nash and Fernandez 1983, Pearson and Elson 1984). The assumption implicit in a lot of studies was that there was a direct link between women’s participation in the work-force and their status and autonomy as pointed out above. In Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and later Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and most recently, China, international capital investments in labour-intensive processes in electronics, garment and other light industries drew young single women from the villages to towns and cities for the first time. Lee’s work on factory daughters in the new export production zones of Shenzhen, South China found exploitative relations between village girls and their employers (Lee 1998). With clientalist relations between local state officials and foreign investors, the formation of trade unions was lax and strikes were opposed. Thus, young women workers were subjected to punitive, coercive control by management which Lee labelled localistic depotism (ibid: 109–36). Women from the different provinces in China were channelled into factories in Shenzhen and

Introduction

5

male locals controlled female locals on the factory floor. Salaff ’s (1995) work on factory daughters in Hong Kong,5 Kung’s (1983) study of Taiwanese factory girls and Lim’s (1983) contribution to the understanding of the situation of factory women in Singapore, argued that there was exploitation of women not only by international capital but also by the state and family. Both Salaff and Kung discussed the power of the Chinese patriarchal family in controlling the wages of their factory daughters. Although Salaff’s factory women lived at home and Kung’s women stayed in factory dormitories, their conclusions were very similar. Women’s contribution to family coffers did not empower them or expand their life-chances. Instead, their wages were often used to educate younger siblings and especially brothers. Sons continued the family line while daughters married and left home. Thus, daughters in Chinese families were perceived to be economically valuable only for a short period of time between leaving school and marriage. However, their economic contributions to the household were seen as part and parcel of filial piety and a repayment of a debt to the family. Hence, their wage-earning did not increase their standing in the family or give them a greater say in family decision-making. Although working daughters enjoyed a certain measure of freedom of mobility, leisure activities with their peers and consumption patterns unavailable to their mothers, they were nevertheless subordinated to the family and capital. Similarly, Lim (1983) documented the burden of domestic responsibilities on Singapore women working in electronic factories and the discrimination they faced as workers and their secondary status both in the economy and the family. Thus, these studies indicated that patriarchal relations at home limited women’s potential even as they participated in the work-force. Contrary to these studies, Lee found that women did not seek factory work in Shenzhen because of their families’ dependence on their remittances. On the contrary, some rural parents supported their daughters when they were unemployed and between jobs and did not rely on their daughters’ luck in getting jobs (Lee 1998: 75). The young women’s main motivation for migration was to escape parental control and family obligations and to explore a new way of life in the city (ibid: 81). Remittance was not necessarily for familial use but as a way of keeping their hard-earned money in secure hands. Thus, the workings of the Chinese patriarchal family find different expressions in different contexts and at different times. In Indonesia, Wolf (1992) studied Javanese factory daughters and found that the less restrictive family structure in Java meant that daughters often worked in factories against their parents’ wishes and did so not for familial economic reasons but for new experiences. In fact, peasant families often had to subsidise their daughters’ meagre wages by sending food to factory dormitories or providing them with free housing if they lived at home. Unlike the factory daughters of Taiwan and Hong Kong who gave their families a substantial portion of their earnings, Javanese daughters earned much less and could only manage small luxuries for their families. Wolf also discussed how Javanese conceptions of femininity were manipulated in order to control women’s labour.

6

Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak This particular conception of women, which encourages the widespread dependency on and submission to males in the family, is reproduced in the worker-manager relations within the factory… By reminding women of their obligation to be loyal and obedient, quiet, accepting and unprotesting, the state can control women’s labour and keep their wages down. (Wolf 1992: 67, 72)

As the women in my study are first generation wage workers, I am interested in the same questions. Does the radical change from rural farms to urban capitalist work-place mean a transformation of their lives in terms of independence from their families; or is the relationship between women and men in their rural economy perpetuated in the urban centres where most of them live and work?

Household In anthropology, the household is often seen as the basic unit of society where recruitment is through kinship and marriage. Not only is it recognised that there is great cross-cultural variation in its form and internal arrangement, it changes through the different life-phases of its members. The organisation of households has important consequences for women as they are the site of production, reproduction and consumption. However, there are also a set of assumptions concerning the household. The household is often seen to be distinctive because intrahousehold relations are non-capitalist as opposed to the capitalist mode of economic transactions outside the household. As Wolf explains, this is related to a romanticised view of the household: Economists from both neoclassical and Marxist backgrounds assume that the competition, struggle, economic self-interest, and exploitation that pervade the capitalist marketplace are left on the doormat. Thus, people are selfish in the marketplace and selfless at home. (Wolf 1992: 16) Hence, it is assumed that household resources are shared and distributed evenly amongst all members. However, feminists have long problematised the concept of household as a collective entity with a common interest and governed by consensus (Sharma 1986, Moore 1988, Wolf 1992, Stivens 1994a). It has been argued that the household is not an irreducible unit and the notion of joint-utility and welfare maximisation must be deconstructed in order to reveal processes of conflict, control and co-operation within the household. As pointed out by Moore: The control and allocation of resources within the household is a complex process which always has to be seen in relation to a web of rights and

Introduction

7

obligations. The management of labour, income and resources is something which is crucially bound up with household organisation and the sexual division of labour. (Moore 1988: 56) In a study by Kibria (1995) of Bangladeshi garment factory workers, she showed how management of the women’s income was not only tied to the household organisation but also to the class position of the household. Working class women handed over all their wages to their husbands in order to bolster the financial authority of men in a situation of financial scarcity and insecurity. On the other hand, lower middle-class women who were also garment factory workers kept their entire wages on the insistence of their men as a means of social distancing from working class men who needed their wives’ wages. In the third instance, rural poor women migrants working in garment factories were found to control their own wages because their families in the villages were too ashamed to demand money as they had failed in their duty to protect and to provide for their daughters. This has to be understood in the context of purdah (female seclusion) in Bangladesh. Thus, there is no predetermined way in which patriarchy expresses itself in the households of the different classes. In this study, analysis of the households of the women interviewed revealed some of the complexities outlined here. However, I have not interviewed all household members. Instead, I have concentrated primarily on the women as I wanted specifically to understand the interconnections between their wage work and the household. One of the constraints of this study is that the power dynamics of intra-household relations are not directly addressed as I have only interviewed six men in this study.

Rural–urban migration Rural–urban migration is another common theme in studies of women in Asia although the transnational migration of women in the region is also an area which has generated much interest of late. Three theoretical perspectives dominate the literature on rural–urban migration. The first approach takes a structural– historical analysis of the causes of migration while the second approach analyses individual decision-making. The third approach sought to combine the first two positions and uses the concepts of households and social networks as an intermediate level of analysis. Households and social networks therefore linked the individual to larger societal forces at work. Often in studies using the third approach, individual decision-making in migration is transferred to that of a group decision, that of households or social networks. However, the different labels of these theoretical approaches often disguise a common underlying assumption that people migrate because they or their households are motivated economically to do so. This is a topic which I would explore further in Chapter 5 when discussing the women’s motivations for migrating to the city.

8


In a research on short-term, circular migration in a village in Central Java, Hetler (1990) reported that 80 per cent of all households in that village had at least one person who was an active circular migrant and 35 per cent of all households were female headed. Women and men generally migrated independently but when they migrated together as a couple, women participated in income generation when accompanying their husbands to urban centres. Children were left behind in the village in the care of older daughters, grandmothers or other kin. Women from the ages of 30 to 59 years tended to be economically active migrants while younger and older women were left in the village. When women migrated, men also assumed the responsibilities of cooking, washing and childcare. In landowning families, women migrated while men looked after the family farm for subsistence and engaged in house construction for others in order to earn cash. Income earning opportunities for women in the village were much less so more women than men migrated. Men and women who migrated had their own trade speciality; men in selling dumpling soup and women in selling bottled traditional herbal tonics. Men earned more than women but the latter’s capital outlay was minimal as they sold their tonics from house to house and in the markets and streets. However, female migrants sometimes contributed to more than half of the total household income. Elite women in the village frowned upon the migration activities of poorer women but the public role of many lower class women was found in precisely these economically productive spheres, for example, petty trading and running small village shops. In my own research, although all the women migrated as single women, some have married and returned to live in the village while their husbands commuted to work in the city, while others have remained in the city. I am also aware that as first generation rural–urban migrants in their households, the Bidayuh women I spoke to were influenced by their experiences of work and life in both the rural and the urban setting. For this reason, in my own research, I have examined both the rural and urban contexts in which Bidayuh women live and work. Stivens’ study of matriliny in Rembau, Malaysia, found that those who had migrated to the city for employment returned to their villages to contribute their labour during crucial stages of paddy cultivation, especially during harvesting. Parents and elderly kin in the villages reciprocated by providing support during child-birth and sickness and domestic labour in child-care. Stivens therefore argued that modernisation did not imply a decline in kinship relations but the emergence of what she called a ‘remittance family economy’ (Stivens 1996: 228) which promoted the interdependence of kin especially in a situation of minimal state welfare provisions. In addition, young women’s participation in the urban labour force often meant that they and their working male siblings contributed to the maintenance of their families in the villages. She labelled this ‘a combined family economic strategy’ (ibid: 229). In a study in Thailand, Szanton (1990) analyses inter-generational resource allocation and investment as a family strategy. She found that Thai women have lost out in the pressures of capitalist development. In the agrarian economy, Thai women were central as they had access to land through bilateral and matrilineal

Introduction

9

inheritance. They worked on household farms and controlled household incomes. However, with the penetration of capitalist development and increasing pressures on land, the number of landless families increased and there was no longer any land for women to inherit. Many migrated in search of wage work in the city. It was culturally expected that a wife would supplement her husband’s earnings. Thus, women’s wages were used to buy food and to pay for the schooling of their children. They therefore had little left for themselves. With low wages in the urban areas and multiple jobs in order to make ends meet, women carried the burden of increased work-loads both in income generation and domestic responsibilities. In my study, I will discuss household management of finances in the context of gender conflict, and analyse the gender division of domestic labour in the households of married women. In a study by Trager (1988) on rural–urban migration in a small city in the Philippines, she found that more women migrated than men and statistics showed that they were likely to be young, single women. She explored the reasons for this. First, women were not discriminated against in education, and in colleges, women graduates outnumbered men. Second, wage-earning opportunities for women in the rural areas were limited but it was easier for women to get jobs in the urban centres than men because domestic service and sales, where most women found employment, were perceived to be ‘female’ jobs. In other words, the types of jobs opened to migrants in the urban areas were likely to have a preference for women. Lastly, daughters were thought to be more obedient and more reliable in remitting money to their natal households than sons. Thus, Trager argued that migration in the Philippines was a household strategy to maximise income earning opportunities and that fathers were most likely to have made the decision for daughters to migrate. Although the use of the concept of household strategy is useful in some cases, studies in Shenzhen and Java found that women’s factory employment was the result of women’s personal decisions rather than a strategy for household survival. Frequently, women sought employment in spite of parental objections and most households did not depend on their daughters’ remittances for household survival (Lee 1998, Wolf 1992). A household is frequently conceptualised as having a strategy as it mediates between the individual and the wider economic structure. However, the concept of ‘household strategies’ is highly problematic (Stichter 1990, Wolf 1992). Wolf argued that the use of household strategies as a conceptual tool is a reflection of changing approaches in the study of Third World countries. The Third World peasant who was formerly seen as an ignoramus bound by tradition is now regarded as a rational strategist. She further noted that a household strategy approach imbued members of a household with altruism and overlooked conflict, dissent and relations of unequal power. Another problem is that ‘strategies’ were often discovered as the result of analysing actions in retrospect, without first questioning the motivations of the players themselves. Wolf’s study in Java revealed that the concept of strategy oversimplified the processes within the household, as often decisions and actions involved a shortterm means–end calculation and did not really constitute a broader, long-term

10


plan that the word ‘strategy’ implied. In addition, not all economic decisions were calculated. They were often ad hoc as a high level of uncertainty existed. Instead, she felt that the term ‘getting by’ used by Selby and Lorenzen (1990: 71) in their study of urban Mexican households was more appropriate. As the women in this study are rural migrants and first generation urban wage-earners in their households Stivens’ study (1996) is relevant as I wanted to know in what ways the Bidayuh women interviewed maintained links with their rural households, if they did. If most of the proceeds of their labour was used to support their natal families in the village, then the financial benefits of wageearning would not accrue to the women themselves. Often in analysing processes of change such as rural–urban migration, the views and perceptions of the individuals involved are often overlooked as the discussion focuses on macrostructural factors affecting change, or else on the household strategy as discussed above. However, I am interested in Bidayuh women’s own motivations for migration. I am keen to understand what Stivens called the ideological restructuring of the women into wage workers. As she explained: The economic needs perceived as family needs by both sides represent one pressing reason for migration. But in themselves they do not explain how the ideological restructuring that allowed some if not all young women to become workers came about. This restructuring has been dependent upon young women adopting a set of ideologies that promoted ideas of personal freedom, being modern, of excitement only available in the big city and sorely lacking in the kampung [village]. (Stivens 1996: 173) Chapter 5 of this book deals with these issues as the women talk of reasons for their migration. In reviewing these studies, one stark fact stands out – the enormous variations in women’s experiences of wage work and family in different countries, social classes and at different historical time. There is no simple, prescribed link between wage work and women’s autonomy. However, what appears to be important factors in analysing women’s experiences are their gender, class position, the nature of their employment, their position in the life-course, the organisation of their households and the connections that they have with their natal families.

2


In this chapter we will journey to the centre of knowledge production where the debates which I am about to discuss are taking place. The majority of the research reviewed in the previous chapter were studies by Western scholars in developing countries. The intellectual tasks of these scholars are complex and difficult as the analysis of gender in the Third World1 by First World feminists is a highly contested area. The intellectual challenges of postcolonial feminism make the project of cross-cultural research a highly charged one for Western feminists. Yet such a situation is doubly hard for a researcher whose social location is in the East but whose intellectual training was in the West. I first went to university in Britain in the 1970s where I was trained in sociology. Some ten years ago, I did my Masters degree in an anthropology department in Malaysia. I therefore straddle both disciplines somewhat uncomfortably although the disciplinary boundaries between anthropology and sociology are increasingly blurred. As a researcher working in my own country, the issues I address are more sociological than anthropological in nature, but my methodological concerns are very much in anthropology. Although the following discussion is arranged in chronological time, the debates have shifted backwards and forwards through the years and over the decades. Thus, they are by no means impermeable boundaries. My discussion will start with the anthropology of women in the 1970s when I first went to university and when feminists began to question the conceptual frameworks in anthropology. From here I move to a discussion of feminist anthropology in the 1980s and then to feminist ethnography. The chapter will conclude with the framework of this research.

An anthropology of women Women have always had an anthropological presence in the discussion of marriage and kinship. However, the feminist critique of anthropology was not so much aimed at women’s absence but at the way women were portrayed and represented by male anthropologists. During the second wave of feminism of the 1970s, where every branch of academic study was subjected to rigorous feminist critique, it was quickly identified that women were not properly represented in anthropological writings because of androcentric bias. For instance, men were

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often thought to be the more knowledgeable informants and more accessible to outsiders. Thus, women were often side-lined in data collection and empirical research. Second, Western assumptions of male and female relationships often introduced bias into the study of non-Western societies. When women appeared in anthropological studies at all, it was often to the credit of the anthropologist’s wife who in accompanying her husband to the field, contributed unpaid labour by studying the local women. In some cases, such as Fernea (1989), these women published their own ethnographies as a result of their studies. However, these monographs were in the main treated as non-anthropological because of their writers’ lack of formal training in anthropology and because of their wide appeal to a general audience.2 In redressing the imbalance, feminist anthropologists collected empirical data on women in a wide variety of cultures and societies. Women’s views, perceptions and attitudes were meticulously recorded. Their activities were described and their position and status explored. This effort to put women back into the picture was labelled the anthropology of women. However, this method of ‘add-women-and-stir’ was found to be merely remedial and inadequate. It soon became clear that it was not merely a matter of male bias in empirical research but a problem of androcentric bias at a theoretical and analytical level. The linguistic categories and conceptual frameworks in anthropology reflected the male worldview in Western culture and were simply unable to allow women’s perspectives to emerge. It was inevitable that this soon gave way to a feminist anthropology.

A feminist anthropology In the United States, two landmark publications, Women, Culture, and Society (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974) and Towards an Anthropology of Women (Reiter 1975) marked the feminist assault not only on the androcentric bias in anthropology but also in trying to understand gender relations. Feminist anthropologists explored women’s status and position in a variety of societies and came to the conclusion that women were universally subordinated to men. The essays in Women, Culture and Society set out to show why this was so by pointing to sexual asymmetry as a result of social structure, culture and socialisation. In each case, women’s role in child-bearing and child-rearing was the basis of their subordination. Women’s association with the devalued domestic sphere and men with the powerful political, public sphere led to women’s subordination to men. The 1970s saw a resurgence of Marxist theorising as a result of the political ferment of the 1960s’ social and political movements. Marxist feminists frequently argued that colonisation led to a worsening of women’s position in colonised societies. Sacks and Leacock (di Leonardo 1991: 12) for example, looked at ethnohistory to argue that early horticultural and foraging societies were egalitarian as there was communal ownership of resources and women and men depended on each other for survival. The imposition of state structures on nonstate societies as a result of colonial rule resulted in a worsening of women’s position as stratification and privatisation of resources emerged.


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In addition, with ‘the development of underdevelopment’ school of political sociology (Frank 1967) and the world system theory (Wallerstein 1979), anthropological research began to examine the effects of colonisation and capitalist penetration on non-Western, third-world societies. In addition, previous anthropological studies which concentrated on the productive labour and decisionmaking of male heads of household and the relegation of women to the domestic reproductive sphere were rewritten. Instead, women’s contribution to subsistence agriculture was analysed. Changes in gender relations as a result of capitalist penetration was also examined. My own work on the change in gender relations amongst a group of Iban in Sarawak is located in this research tradition. The Iban of my study were subsistence hill paddy cultivators and they were resettled into plantation cash cropping as the consequence of the siting of a hydroelectric dam in their area. Iban women in hill paddy cultivation enjoyed high status because they were custodians of the paddy rites and rituals and because they were responsible for food production. All this was lost as a result of the agrarian change and women’s position worsened because men were now in charge of cash cropping. In addition, cash compensations for the loss of land were given by the state to heads of households who were perceived to be men. This set up gender asymmetry as women who previously had rights to land inheritance became dependent on their men for a fair share of the compensation (Hew and Kedit 1987: 163–219). Thus, anthropology provided much of the material to the subfield of ‘Women in Development’ (WID) and later ‘Gender and Development’ (GAD) in development studies. On the other side of the Atlantic, Women United, Women Divided (Caplan and Bujra 1979) and Of Marriage and the Market (Young et al. 1981) were watershed publications by British Marxist feminists. Although these two volumes were outside the discipline of anthropology per se, these interdisciplinary studies were influential to feminist thought as they linked the specific to the larger political– economic context. For example, Elson and Pearson’s (1981) think piece in the volume edited by Young et al. (1981) analysed women’s position through the internationalisation of factory production in a global economy. In the 1980s, this early theorising came under increasing attack. The universal subordination of women thesis lost its saliency as it became obvious that women’s positions vis à vis men and other women were multiple, complex and contradictory. Women and men do not always stand in opposition to one another and gender relations have to be located in a complex web of interrelationships. Structural Marxism was criticised as being too economistic and deterministic and for not giving enough attention to the dynamics of power in society and human agency. The analysis of belief systems and values as ideology articulating with a material base in maintaining and legitimising the existing order was constraining. Culture was reduced to ideology which functioned to maintain the status quo and could not accommodate the idea of contestation over meaning. Their tendency to separate the relations of reproduction from other productive relations has also been heavily criticised. It has been argued that this separation between the economy and the family is artificial. The productive and reproductive

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roles of women mirror the public–domestic divide which is analytically limiting. Hence, structural Marxism is deterministic and highly problematic. The capitalist worldview also had its problems. Ortner remarked, ‘History is often treated as something that arrives, like a ship, from outside the society in question. Thus we do not get the history of that society, but the impact of (our) history on that society’ (1984: 143). It follows from this that what was previously conceived of as tradition was in fact a response to Western incursion. In addition, colonialism did not necessarily mean a deterioration of women’s position. On the contrary, in some societies, women’s position was in fact strengthened. An example was the impact of the fur trade on the Iroquois in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Women’s control over agriculture was improved and they achieved more political decision-making power (Lamphere 1987: 24). In the context of Sarawak, the impact of Brooke rule on the position of Bidayuh women appears to have been mixed. For example, Bidayuh women who were slaves in the households of aristocratic Malays were freed as a result of an edict to abolish slavery by Charles Brooke. However, the White Rajahs also maintained a notion of ‘the noble savage’ and perceived formal schooling as a corrupting influence on indigenous people. In this, Bidayuh women as well as their men lost out. It was also argued by the critics of structural Marxism that the dichotomous framework of nature/culture, domestic/public, reproduction/production were Western categories which had their historical roots in the Enlightenment Period and bore no relation to realities in non-Western societies. Class and race also made the thesis of separate spheres highly problematic. What is a private and domestic domain for one group of women is public to another. Domestic servants are a case in point (di Leonardo 1991: 16). Similarly, in the rural farming areas of Sarawak where the Bidayuh of this study reside, there is no clear separation between domestic and productive work. Child-care takes place in the farm when babies are swaddled on the women’s backs and the processing of crops for instance, the drying of harvested pepper berries takes place at home. As theory and conceptual frameworks inform data collection and interpretation, inadequacies in anthropological theories were reflected in feminist analysis. Hence, feminist anthropologists began to critique the binary concepts used in anthropology, and set out to rework and redefine anthropology itself. It was also in the 1980s that feminism faced the crisis of difference. Feminists of colour (particularly, black feminists on both sides of the Atlantic, in North America and Britain), criticised white feminists for not taking into account the diversity amongst women. Feminist theories were constructed with white, middleclass, heterosexual woman in mind and excluded the experiences and circumstances of women of colour. The ‘add-women-of-colour-and-stir’ method was untenable because women of colour have structurally very different situations because gender and class are overlaid with ‘race’. Thus ended the innocence of universal sisterhood. It was in this climate that postmodernist and poststructuralist feminisms seized the day.


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Feminist ethnography Feminist ethnography is not a new invention but a reworking of an old one. Feminist ethnography today has a postmodern turn (to take a phrase from MasciaLees et al. 1989). Postmodernism is characterised by disillusionment in the West with Western philosophies. Rational thought and scientific development are no longer seen as the panacea for the ills of society. Parpart and Marchand describe postmodernism this way: The grand theories of the past, whether liberal or Marxist, have been dismissed as products of an age when Europeans and North Americans mistakenly believed in their own invincibility. The metanarratives of such thought are no longer seen as ‘truth,’ but simply as privileged discourses that deny and silence competing dissident voices. The struggle for universalist knowledge has been abandoned. A search has begun for previously silenced voices, for the specificity and power of language(s) and their relation to knowledge, context and locality. (Parpart and Marchand 1995a: 2) Thus, postmodernism emerged from a critique of the concept of modernity, and it argues that there is no objective reality. Hence, there are no grand theories nor can there be universal claims to knowledge. In addition, Derrida (Parpart and Marchand 1995a: 3) argued that the binary opposites in Western thought such as man/woman, rational/emotional, mind/ body, culture/nature, modern/traditional, scientific/non-scientific, neutral/partial are constructed in a way that privileges the first term over the second. He further suggested that texts have to be deconstructed to reveal how binary thinking shapes our understanding and how language (discourse) is constructed to highlight difference which in turn leads to hegemony. Poststructuralist writers therefore claim the supremacy of textual analysis. All texts whether they are scientific reports, historical narratives or poetry for instance are seen to be forms of persuasive fictions and have to be deconstructed in order to reveal their hidden agenda (di Leonardo 1991: 22). In colonial discourses, Western scholars often represent the Oriental, ‘Third World other’ as irrational and uncivilised as opposed to the rational, scientific and civilised West. In other words, the negative and devalued of the binary opposite is projected onto the ‘Third World other.’ Hartsock writes, … the epistemological and political thought of the Enlightenment depended on the dualistic construction of a different world, a world onto which was projected an image of everything that ruling-class, male Europeans wanted to believe they were not. Edward Said names the fundamental dynamic of the process clearly when he states that the creation of the Orient (and one might add, the creation of various other racial, gender, and even class categories) was an outgrowth of the will to power. ‘Orientalism,’ he said, is

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.’ (Hartsock 1990a: 18)

Thus a hegemonic discourse which essentialised and universalised reality is constructed without taking into account the complexity of specific local historical contexts. This discourse was not constructed only in theory but legitimised domination by the West over the rest of the world. Foucault elaborated the power dynamics further and emphasised the inadequacies of metanarratives and the need to examine the specificities of power and its relation to knowledge and language. He dismisses ‘reason’ as a fiction and sees ‘truth’ as simply a partial, localised version of ‘reality’ transformed into a fixed form in the long process of history... The ability to control knowledge and meaning, not only through writing but also through disciplinary and professional institutions, and in social relations, is the key to understanding and exercising power relations in society. (ibid: 3) However, the postmodernist rejection of binary categories and the embrace of relativism is a stance which is unpalatable to most feminists as it undermines feminism’s political agenda. Hartsock views relativism with suspicion and asked, Why is it that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic? (Hartsock 1990b: 163) She argues that if all knowledge is situated, postmodernism is a situated knowledge of a particular kind, that is, ‘Euro-American, masculine, and racially as well as economically privileged’ (Hartsock 1990a: 23). Thus, feminists ask if there can be a marriage between feminism and postmodernism given the earlier unhappy marriage between feminism and Marxism. Some feminists who are sympathetic to postmodernism argue for a strategic engagement between feminism and postmodernism which will transcend both rather than an alliance. Fraser and Nicholson suggest, Postmodernists offer sophisticated and persuasive criticisms of foundationalism and essentialism, but their conceptions of social criticism tend to be anaemic. Feminists offer robust conceptions of social criticism, but they tend at times to lapse into foundationalism and essentialism … They therefore


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believe that the best combination is that of “a postmodernist incredulity toward metanarratives with the social-critical power of feminism” (Fraser and Nicholson 1990: 20, 34 as quoted in Parpart and Marchand 1995a: 10) I am therefore very conscious of not essentialising and universalising the women I study. I will not use the women in my study as research objects in order to confirm or refute any grand theory. Instead, it will be a study which is grounded in a specific historical development of a group of Bidayuh women and the city of Kuching in Sarawak. Hence, I have decided to present my data in the form of ethnography where the women’s own experiences constitute a substantial part of the book. Needless to say, this is not without its own problems as we shall soon see. In anthropology, the ethnography-as-text school3 was concerned with anthropology’s historic role in colonial ventures and analysed the strategies used by ethnographers to claim privileged knowledge in describing the lives of the colonised to a Western audience. The discursive context between the powerful anthropologist and the powerless ‘native’ was dissected to reveal a complicit ethnography. Thus, for the poststructuralists in anthropology, material reality is hard to know as it is culturally constructed and mediated by representations of the ethnographer. Hence, theory is now only discourse theory and power is reduced to the politics of representation. This self-reflexive trend in anthropology led many feminist scholars to reanalyse gender relations in colonial discourses but it was the publication of Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Clifford and Marcus 1986) which instigated a furore amongst feminist anthropologists. Apart from Mary Louise Pratt, no other female anthropologists were represented in the collection. In justifying this, James Clifford asserted that feminists did not write creative or innovative ethnographies. Feminism had not contributed much to the theoretical analysis of ethnographies as texts. Where women had made textual innovations they had not done so on feminist grounds. Feminism clearly has contributed to anthropological theory. But feminist ethnography has focused either on setting the record straight about women or on revising anthropological categories (for example, the nature/culture opposition). It has not produced either unconventional forms of writing or a developed reflection on ethnographic textuality as such. (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 20–1) This has led Behar to ask, ‘What kind of writing is possible for feminist anthropologists now, if to write unconventionally puts a woman in the category of untrained wife, while writing according to the conventions of the academy situates her as a textual conservative?’ (Behar 1995: 15) Narayan noted that there were two types of anthropological writing which are poles apart. The first type is ‘accessible ethnographies laden with stories’ for

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students taking introductory anthropology to entice them to go further; the other is ‘refereed journal articles, dense with theoretical analyses’ for privileged postgraduate students. She wonders aloud if the two types need be impermeable. She thinks that ‘they are seeping into each other in increasingly hybrid ethnographic texts’ (Behar 1995: 18). The response to Clifford by American feminists across the United States was unequivocal. Two edited volumes with exactly the same title were published in 1995. Women Writing Culture edited by Behar and Gordon on the West Coast and another by Olson and Hirsh on the East Coast. The title Women Writing Culture is indicative of what feminists felt about Clifford’s statement. Even earlier, Abu-Lughod on the East Coast and Stacey on the West Coast both came out with articles of exactly the same title: Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography? Abu-Lughod argues that the notion of a feminist ethnography stabs at the very heart of anthropology as it provokes questions about objectivity in the anthropological enterprise. If objectivity is seen as the ideal of ‘good science’ and therefore important for anthropological research and writing, then to argue for a feminist ethnography would be to argue for a biased and partial account. According to her, the notion of objectivity has been subverted by interpretive anthropology. She puts it thus, ‘If, as anthropologists, we know what we know through emotionally complicated and communicatively ambiguous social encounters in the field, then certainly objectivity is out of the question and anthropology is not to be likened to science’ (Abu-Lughod 1990b: 10). In fact the early feminist critique on androcentric bias in anthropology had already raised the issue of objectivity in anthropology. Moore wrote concerning the early phase of the development of the ‘anthropology of women,’ fears were expressed that what had once been ‘male bias’ would be replaced by a corresponding ‘female bias.’ If the model of the world was inadequate when seen through the eyes of men, why should it be any less so when seen through the eyes of women? The issue of whether women anthropologists are more qualified than their male colleagues to study other women remains a contentious point. The privileging of the female ethnographer not only casts doubt on the ability of women to study men, but ultimately casts doubt on the whole project and purpose of anthropology: the comparative study of human societies. (Moore 1988: 5) In feminist epistemology, there has long been a questioning of the very concept of objectivity. The binary opposites of objectivity/subjectivity, unbiased/ biased, reason/emotion, detachment/involvement, universal/partial, professional/ unprofessional are terms associated with masculine/feminine. Thus, Keller made the observation that the notion of objectivity is one associated with masculinity (Abu-Lughod 1990b: 13). Others more radical like MacKinnon would go as far as to argue that men created the whole notion of objectivity as it corresponded to their dominant view of the world in which they objectified women (ibid: 14).


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Feminist reactions to these debates have been mixed. Some reject the notion of objectivity and privilege the devalued terms of binary opposites. Others argue that turning these gender dualisms on their head merely maintained such oppositional thinking. For instance, Harding, a philosopher of science, wants to redefine objectivity. For Harding, objectivity does not mean neutrality but starting from a specific social location because as she argues, all knowledge is socially situated. As a proponent of feminist standpoint theory, she believes that standpoint epistemology will produce a ‘stronger objectivity’ if we step outside the dominant conceptual framework and study a phenomenon from the vantage point of people who have been marginalised and excluded from knowledge production, such as women and ethnic minorities. This deconstructive strategy will produce more useful knowledge. Her use of the word objectivity in standpoint theory is deliberate. So, I’m simply using the rhetoric of objectivity because it’s an incredibly powerful language. It’s a calculated attempt to make it progressive because my point is that notions such as objectivity are deeply embedded in the institutions of the West that we’re proudest of – the legal tradition, for example … Objectivity is central to public policy; it’s central to Western democracy … I think that we should conduct our intellectual and political struggles on the terrains where those struggles are taking place. And for anybody who works close to the natural sciences or the law or public policy, relativism and subjectivity are not the terrain where those struggles are taking place – that’s not a language that’s going to help people understand how to do better than we’ve been doing. (Harding as quoted in Hirsh and Olson 1995: 32) Haraway (1988) similarly argues for situated knowledges as against disembodied knowledges. Hartsock elaborated on this concept to suggest that the views from below are embodied and collective knowledges, which have to be engaged with issues of power and therefore have potential for empowerment (Hartsock 1990a: 32). I agree with the notion that all knowledges are situated and I hope that by privileging the women’s own accounts, I have opened up a discursive space for Bidayuh women to articulate their views from below. However, I am also aware that things are not simple for connected to this concept of situated knowledges are the highly political questions of positionality and representation.

Positionality and the politics of representation This crisis of difference and the politics of representation in feminism were reflected in feminist ethnography by the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, an edited volume by Chicane writers Moraga and Anzaldua (1983). The volume included dialogues, poems, essays, letters, speeches, manifestos from ‘women of

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colour’ (i.e. Native, African, Latin, Asian Americans). The politics of authorship was addressed by the contributors to This Bridge. The contributors wrote in full consciousness of the fact that they were once the colonised, the native informants, the objects of the ethnographic gaze, and they pondered the question of who has the right to write culture for whom. (Behar 1995: 7) The politics of representation has been well addressed by many writers (Lazreg 1988, Mani 1990, Spivak and Gunew 1990, Mohanty 1991b) and I do not intend to spill any more ink over the same issue. Alcoff has this to say, The rituals of speaking that involve the location of speaker and listeners affect whether a claim is taken as a true, well-reasoned, compelling argument, or a significant idea. Thus how what is said gets heard depends on who says it, and who says it will affect the style and language in which it is stated, which will in turn affect its perceived significance (for specific hearers). The discursive style in which some European post-structuralists have made the claim that all writing is political marks it as important and likely to be true for a certain (powerful) milieu; whereas the style in which African–American writers made the same claim marked their speech as dimissable in the eyes of the same milieu. (Alcoff 1991: 13) As for the dilemmas of positionality, I find the views of Abu-Lughod on this matter particularly instructive. She points out, ‘… not only are truths partial, they are positioned’ (Abu-Lughod 1991: 142). For Abu-Lughod, a woman fieldworker studying other women is already coming to terms with specifying similarities and differences. Indigenous anthropologists or ‘halfies’4 as she calls those who straddle two or more cultures both in the East and West, ‘First’ and ‘Third World’ are in an even more unsettling situation as anthropology has always been constructed as a study of the Other. She adds, Given this, it seems to me that both feminist and halfie ethnography are practices that could shake up the paradigm of anthropology itself by showing us that we are always part of what we study and we always stand in definite relations to it. Feminist ethnographies can offer feminists a way of replacing their presumptions of a female experience with a grounded sense of our commonalities and differences. (Abu-Lughod 1990b: 27) This interconnectedness is what she sees as the crux of what feminist ethnography is all about.


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This outsider/insider positioning of the ethnographer has also been explored by Rosaldo when he talked of doing research in the borderlands. He explains: Ethnographers look less for homogeneous communities than for the border zones within and between them. Such cultural border zones are always in motion, not frozen for inspection … Rapidly increasing global interdependence has made it more and more clear that neither ‘we’ nor ‘they’ are as neatly bounded and homogenous as once seemed to be the case. All of us inhabit an interdependent late-twentieth-century world marked by borrowing and lending across porous national and cultural boundaries that are saturated with inequality, power and domination. (Rosaldo 1989: 217) I would be a halfie according to Abu-Lughod‘s definition of the term because of my tertiary education in the West and my social location in the East. However, within the context of Sarawak (and Kuching in particular where my study is located), I’m perceived as an outsider even though I have lived and worked in Sarawak for close to two decades. This is because of my origins in West Malaysia and because of state and federal politics, West Malaysians are not only perceived as outsiders but are treated as such by state immigration policies. Another dimension which positions me differently from the women I study is that of the intersection of race with class. Although the Chinese in West Malaysia are not the dominant ethnic group in terms of population or power, the Chinese in Sarawak are the second largest group after the Iban. As mentioned earlier in Chapter 1 the Bidayuh are a minority group in the state and have long historical links with the Chinese because of the former’s proximity with Kuching. Some view the relationship between the Bidayuh and the Chinese as symbiotic (e.g. rural–urban trade ties), others have pointed to its exploitative nature. Thus there is a common perception amongst the indigenous groups in Sarawak that all Chinese must be rich ‘towkay’.5 Although I have no family links in business, the fact that I teach in the university merely reinforces my middle-class identity and therefore my outsider position. As Abu-Lughod pointed out, ‘What we call the outside, or even the partial outside, is always a position within a larger political historical complex’ (Abu-Lughod 1993: 40). Stacey on the other hand, does not share Abu-Lughod’s enthusiasm. She puts forward two reasons why she thinks a feminist ethnography is hard to achieve. First, she argues, the ethnographic process is unavoidably exploitative in nature as the informants’ lives are put into the ethnographic mill.6 Second, the research product is ultimately the product of the researcher however modified and influenced by informants. She therefore agrees with Strathern’s description of the ‘awkward relationship’ between feminism and anthropology (Strathern 1987). According to Stacey, the suggestion of alliance and identification by feminist researchers with the women they are studying is merely a delusion because the actual separation of feminists from men of their own culture is illusionary.

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Feminist scholars are therefore naive in thinking that they can achieve equality with their research subjects through their representation of women. Glucksmann is equally sceptical and argues that a central inevitable contradiction of academic feminist research is the inequality of knowledge between researcher and researched. She argues, No amount of sensitivity or reciprocality, for example in the interview situation, can alter the fact that while the task of the researcher is to produce knowledge, those being researched have a quite different interest in and relation to their situation. Nobody imagines that we could transform the various forms of gender subordination either through or within the research process. Equally, the same must also hold true for unequal relations between women: we do not and could not overcome the structured inequalities between women within the research process’. (Glucksmann 1994: 150–1) However, inspite of the ambivalent relationship between feminism and ethnography, Stacey believes that at least a partially feminist ethnography is achievable. There also can and should be feminist research that is rigorously self-aware and therefore humble about the partiality of its ethnographic vision and its capacity to represent self and other. Moreover, even after my loss of ethnographic innocence I believe the potential benefits of ‘partially’ feminist ethnography seem worth the serious moral costs involved. (Stacey 1988: 26) Bell when reviewing the work of women anthropologists and the writings of ‘untrained’ wives of anthropologists, argued that the gendered nature of fieldwork has been long debated by women in anthropology. There is a long and honourable tradition of ethnographic writing in which the voice of the ethnographer pondering her situation, the impact of her presence on the people with whom she is working, and the problematic nature of being both observer and participant is audible. In short, there is a reflexive tradition in which the voices of women are critical. (Bell et al. 1993: 4) Thus, feminist ethnography is not only possible but has been what women have been doing for a long time. The problem of how the writings of women anthropologists or untrained wives have been ignored and trivialised has also been well documented and discussed (Bell et al. 1993, Behar and Gordon 1995, Abu-Lughod 1991). What is new are some of the innovative writing techniques, for example, a story, a dialogue, an interview, a group conversation, which have been employed to include the research subject.


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I will not add more to this discussion except to say that I locate my own work in feminist ethnography. I not only think it is possible but I agree with Stacey that it is potentially beneficial. In my own work, what the women say of their experiences is central to my analysis and their first person accounts will be in the main body of the text. By saying that I am privileging the women’s own words, I am not suggesting that the reader is hearing the women’s voices directly or that I am a ventriloquist. Their accounts are of course mediated through me. I use quotation marks for verbatim translations from the taperecorder but these have been edited, selected and inserted into the appropriate sections. I have also included some of the verbatim quotes in Malay, which was the main language used in the interviews. However, some women used a mixture of Malay and English. My intention here is to remind the reader of the geographical location of the speakers and to give the ethnography its local flavour. Given that all stories are situated, it should be clear that the questions I asked spoke of my concerns and interests which do not necessarily reflect those of my informants. In writing this book, I attempt to ameliorate the problem of positionality by making my own position explicit. Apart from the issue of writing style, my study is also ethnographic in the sense that I do not intend to produce generalisations from the women’s experiences. As pointed out by Abu-Lughod (1993: 7), this ‘traffic in generalisations’ homogenises the people studied and creates an internal coherence which may not be present. It smooths over contradictions and ambiguities and creates a bounded entity which is at once fixed and essentialised. Another problem is that of social distancing. Olson and Shopes (1991: 198) argue that when we locate our subjects’ stories in a highly theoretical discourse, we maintain a social distance and reify their lives. In poststructuralist terms, generalisations construct and essentialise the other. This practice of commodifying research products for professional prestige and privilege is endemic in academia. This process, it must be emphasised, is embedded within the structure of the academic community; it is not the personal fault of individuals, but an integral part of the system of evaluation, tenure, and promotion that has evolved. Given the competitiveness of the academic enterprise, professional credibility often necessitates that we abandon social commitments and frame our work in theoretically complex arguments that invite collegial appreciation. The danger here is one of which we are all aware: the predominance of academics who are themselves alienated from the world they study by the language they use and the professional identities they have created. (Olson and Shopes 1991: 199) Another important issue to address when conducting cross-cultural research is that of accountability. Halfies not only have to contend with the charge of partiality, they have to account to multiple audiences in the East and West. Educated audiences in the communities that they study force the halfie to face the politics

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of representation and accountability. Differences of class, race and ethnicity between the ethnographer and the research subjects present another problem. Abu-Lughod put it succinctly when she said, ‘Because of their split selves, feminist and halfie anthropologists travel uneasily between speaking “for” and speaking “from” ’ (Abu-Lughod 1991). Accountability to multiple audiences is also an issue which I have to face. Giving a paper on my research in an international conference outside of Malaysia is quite different from one that I have to give as a staff member of the university in Sarawak. Amongst my colleagues in Sarawak are Bidayuh men who viewed my work with scepticism and ambivalence. An attitude of ‘what has she got to tell us that we do not know already?’ and ‘what will her biases be as a West Malaysian Chinese studying us, the Bidayuh?’ I am a tight-rope walker with no safety net. My only justification is that of doing feminist research in good faith. I define feminism here not in terms of a grand political project of emancipation but in terms of the modest aim of understanding women’s lives in a changing society. If we are not to abandon the writing endeavour altogether, we have to accept the fact that ‘there is no neutral place to stand free and clear in which one’s words do not prescriptively affect or mediate the experience of others, nor is there a way to decisively demarcate a boundary between one’s location and all others’ (Alcoff 1991: 20). As Alcoff adds, even silence is political as it allows dominant discourses to continue.

Conclusion When I first entered full-time tertiary education in Britain in the late 1970s, the intellectual climate was self-assured and confident. Marxism and other metanarratives were in ascendance. When I returned to post-graduate work in Australia in the late 1990s, I felt the chill winds of uncertainty. Western intelligentsia is more disillusioned, self-absorbed, reflexive and fractured. As a student from a developing country, I have an interest in enhancing women’s opportunities and material security although in the context of Sarawak it is difficult to push for social policies of benefit to women. In spite of the fact that my study has no clear practical outcomes, I cannot take on board the defeatism of postmodernism. On the other hand, I cannot be immune to some of its compelling arguments. Postmodernism has alerted us to the problems of essentialism and positionality. In such a climate, the truth claims of metanarratives are no longer tenable. Postmodernism has made us more tolerant of ambiguities, ambivalence and contradictions. Ideally, I would like to develop a theoretical orientation responsive and relevant to my social location in a developing country. However, in straddling both worlds it has proven extremely difficult for me to deconstruct the Western analytical frameworks I inherited. Given these limitations, I have decided then to study the rapid changes which the Bidayuh women I interviewed are experiencing and compare them to the experiences of women who preceded them into the world of paid work in the region. This means first that my study will be historically specific and located within the political–economic context of


25

Sarawak in the second half of the 1990s. In addition, the analysis is embedded in the social organisation of Bidayuh gender relations in their agrarian society, as the categories of class, ethnicity and gender are not immutable but are socially and historically contingent and shifting. Second, the women’s situated experiences will be given precedence over any generalisations or metanarratives. I am interested in two things. First, the reasons why the women left their villages and second, changes in gender relations. Although most writers locate rural–urban migration in terms of the larger structural factors, it is important to investigate women’s own motivations for doing so. I also wanted to know how these women experience changes in their relationship to men in the face of such massive structural transformation and in doing so, I compare them to their mothers who are farmers in a rural agrarian economy. In conducting this research, I am aware of my own location, my accountability vis à vis the women that I study and the partiality of my accounts of their lives.

3


In much of classical anthropological study, the field-site is chosen to investigate a particular intellectual interest. In my case however, the field determined my research topic. Furthermore, I did not leave home to travel to a faraway, exotic location for fieldwork. Instead, dislocation for me occured when I left Kuching to travel to Australia where I read and wrote. I returned ‘home’ to do fieldwork. I could be what Weston calls a ‘virtual anthropologist’ (Weston 1997: 164), that is a hybrid category for one who is an anthropologist and yet not an anthropologist. Weston uses the term to mean the ‘native ethnographer’ who is charged with non-objectivity because she/he is researching her/his own kind. However the polemics of ‘real’ anthropologists and ‘native’ anthropologists, ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ knowledge can be seen as a hangover from colonial times where the Other was essentialised through institutionalised inequalities of power. With increasing globalisation and the transnational movement of people and information at the close of this century, we should perhaps be rethinking these issues (Appadurai 1991, Narayan 1997). Not only was I dislocated but so too were my research participants. These rural migrants to Kuching, are dispersed and scattered throughout the city and unrelated to each other except that some shared the same workplace. ‘Natives’ are no longer bounded in geographical space, fixed in time, untouched and homogenous. In fact, a few of the women I interviewed have sisters and aunts married to white men from Western countries. Similarly, anthropologists whatever their flavour (native, real, mixed) are not culturally or racially ‘authentic’. As researchers, we can identify with several communities simultaneously and the identity that we choose for ourselves will change with the context – what Rosaldo would term multiplex subjectivity (Rosaldo 1989: 168–95). When talking to employers and soliciting their co-operation in order to interview their workers, I am a lecturer at the local university doing research. When speaking to the women in order to set up the interview, I am a student in Australia interested to learn more about their lives. In terms of my own research experience, the categories of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ were thoroughly destablised (see also: Strathern 1987, Mani 1990, Abu-Lughod 1990b). I agree with Narayan when she points out: Given the multiplex nature of identity, there will inevitably be certain facets of self that join us up with the people we study, other facets that emphasize


27

our difference. Whether we are disempowered or empowered by prevailing power relations, we must all take responsibility for how our personal locations feed not just into our fieldwork interactions but also into our scholarly texts. Knowledge, in this scheme, is not transcendental, but situated, negotiated, and part of an ongoing process. This process spans personal, professional, and cultural domains. (Narayan 1997: 34–7) As discussed in the previous chapter, I am simultaneously both insider and outsider vis à vis the women I study. As co-resident of the same city, we share a common understanding of what work entails in the personal services sector and all that is involved in living in Kuching. In addition, as a wife and mother, I share some of the women’s worries. However, there is also a great divide between us. Not only am I a middle-class, university-educated West Malaysian Chinese, I am frequently a customer in the places where they work. This was particularly awkward at the stage of setting-up the interviews. As I often frequented the places where the women worked even before the research began, many regarded my request for an interview with amusement and curiosity. Until that point, they had regarded me as a customer, and in the hierarchial society where we live, customers are not generally interested in the workers who serve them. I remember that on one occasion when I was trying to fix an interview with a waitress in a restaurant, an acquiantance dressed in her dining finery stopped by to ask me what I was up to. Immediately, I was identified as belonging to the other side of the divide regardless of what I said or how I dressed. The waitress felt very uncomfortable and promptly turned me down after she left. Fortunately, this distance was frequently narrowed during the interviews when I reciprocated with stories from my personal life.

Research methods The research methods employed in this study were eclectic and multi-sourced.1 Semi-structured, in-depth interviews each lasting at least two hours were used to collect primary data on the women’s natal and current households, their employment histories, their views on children, marriage and migration. The interviews were conducted on a one-to-one basis. Focus group discussions or other group interviewing techniques were not utilised because of the constraints of the participants’ shift-work. On hearing that the interviews lasted at least two hours and sometimes even three, a male colleague exclaimed, ‘How can anyone chat for so long, non-stop?’ Over drinks, snacks and even a meal (depending on the time of day), the conversations were enjoyable and time passed quickly. However, transcribing the tapes was a totally different matter. Two hour long interviews took an entire day (six to eight hours) to transcribe. When the interviews were transcribed, the sheer volume of material meant that any repetitions, paraphrasing, back-tracking and pauses have all been edited for ease of reading. I have also selected what they say and inserted them in the relevant places throughout the

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book. As pointed out in the previous chapter, I wish to reiterate that the reader is reading the women’s words through me. In addition, not all interviews were tape-recorded. All the women were asked as to whether they agreed to its use but several women were uncomfortable with a tape recorder in front of them and I switched it off. Background noise was another major factor that sometimes rendered the tapes useless. The lodgings provided by the employers of the single women were often located above shops and next to busy streets. Similarly, in the homes of some housewives, the television set was switched on for the children while we sat nearby in order to keep an eye on them. Thus, the level of background noise on some of the tapes was too high for meaningful transcription. In all such cases, I relied upon the notes I took throughout the entire interview. Inspite of such difficulties, I felt that the complexities of their views were better captured by such qualitative research methods. The diversity of women’s experiences would be lost through a highly structured questionnaire which would restrict analysis only to the constructed categories. The range of personal services work encompassed women working as waitresses and kitchen assistants in coffee-shops and restaurants, receptionists and housekeepers in small local hotels and family clubs, shop-assistants in retail outlets like a garden shop, cashiers in supermarkets, petrol pump attendants, domestic workers and child-minders in private child-care centres. I interviewed single women, working mothers and housewives who had been previously employed in personal services. As mentioned in Chapter 1, my reasoning here was that women at different phases in the life-course could have different experiences of work and the household. A total of 50 women were interviewed in 1997. Thirteen were single women and their ages ranged from twenty to thirty-nine with the average being twenty five years. Ten of them were in their twenties. The criteria for the selection of single women were that they be single and childless during the time of the interview. Twenty-four working mothers were interviewed. Six among them were single mothers. Four working mothers were in their forties, seventeen of them were in their thirties, the youngest being twenty-four and the oldest forty-five years. Thus their average age was 35 years. The average number of surviving children each of these women had was three (range: 1–6). All had dependent children although five also had children who had already left school. One was a grandmother too. The working mothers were selected because they were mothers and working in the personal services sector at the time of the interview. Thirteen housewives were interviewed and their ages ranged from twenty one to thirty five years with nine of them in their twenties, the average age being twenty seven years. As this group of women were generally younger than the working mothers, they also had fewer children. The average number of surviving children each of these housewives had was two (range: 1–4). The majority (9) of the housewives interviewed had pre-school aged children. In other words, they all had dependent children who were generally younger than those of the working mothers interviewed. The criteria for the selection of housewives were


29

that they be mothers and have a history of working in the personal services sector. It is interesting to note that 51 per cent of the married women in this study were married to non-Bidayuh men. Although none mentioned any significant changes to their lifestyle as a result of marrying non-Bidayuh men, one woman commented in the interview that her ethnicity was a problem for her Chinese husband’s family. She spoke of her late father-in-law’s kindness to her and her mother-in-law’s disdain of her ‘Bidayuhness.’ Many of the women had Western names and in the interest of confidentiality and anonymity, only pseudonyms are used in this book. All the participants were contacted through three main avenues: their employers, friends and the Sarawak Family Planning Association (SFPA). In the first case, permission was first sought from the employers who were known either to me or a friend. After the initial introduction to the employer and a brief explanation, suitable interviewees were identified. I then met and spoke to each participant to explain the study. When they agreed to be interviewed, a convenient time and place were decided upon. For the single women, all interviews were conducted outside working hours, while the majority of working mothers were interviewed mainly during the lull period of their work. Sometimes they were interviewed immediately after they had finished for the day. This was to be expected as working mothers are time starved. Thus, many working mothers preferred to be interviewed at their place of work. For the single women, three interviews were conducted in the free lodgings2 provided by their employers, but they were often noisy. As a quiet venue was difficult to find, I decided on a women’s Drop-in-Centre.3 It proved to be ideal. The Centre was conveniently located in the city. It was also informal and woman-friendly. The Centre was a good ice-breaker as I showed them around, introduced them to the full-time Bidayuh worker (when she was around) and gave them various pamphlets on the Centre’s activities to be distributed amongst their friends and colleagues. The participants interviewed there were happy to be taken out of their familiar surroundings to a new place. However, a few refused to be interviewed as they were anxious about getting into a stranger’s car and being driven to an unknown destination. Only two single women were not introduced by their employers. One participant’s brother was a colleague of a friend of mine, while the other was met by chance. I stopped to fill up at a petrol station after a futile afternoon of waiting for a would-be participant. The women at the pumps were cheerful and chatty. I asked the manager who was with the petrol pump attendants at that time, and she gave me permission to interview her staff. The interviewee volunteered. Of all the participants, housewives were the most difficult to make initial contact with as they were the most ‘invisible.’ A friend who worked with the SFPA, a non-governmental organisation, suggested that I meet women waiting to see a doctor in the women’s clinic that the Association ran. The clinic’s doctors had their own private practices and contributed their services free-of-charge to the SFPA on a voluntary basis. The patients then paid a nominal fee, below that of the market rate, to the Association. Thus, many women from lower economic

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strata made use of the services provided. Many women arrived early in the afternoon and had a two to three hour wait in front of them. When a suitable participant was identified and she agreed, the interview would take place in an office above the clinic. When the interview was over, I would wait for her to finish with the doctor and take her home. Thus, I was able to see where some of them lived. However, some had made prior arrangements to be picked-up or otherwise preferred to go home on their own. As the doctors’ sessions were held only in the afternoon, I spent many afternoons at the SFPA waiting for a suitable participant to walk in. I got to know the staff well and they were very helpful. When a potential interviewee came to the Association in the morning to buy contraceptives,4 the SFPA staff would talk to her about my study and ask if she would agree to an interview. If she agreed, they would pass her name, address and contact number to me. Housewives were busiest in the morning and thus most interviews with them were scheduled in their homes in the afternoons. SFPA also ran women’s programmes in three squatter areas in the city. Through the SFPA’s clinic and women’s programmes, I met eight working mothers and eight housewives. The rest of the housewives were met through mutual friends. In addition to the participants in the study, key informants familiar with rural Bidayuh custom and practices were also interviewed. They include the research assistant in the Bidyuh section of the Majlis Adat Istiadat (the customary law council of Sarawak), a Bidayuh community worker and key members of the Dayak Bidayuh National Association (DBNA). Several sources of secondary data were also utilised. These included anthropological studies of rural Bidayuh, colonial reports, conference proceedings and papers from the DBNA, the Sarawak Museum Journal, Statistical Yearbooks on Sarawak, government census, migration surveys and reports, newspapers and archival materials. Secondary data was required to frame the current study within the historical development of rural Bidayuh economy, the wider context of urbanisation in Sarawak and the urban labour market.

Problems and limitations I have already discussed problems of positionality and authenticity in the previous chapter. However, there was also a problem of interpretation both literally and analytically. The interviews were conducted in Malay, which although the national language was nevertheless a second language for both the interviewees and myself. In order to give the narratives a local flavour, I have left some of the verbatim quotes in Malay. As a researcher, I am aware that interpretation is a social process imbued with values and choices when deciding between competing interpretations. Holland and Ramazanoglu explain this predicament clearly when they state: A number of factors interact in unpredictable ways in any process of interpretation: feminist theory and political values, the standpoint and subjectivity of the researcher, the social event of the interview, the ways in which


31

interviewees formulate their accounts on that occasion, and their own standpoints and values... hence we can only give mediated representations of our subjects own mediated representations of themselves. (Holland and Ramazanoglu 1994: 145) In other words, there can be no authentic women’s experiences, unblemished by the interpreter’s account. It is therefore imperative that the process by which we arrive at conclusions be made transparent. Another problem is that of the unequal power position between those interviewed and the interviewer. Marchand pointed out that: The ethnographer will still hold an authoritative position, because of the dynamics involved in the interview process itself and the fact that she has the power of production. For instance, the ethnographer ‘selects the subject’ and directs the interview by asking questions. These questions are based on what the ethnographer deems important. The ethnographer’s ultimate authority lies in her power of production. (Marchand and Parpart 1995: 66) However, I would argue that to say that the researcher is all powerful, is to deny the research participants any agency. The research subject has the power to decide whether or not to share her story. She also has the power to answer the researcher’s questions in a way she feels comfortable or not answer them at all. This fact came across unequivocally during fieldwork. One woman was too embarassed to tell me that she was a single mother. Another woman could not speak to me as she had not sought prior permission from her husband. Another participant questioned, ‘Why are you interested in the stories of poor people?’ After my explanation, she took pleasure in a chance to be heard. In other words, those who consented to the interview did not view the sharing of their lives as particularly threatening. In fact, the contrary is true. Many women were willing participants because they felt that as Bidayuh and personal services workers, they were frequently looked down upon and they welcomed the opportunity to give their side of the story and to set the record straight as it were. They also had the dubious notion that as an academic and a member of the middle-class, I would be able to transmit their experiences and world-views to a larger audience to which they had little access. Sharma once argued: ‘Doing social science research is like shining a torch around a darkened room. As one object is illuminated, shadows are cast on others’ (Sharma 1986: 45). In focusing light on the women in this study, the men in their lives were unilluminated. I had wanted to interview as many husbands as possible but in the end only five of the participants’ husbands consented to be interviewed. The co-operation rate was very low for the men because the gender, class and education gap was felt more greatly by the men than the women. Many men felt uncomfortable about the idea of being interviewed. However, whenever they were present during my session with their wives, they found it hard to resist

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making their own contributions to the interview. Asking the women if I could interview their husbands revealed certain dimensions of their relationships which were unknown before. One woman was noticeably shocked when I asked her. She swallowed and gave a categorical ‘No’. I was told later by two of her colleagues that she had been battered by her husband and he had been known to come to the workplace to threaten her. Due to my limited access to the women’s husbands, I cannot verify the women’s interpretation of the power dynamics between husband and wife at home. A consequence of this is that I was not able to firmly establish if husbands held much sway over the decision as to whether their wives worked or not. In addition, reliable data on their husbands’/fathers’ incomes, savings, and expenditure was difficult to obtain. A few women did not know and were guessing, while some of those who knew were reluctant to divulge the information. Monthly household expenditure, monthly savings and remittances to parents were very variable. These depended on the women’s existing commitments as any unexpected expenditure would throw their careful budgets into disarray. Most single women did not have to take care of the household expenses and therefore did not know the details. In such cases, actual figures when used were mere approximations. As I did not do any fieldwork in the women’s natal village household, I was unable to establish the impact of the women’s remittances on these households. This is particularly so for the natal households of single working women as their remittances is the highest at this stage of the life-course. I therefore did not know if there was a reverse dependency where parents became dependent on the remittances of working daughters whether such remittances confer greater status on the latter. Other problems encountered were more mundane. First, getting permission directly from an employer without an introduction by a person known to them was difficult. Even being armed with the relevant letters to say that I was a bonafide researcher did not facilitate access. In a situation of labour shortage, employers were anxious to hold on to their staff and were uncertain as to the outcome of the interviews. In addition, they were uncomfortable as to what their employees might say about their work experiences with them. Hence at the outset, many a day was spent circling the city, talking to owners/managers of supermarkets, petrol stations and local hotels to no avail. Often a tentative approval was given but on the day of meeting potential participants, the employer/manager would change their mind. In one case, the local supervisor gave consent in the absence of the manager from Kuala Lumpur, only to have it retracted when the manager returned. Thus, most of the women interviewed worked in small, family type businesses which constitute the majority of the personal services industry in Kuching. In addition, keeping in touch with some of the participants was difficult as their situation was extremely fluid and life itself unpredictable. One single woman lost her job a few months after the interview because she did not turn up for work for a week and offered no explanation. I was informed by one of her colleagues, whom I had interviewed and become friendly with, that she had


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a liaison with a married man and their relationship ran into difficulties. Another changed jobs and one left the labour market altogether following the birth of her fifth child. One working mother passed away shortly after a diagnosis of cervical cancer. The collection of secondary data was also problematic. There was an acute lack of labour market data. There were no statistics on the participation rate of women in part-time work and much of the data is aggregated under the headings of ‘Sales and Related Workers’ and ‘Service Workers’ with no finer division of the different types of occupation under those headings. In addition, statistical data was often not collected according to the different ethnic groups in the state. They were usually categorised under the general heading of ‘Bumiputra’5 which includes myriad indigenous people. There was also a conspicuous absence of publications on Bidayuh women6 and none about them in the city. Whatever fragmented accounts I found, had to be gleaned and painstakingly pieced together. In spite of these problems, I encountered an enormous amount of goodwill and co-operation in the field. Interviewing the women was immensely interesting but the openness of my research interests meant that at times I felt overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the data that confronted me. In addition, the women’s employment in the personal services sector revealed no pattern and the women’s views were often fragmented and ambivalent. Through my own anxiety in coming to terms with my fieldwork data, I was reminded that our lives are messy and full of contradictions and dilemmas which are ambivalent and complex. The challenge facing me was to weave together all these contradictory strands into a meaningful representation of their lives.

4

The socio-economic context of change

The focus of this study is on the lives of first generation Bidayuh women from their rural households who have migrated to the city for wage work. It is important to place the women’s migration to the city and their urban experiences in a broader historical and comparative context. This chapter will therefore discuss the forces which led to the women’s entry into wage work in the city. To begin with, both historical and contemporary data will be used to explain who the Bidayuh are, where they came from and why they are leaving their villages. The Bidayuh rural agrarian economy will be discussed in terms of the factors which encouraged rural–urban migration. There will be some discussion of Bidayuh women’s position in the rural villages but I have left the bulk of what is relevant to my analysis of gender relations to the chapters that follow. The second part of this chapter will give the material and structural context of urbanisation and employment in Sarawak in order to explain why the women leave the villages.

Who are the Bidayuh? According to Geddes who studied rural Bidayuh from 1949–51, the word Bidayuh simply means ‘people of the interior’ and the Bidayuh themselves would have used the term for non-Malay, non-coastal indigenous people in the interior of Sarawak (Geddes 1954: 6). During the Brooke and colonial regimes, they were commonly referred to as the Land Dayaks. However, nowadays the official term used by their ethnic association is Dayak Bidayuh or Bidayuh for short.1 They make up 8.1 per cent of the population of Sarawak and less than 1 per cent of the population of Malaysia. The majority live in the districts of Kuching, Serian, Bau and Lundu which are in close proximity to the state’s capital, Kuching. Kuching has served as the political and administrative centre of the state since Brooke rule (1841–1946). Kuching had a population of 369,200 in 1991 with 42 per cent of the population being Chinese, 34 per cent Malay, 14 percent Bidayuh, 7 per cent lban, 1 per cent Melanau, 0.5 per cent other indigenous groups like the Kayan, Kenyah, Kelabit, Lun Bawang2 and 2 per cent of what is classified as ‘others’ which includes the Indian and Eurasian communities.


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The Bidayuh are said to have long inhabited the island of Borneo and migrated into Sarawak from Kalimantan well over a 1,000 years ago (Minos 1994: 6). The Bidayuh do not have a written language but speak a total of four different dialects according to the districts they come from. Within each dialect, there are sub-dialects and variations in the way each dialect is spoken.3 The Biatah dialect is spoken by the Bidayuh in Kuching District, the Bukar-Sadong dialect by the Bidayuh in Serian District, the Jagoi dialect by the Bidayuh in Bau District and Salako-Larra dialect by the Salako-Larra Bidayuh in the Lundu District. Thus, most Bidayuh identify themselves strongly with the geographical location of their village of origin. Inspite of the large numbers of Bidayuh in the proximity of Kuching, they were conspicuously absent in the economic and social fabric of the city during the greater part of Brooke rule. By 1947, there were only 227 Bidayuh in Kuching and this constituted only 0.6 per cent of the city’s population (Lockard 1987: 186). In the late nineteenth century, they were mainly bonded to Malay aristocratic families as slaves. They were either bonded because of debts or had been taken captive in Malay–Bidayuh skirmishes during the pre-Brooke era. These Bidayuh slaves could be bought and sold and their descendants inherited this status. The women worked as domestics while the men worked on the farms, ships and in the households of their owners. Many became Muslim and lost their own culture and language. It was only in 1886 that Charles Brooke was able to abolish slavery. At the turn of the century, many Bidayuh men became seasonal migrants to Kuching, earning a wage as labourers during the slack agricultural period of hill padi (rice) farming. The absence of a large Bidayuh population in Kuching was also due to the fact that the Brooke government actively discouraged their migration into Kuching. The Brooke administration believed that the Bidayuh would be corrupted by city living and were better-off living in their own villages. A quote from a local paper, the Gazette, in 1902 reveals such sentiments: Those (Dayaks) who have been brought into a state of semi-civilisation, who are living in the vicinity of the capital and around Kuching … show plainly that they have lost the pride they once possessed in themselves and their ancestors, are shabbily dressed and generally dirty and ill-mannered. (The Gazette 1902, in Lockard 1987: 142) In 1909, when Charles Brooke found that some Dayak4 girls had been brought to the mission schools in Kuching, he promptly ordered them to be sent back (Runciman 1960). As a result, the Bidayuh were the last to take advantage of the first mission schools in Kuching. The Chinese were by far the most educated and the indigenous population in the interior, the most illiterate. Brooke rule ended with Japanese occupation during the Second World War. After the war, Sarawak was ceded to the British and it became a Crown Colony from 1946 to 1963. By 1963, there were only eleven secondary schools in the state and they were mainly sited in urban centres. The rural primary schools had untrained

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teachers and poor resources. The consequences of the gap between rural and urban schools reverberate to this day, where the majority of Bidayuh workers are concentrated at the lower rungs of the labour market hierarchy. This is borne out by the fact that the majority of my respondents cited poor performance in public examinations and poverty as reasons for dropping out of school. It must also be pointed out that there has been a long history of intermarriage between Bidayuh women and the other migrant groups, especially Chinese merchants who eventually replaced the Malay in upriver trade.5 Apart from the Hakka women who mainly came from Sambas in West Borneo, there was a general shortage of Chinese women migrants and hence, many Chinese men took Bidayuh wives. As mentioned in the previous chapter, in this study, over half the respondents (51 per cent) were married to non-Bidayuh men.

Rural Bidayuh economy Agriculture in Sarawak, unlike Peninsula Malaysia, is dominated by small holders. As Reece put it, ‘… through its extensive smallholding system Sarawak offered an alternative form of economic ownership to that practised in other parts of colonial South-east Asia’ (Reece 1988: 33). Throughout the Brooke regime,6 there was a deliberate policy to keep out large-scale agricultural interest from foreign investors. The official policy line was the protection of native interests against those of immigrants and foreigners but privately, James Brooke was worried that the presence of large commercial capital would erode his power base in the state. The majority of Bidayuh live off the land and practise mixed farming. Depending on the terrain of their land, they grow either swamp padi or hill padi for subsistence and cash crops. The cultivation of hill padi by the method of slash and burn is an important part of their lives in the villages because their religion is closely tied to the padi cult. Despite the fact that the majority of Bidayuh are now Christians, the production of hill padi by shifting cultivation is still an integral part of village life. This is so for four main reasons. First, it is a link with their past and their way of life for many generations. Second, rice is a staple and self-sufficiency in this is a goal of the majority of households given the instability of household incomes from cash cropping. Third, secondary crops like cucumber, maize, pumpkin, cassava leaves, egg plants and others which are grown around the hill padi fields are important not only for the family’s own consumption but as an important source of cash income. Fourth, it is their way of affirming land claims which are tied to the cycle of hill padi cultivation. In order to understand the significance of hill padi cultivation to the Bidayuh we need to know their customary land tenure system.

Customary land tenure system The customary land tenure system of the Bidayuh is contained in the following principles. The original feller of the primary rain forest establishes rights over


37

the use of that land. The control of land cleared by the original feller passes to the eldest child or sometimes the youngest child. Whoever inherits the control of the land, resides in the ancestral household and cares for the aged parents. The descendants of the original person who clears the land are collectively called the descent group and they too share in the rights to utilise the land. The descent group consists of siblings and first, second or third cousins of the head of the descent group. As inheritance is bilateral, a person can claim the rights to use land from both parents’ descent groups. Such land, which is known as Native Customary Rights (NCR) land, does not have individual titles and hence descendants do not inherit individual parcels of land: they merely exercise rights over the cultivation of the land. An individual family loses cultivation rights when they move to live in another village and the land reverts to the common pool to be used by the remaining members of the descent group. In other words, land rights are validated through cultivation. An individual or family exercises exclusive rights over a plot of land until the cultivated crops are harvested. The introduction of cash cropping, however, meant that land could be taken out of the common pool of a descent group for many years and even up to a generation as crops like rubber trees can be tapped indefinitely. When land is allocated for the planting of cash crops and fruit trees, the implication is that land is permanently owned by the descent group member who has been allocated the land, and a new descent group is formed through her/him. Siblings of the heads of descent groups are given preferential treatment when they request land for cash cropping while the requests of distant relatives are rejected. According to Gerrits, a man or a woman can be the head of a descent group. Age rather than sex is the main criterion in being the head of a descent group. The head is responsible for the administration of the descent group’s landholdings and this implies an intimate knowledge of all land belonging to the group and the relationship of all potential claimants. Thus, the head of a descent group is the arbitrator of land disputes for his/her descent group (Gerrits 1994: 130). In practice, men assume control more often than women. Although women also inherit land, they normally cede control over to their husbands who are usually viewed as the head of household. Marriage usually involves virilocal residence of the new couple except in cases where the woman is an eldest child who is inheriting the control of the descent group’s land. In such cases there will be uxorilocal residence, i.e. the husband moves into his wife’s parental household. The man is commonly regarded as the head of the household and, in the case of uxorilocal movement, his wife (who has the control of land through descent) will generally allow the husband to exercise control over the land holdings. (Gerrits 1994: 135) Some descent groups exert control over more land than others. This is dependent on the circumstances of the original fellers, for example, the initiative taken, the availability of household labour at that time and the season of the actual felling.

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As there is no longer any primary forest to clear, population pressure on land mounts. In addition, land is taken out of circulation because of cash-cropping. Although there is no systematically documented evidence, there have been discussions among many scholars who predict that there will be increasing differentiation amongst villagers in terms of the inequitable distribution of rights to land. Grijpstra even argued that this individualisation of land rights as a result of cash-cropping will lead to the emergence of a landless class of Bidayuh villagers within a few generations (Grijpstra 1976: 81). Migration out of the village implies a temporary lapse in the rights to utilise land. When the individual or couple reside in the village and cultivate crops once again, rights to land are regained. This therefore explains why the migrants in this study continued to maintain strong links with their rural bases as a way of reaffirming their rights to land. This will be elaborated further in the next chapter. Marriage with people from another village or of a different ethnic group has no effect on the rights to land. Outsiders are absorbed into the customary land tenure system. In short, with the introduction of cash crops and increasing monetisation of the village economy there is growing individualisation of landholdings, and a concomittant development of inequality and stratification amongst the villagers (ibid). Although in theory women can wield considerable authority as heads of descent groups, they usually pass over the control to their husbands when they marry into their household (Gerrits 1994: 135).

State discourse on the shifting cultivation of padi From the discussion so far, it is evident that shifting cultivation is a way of life for the majority of Bidayuh. However, the state has a deep-seated belief that shifting cultivation is a wasteful, unproductive and primitive form of land use. The state’s disdain for this method of rice cultivation goes back as far as the Brooke era and is premised on two popularly held views. First, it had been argued that shifting cultivation (slash and burn farming) has increasingly encroached on primary forest as a result of population growth. Second, population pressure has also progressively shortened the forest fallow period. This shortened fallow period has led to farmers cultivating larger plots in order to compensate for lower yields. This in turn has resulted in serious soil erosion problems. These arguments have all been refuted by Cramb (1988). Cramb argues convincingly that shifting hill padi cultivation as a form of land use is well suited to the hilly terrain and the poor soil of most of the cultivatable land in Sarawak. Cramb estimated that less than 4 per cent of the total area under hill padi was cleared from primary forest as it was simply no longer available to shifting cultivators as a result of increased logging. New NCR lands are also rarely created and existing ones are often alienated for land settlement schemes, infrastructural projects and the construction of hydroelectric dams as in the case of Batang Ai. In addition, he points out that hill padi cultivators were no longer entirely


39

subsistence farmers as in the past. Many cultivated one or more cash crops like pepper and cocoa and a variety of secondary crops like maize, pumpkin, egg plants and cucumber on their padi farms. This was in addition to taking on offfarm wage employment. Cramb argues that self-sufficiency in rice was no longer crucial in a mixed farming system. As a result of competing labour demands, a smaller padi farm plot was cultivated since a reduced fallow period meant increased weed growth and lower soil fertility. The maintenance of a larger farm size would not make economic sense and in fact field research has shown that there has been a general reduction in the size of hill padi farms. Contrary to common perceptions, the productivity of the land has improved substantially as a result of intensification of land use and an increased use of agricultural inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides. Cramb is of the opinion that the gains made through increased agricultural output have been achieved by improved transportation and infrastructure, agricultural research and extension, and the initiative of small-holders rather than large-scale land development. Village-based land tenure is a low-cost, flexible and acceptable way of administering agricultural land from the point of view of the communities concerned … Further, the family labour unit is highly motivated to work on its own land and typically uses different classes of worker (male and female, old and young) to maximum advantage, particularly in a diversified farming system. Village based farm families also have the ability to pool and exchange labour at critical times, with minimal problems of supervision and control. (Cramb 1988: 99–100) However, the government is convinced that large-scale plantation cultivation of cash crops is the panacea of rural ills. Thus, the Sarawak Land Development Board (SLDB) was formed in 1972 and the Sarawak Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Authority (SALCRA) in 1976. In the main, SLDB dealt with the resettlement of remote natives from the border for security reasons. SALCRA on the other hand, dealt more with in situ development of NCR land. In these land development schemes, villagers are employed to work on the estate and when the crops are established and ready for harvest they are sold to the authorities. When the farmers have settled their repayments for the development of the land, share certificates to the crops and titles to their individual plots in the estate would be issued. In the narratives of some of the Bidayuh women in this book, the word SALCRA will be used. This means that their villages have participated in these plantation schemes. However, many villagers are resistant to surrendering their land rights in order to participate in these schemes as they are unwilling to work in the poorly paid plantations when there are other far more attractive options in timber camps and urban centres. In addition, the villagers have access to vast tracts of NCR land and are already growing their own cash crops.

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Against this backdrop of the state’s attack on shifting cultivation of padi, it comes as no surprise that the majority of the women interviewed in this study feel that the type of agriculture practised by their parents is no longer relevant in today’s world. On the other hand, plantation cash-cropping as promoted by the government is also unpalatable to them because of the low wages and harsh working conditions associated with this form of work in comparison to employment in the cities. Thus, it is ironic that government efforts to anchor the villagers to the rural areas through its land development schemes and its discourse of rural development have the effect of encouraging migration to the cities.

Cash-cropping and the education of children Cash-cropping has been increasing in importance because of the encroaching market economy. Cash is needed to buy foodstuffs, clothing, building material for house construction and for the education of children. Cash crops cultivated are a mixture of rubber, cocoa, pepper, vegetables and in addition secondary crops grown on the hill padi farms as described earlier. Secondary crops are grown for the market as well as for the household’s own consumption. The proportion of land, labour, time and other agricultural inputs allocated to each type of cash crop is dependent on the prevailing market price of each. The Bidayuh farmer has little control over the global prices of rubber, cocoa and pepper. Hence, most households cultivate at least two if not three different types of cash crops in order to spread the risk. Vegetable growing is gaining ground as urban demand increases. The price of vegetables is relatively more stable than those of rubber, cocoa and pepper. Other cash generating produce include fruit (like durian and banana), jungle products (like wild fern tips and bamboo shoots) and livestock (like poultry and pigs). As cash crops such as rubber, cocoa and especially pepper are vulnerable to global price fluctuations which can lead to a crisis in rural household incomes, it is important for households to obtain an alternative source of cash income. Remittances from off-farm workers in the household will cushion any crisis that is triggered by a fall in the price of cash crops. As Gerrits pointed out, households with an alternative income source, such as remittances, are not dependent on the farm for cash and are better able to optimise their various agricultural activities, for example, subsistence cultivation of padi, poultry-keeping and cash-cropping (Gerrit’s 1994: 284). Thus, self-sufficiency in food and the securing of cash are now the twin goals of rural households. The major item of expenditure for most families is the education of their children. Children are highly valued and it is expected that every family will have children as they are seen as an insurance policy for old age and sickness. It must be remembered that there are minimal welfare provisions in Sarawak. Increasingly, education is seen as an avenue for upward social mobility and a secure government job is much coveted. Education is a route to independence from farming and it is the aspiration of many parents that their children be spared the hardship of living off the land. In addition, the remittances of wage earning


41

children mean a less precarious livelihood should the padi harvest fail and the prices of cash crops fall. Apart from parental aspirations, the organisation of schools also promotes rural–urban migration. Primary schools can be found at village level but the majority of secondary schools are clustered in towns and bazaars. As infrastructure in Sarawak is poor, many secondary schools in semi-rural areas are boarding schools where food and lodgings are provided free by the government. Thus, children from villages often spend their adolescent years away from their families, returning home only on weekends or sometimes only at the end of every school term. When school-going children return to the village, most do not farm. Instead, they spend their time at home listening to the radio and watching television. In the evenings they walk around the village with their friends. They are therefore not initiated into the intricacies of farming. Boarding schools have resulted in the rural young being disengaged from their own community. In addition, many of the young who have had more years of schooling than their parents feel that they know much more than their elders. Far from preparing them for life in the village, formal education has the effect of alienating them from it. This coupled with the state’s rhetoric of shifting cultivation as backward and old-fashioned has made the young unwilling to farm.

Bidayuh women in rural agrarian society There has been no previous study of the Bidayuh either from the perspective of the anthropology of women or a feminist anthropology and much of the information drawn upon in this study has been gleaned from colonial reports and rural development studies of the Bidayuh. Inspite of its fragmented nature, a picture has emerged in which Bidayuh women are important food producers and income earners through vegetable growing and the cultivation of secondary crops in their padi fields. Women are also held responsible for domestic work and any help they may receive from their male partners is dependent on the goodwill of the latter. As mentioned earlier, the gender division of labour in the farm and household will be elaborated in Chapter 6 where Bidayuh women’s paid work in the city is compared to the work of their parents in the village. Bidayuh women who live in villages near to urban centres are also traders as they bring their crops and other jungle products for sale in the city markets. In addition, women are able to obtain jobs in nearby light industrial estates. Women earn an average of RM10–15 a day in factories manufacturing instant noodles, dressing chickens, bottling mineral water and cleaning birds’ nest.7 This is in contrast to a daily wage of RM25–50 that a construction worker can earn depending on his level of skill. However, as the construction sector dwindles with the Asian economic crisis, many Bidayuh men become unemployed while their wives are able to find employment. This has resulted in tension at home as men suffer a loss of identity as the bread-winners of their families. Dayak leaders often express dismay at the alleged increase in alcoholism among Dayak men.

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In addition, Bidayuh women enjoy equal rights with men in customary law (adat), although in practice they often defer to men as in the case of control over land, and they are only considered as the head of a household in the absence of men through divorce or widowhood. In the village, divorce is not a stigma. If a couple was married by the village head under customary law, they would also seek divorce through the same channel. Once the village head establishes that reconciliation is not possible after a period of time, the divorce is effected. However, in some villages, women do not bother with proper divorce procedure if their spouses are from villages different from their own. Only when they wish to remarry or seek maintenance from husbands who are in government service would they go through the trouble of getting a legal divorce. Since the introduction of Christianity, women’s position as spirit-mediums and leaders in the padi cult has been eroded. In Bidayuh villages, it is common to find both Christians and non-Christians. Amongst the natal families of the women I studied, some of their grandparents are Christians while others have only been converted in their generation. Hence, there is great variability amongst the Bidayuh in terms of Christianisation. In communities following the padi cult there is one group of female elders and another group of male elders. Each group has their respective spirit leader. They preside over all rites and rituals associated with the different stages of hill padi cultivation, for example, the blessing of the farm’s path (gawai oran), blessing of the padi seeds (gawai nuruk) and harvest festival (gawai pinonguh). The part played by the priestess (dayang boris) is crucial to the success of the festival and hence of padi cultivation (Gerunsin Lembat 1993: 3). Numerous taboos have to be observed as infringement means that the delicate balance between the physical world of the village and the spirit world would be disturbed and the well-being of the villagers threatened. On a less exalted plane, women have to collect the various ritual items like special leaves and bamboo and prepare the delicacies and food that accompany these ceremonies. Non-Christian Bidayuh also believe that hostile demons can wreak havoc in the physical world and ancestral spirits have to be evoked for protection. In addition, it is believed that sickness and disease are due to the soul wandering off when the person is asleep and hence spirit-mediums are required to catch the soul and return it to its owner. Both women and men can be spirit-mediums. There is also a women’s cult and the ceremonies associated with this cult are for the well-being of the female members of a household. Within a year of giving birth to a child, a ceremony is also held for the mother of the baby. Some households have a combined ceremony but apart from these, they are not villagewide celebrations. Although spirit-mediums and healers are village elders, they do not enjoy much material reward. Instead, they wield considerable influence and prestige in village life. They consist of both women and men but the village leader (tuai kampung) who is elected amongst these elders is inevitably a man. The village headman is officially recognised as the representative of his village by the authorities and is the mediator between the government and the people.


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Together with the other elders in the village, he arbitrates conflicts and disputes and administers customary law (adat). As men have to be in contact with government officials in larger towns, Geddes reported that men are more mobile than women in the village and have travelled further afield and make more frequent trips outside of the village (Geddes 1954: 83). With their conversion to Christianity, Windle and Cramb (1995: 8) also suggested that women and children attend church more regularly than men. However, women are excluded from any leadership roles in the church. Given that community leaders in Bidayuh villages are increasingly also church leaders (Gerrits 1994: 112), the introduction of Christianity has therefore contributed to the erosion of Bidayuh women’s position in the villages.

Transformation of village life It is difficult to talk of a ‘typical Bidayuh village’ as those at the periphery of urban centres are experiencing unprecedented change. Young and old now sit before the television set in the evenings rather than tell stories and talk to each other on their verandahs as in the past. Television programmes offer more excitement than tales of a bygone era. Similarly, with the introduction of piped water, there is no longer the communality enjoyed while bathing in the river. Bathing now takes place in the privacy of one’s home. Bidayuh women in these villages also no longer go out in small groups to collect firewood as many cook with gas. Even among family members, the telephone has replaced face-to-face interaction. In addition, with improved infrastructure, many now own motorcycles which eliminates the long wait at bus-stops where people meet and chat. However, there are many remote villages which do not enjoy these amenities and are therefore more dependent on farming and the forest for their livelihood. In other words, the entire continuum of Bidayuh villages exist in Sarawak and is therefore difficult to paint a stereotypical picture.

Rural–urban migration and urbanisation in Sarawak According to a report on internal migration (Ishak Shari et al. 1997),8 Sarawak is currently undergoing rapid urbanisation. In 1970, only 15.5 per cent of the state’s total population lived in urban centres but this jumped to 21.9 per cent in 1991. By the year 2000, 54.7 per cent of Sarawak’s population was urban based. The major receiving centres are Kuching, Miri, Bintulu and Sibu in descending order of number of migrants. The Bidayuh are the second largest group of rural migrants after the lban. Between 1986 and 1991, urban Kuching received a total of 45,040 migrants and the percentage of net migrants to the total population is as high as those in the most rapidly urbanising areas in Peninsular Malaysia such as the Klang Valley and Johor Bahru (ibid: E13) (see Table 4.1). 55.4 per cent of the rural–urban migrants within the state are males (ibid: 2.26).

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak Table 4.1 Percentage distribution of migrant population involved in rural–urban migration by state in Malaysia, 1995 States in Malaysia

Johor Kedah Kelantan Melaka Negeri Sembilan Pahang Perak Perlis Pulau Pinang Sabah Sarawak Selangor Terengganu

Percentage of population involved in rural–urban migration (%) 23.1 20.6 22.0 11.8 22.1 8.2 12.7 35.1 19.1 12.8 28.8 19.7 27.1

Source: Department of Statistics, Malaysia.

Kuching had the highest number of rural female migrants in Sarawak. The majority of rural migrants are single and more than half of the female migrants are aged between fifteen and thirty-four years.9 Kuching, the capital and administrative centre of the state has a large service sector which attracts more female migrants. In contrast, male migrants are attracted to the petro-chemical industries in Miri and Bintulu and to the wood-based industries around Sibu. At the end of 2000, there were only five electronic factories10 in Kuching. In the main, manufacturing in Kuching is small to medium size, and light industry rather than heavy. The tertiary industries such as transportation, communications, utilities, wholesale and retail trade, finance, real estate, business and government services contributed 29 per cent of Sarawak’s GDP in 1995 (ibid: E.9). The government plays a large part in stimulating tertiary industries. In addition, since the late 1980s, there has been a government thrust to develop the tourist industry in the state (Hamid Bugo and Hatta Solhee 1988: 26). Revenue from tourist and travel agencies in the state jumped by 290 per cent between 1989 and 1998. The percentage of women employed in wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants also tripled, from 7.2 per cent of employed persons in 1980 to 21.2 per cent in 1999 (Yearbook of Statistics Sarawak 2000). Kuching, with the only international airport in the state, is the gateway to Sarawak and hence there has been a rapid expansion of tourism related service industries such as restaurants, hotels and coffee-shops. The economic boom of the late 1980s and early 1990s has also led to an expansion of the urban middle class, increased levels of personal consumption and a change in lifestyle. For example, families eat out more frequently and


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there is a greater demand for child-care centres as more and more women enter the workforce. The result is greater employment opportunities in personal services work in the urban centres for rural women migrants. Alongside these urban opportunities, there is widespread rural poverty. According to Puthucheary (1988), in the rural areas, the highest incidence of poverty is among padi farmers and the highest amongst the Bidayuh. This resource distributional gap between rural and urban areas in Sarawak is a deep-seated problem with historical roots. Morrison, a colonial officer in Sarawak for almost two decades11 remarked: In my personal estimation, the main failures of the colonial period lay in rural development and land administration. Above all, there was a failure to overcome the intractable problems of raising living standards in the countryside to an extent that would encourage country people (especially the younger, educated ones) to remain in the countryside and maintain their heritage of independence and social and cultural cohesion. (Morrison 1988: 45) However, the disproportionately higher incidence of poverty in the rural areas in comparison to the urban areas is also an outcome of the urban bias in postcolonial development policies. Cramb and Dixon report: The present pattern of economic growth, then, tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of the government and those on whom the government bestows its patronage. The result has been a familiar bias in the pattern of both private and public consumption and investment towards the urban sector and in particular towards the state capital, which has been growing at a disproportionate rate. This has provided benefits to those in the burgeoning government bureaucracy and to the urban middle class generally but has led to a relative neglect of the countryside which is where most of the poverty is concentrated. (Cramb and Dixon 1988: 13) The urban bias is mirrored in the distribution pattern of employed persons in the state. Between 1980 and 1996, there has been a dramatic drop in the percentage of people working in agriculture, forestry, livestock and fishing. It fell from 56.5 per cent in 1980 to 29.1 per cent in 1999. On the other hand, the service sector has seen an increase from 16.2 per cent to 22.6 per cent, while manufacturing and construction leapt from 14.6 per cent to 27.8 per cent in the same period (Yearbook of Statistics Sarawak 2000). The distribution of Bidayuh rural–urban migrants by industry in Sarawak for 1995 showed that 43.4 per cent of rural–urban migrants are employed in the types of industry (wholesale and retail, restaurants and hotels, community, social, personal services) where the women in this study are employed. In 1990, the official labour force participation rate for women in Sarawak was 46.7 per cent (Yap and Chan 1992). A human resource survey conducted by the

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state in 198412 also showed that the occupational structure was highly gendered with women concentrated in service occupations such as nursing, teaching, secretarial, waitressing, cleaning and hairdressing (Colclough 1988). Although there is no break-down of the figures for Bidayuh women migrants specifically, the 1995 Migration Survey found that 45.5 per cent of female rural–urban migrants worked in the wholesale, retail, hotel sector, another 35.5 per cent in community, social and personal services and only 15.2 per cent were found in the manufacturing sector. Thus, it would appear that the top five categories of industries listed in Table 4.2 are masculinised and the bottom four categories are feminised. The internal migration report also mentioned that the majority of the migrants have education up to secondary school level (Table 4.3). The two main employment sectors that migrants enter, namely services and production or related work, are sectors which require little formal education (Ishak Shari et al. 1997: E.18). Thus, women migrants from the rural areas are often over-qualified for the lower rung service sector jobs where they predominate. This is borne out by the educational profile of the participants in this study. Half of the single women interviewed were educated up to Form 5 and the majority of the working mothers and housewives had schooling up to Form 3.13 Table 4.2 Distribution of Bidayuh rural–urban migrants by industry, 1995 Types of industry

Bidayuh rural–urban migrant population (%)

Agriculture, forestry, livestock and fishing Mining and quarrying Manufacturing Electricity, gas and water Construction Wholesale/retail trade, restaurants and hotels Transport, storage and communication Financing, insurance, real estate and business Community, social, personal services Total

7.8 — 32.1 — 17.1 30.6 — — 12.8 100.4

Source: Migration Survey, 1995.

Table 4.3 Educational attainment of Bidayuh rural–urban migrants, 1995 Educational attainment No formal education Primary Secondary Tertiary Total Source: Migration Survey, 1995.

Bidayuh rural–urban migrant population (%) 5.12 22.7 67.1 5.0 99.92


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The report also noted that Sarawak ranked the second highest amongst all the states in the country in terms of the percentage distribution of migrant population involved in rural–urban migration.14 The report concluded that due to the expansion of the economy and the concentration of development activities in the urban centres, economic considerations and job seeking were the major motivating factor for the outward migration from the rural areas (ibid: E. 15). However, as I suggest in the next chapter, economic goals are merely one part of the story. Migration is a gendered process as men and women have different motivations to move to the city. In the next chapter we will juxtapose this bigger picture with an examination of what the women say were their motives for migration. Often, in studies discussing migration in Asia (Trager 1988, Schenk–Sandbergen 1995), structural factors as well as individual decision-making are imbued with economic imperatives. For the women in this study, poverty is one of the lesser reasons which motivated their migration. As we listen to the women, we not only understand why they moved but also the ideological underpinnings which helped to transform them from peasant daughters to urban wage workers. Their stories of life in the city and in the village reveal the complex processes at work in rural–urban relations. Issues of autonomy and independence are also addressed in the discussion of their decisions about migration and sending remittances to their rural natal households.

5

To market, to market Rural–urban migration and becoming modern

In the previous chapter I discussed the wider structural context in which the women’s migration takes place. Although larger structural forces have a profound effect on people’s behaviour, usually not enough attention is paid to the choices and decisions that people make, and the actions that they take. People do not just react, they also act. They also do not act purely out of pragmatic rationality, to further economic interests – although it is an aspect of their motivation. People also act because of a host of other reasons. I decided to ask the Bidayuh women in this study who made the decision for them to migrate and why. Before I interviewed the women, I also held the belief that the main reason for the women’s migration was financial in nature. However, as I read the transcripts of the taped interviews, I began to realise that the picture was more complex than I first envisaged. First, twenty-seven of the fifty women I interviewed (or 54 per cent) did not migrate merely to escape rural poverty but because of a larger personal transformative project – to become modern. In other words, their migration is not just about ‘getting’, it is also about ‘becoming’. I will elaborate on this later. Financial reasons ranked second. Ten out of the fifty women interviewed (or 20 per cent) gave poverty as a reason for their migration. They said that they needed to earn cash to help their parents and school-going siblings. Seven of the women who cited financial reasons were the eldest in their families. As in Salaff’s (1995: 261–6) study of Hong Kong factory daughters, the Bidayuh women’s position in the sibling order is more crucial in determining their educational attainment than their sex. In the early stages in the life-cycle of poor households, scarce resources cannot be stretched to educate the older children. Hence, they are often sent out to work early in order to augment family income and this is borne out in the women’s natal family profile. However, it must be pointed out that this finding is different from that of Gerrits’. He argued that in large farming families, elder children may progress educationally at the expense of their younger siblings (Gerrits 1994: 116). Six women (12 per cent) migrated and started wage work after marriage. Their reasons for entering the labour market are mainly economic in nature and will be discussed more fully in Chapter 8. Seven of the women (14 per cent) in my study did not want to migrate at all but were asked to do so by their parents. Only in households where the women’s

To market, to market

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Table 5.1 Migration profile Migration profile Migrated to become ‘modern’ Migrated for financial reasons Started wage work after marriage Did not want to migrate but pressurised by their families to do so Total

No. of women

Percentage of total (%)

27 10 6

54 20 12

7 50

14 100

remittances were needed by their families was there pressure for them to leave. They did not initiate the migration but were asked to leave home in order to repay a debt to kin or to support their families. Table 5.1 below summarises their migration profile. This table provides a short-hand version of the women’s motivations for migration, but in reality the categories were not quite as self-contained as this table suggests. Women in the first category who migrated because of a yearning to be modern and sophisticated did not mention poverty as a motivating force. However, women who gave financial reasons as their primary reason for migration and some of the women in the other categories also talked of their desire to be modern, keeping up with the times, mixing with others in the city. In other words, the theme of wanting to be modern was recurrent, even if the main reason that they gave for their migration varied. Thus, migration is not just a simple case of either individual decision-making or that of the household but appears to be a mixture of both. This is particularly so for the women who migrated to help their families and for those who were conflicted and ambivalent about migration but felt that they had little choice in the matter. At the same time, economic reasons were not the only motive for migration but the narrative of modernity came across loud and clear. In this chapter, I will discuss economic necessity and modernity as these are the two main reasons the women gave for their migration. As the theme of becoming modern is recurrent and most pervasive, it requires further elaboration and discussion first.

The desire to be ‘modern’ The meaning of modernity in the West is frequently associated with freedom, rationality, individualism, liberal democracy, secular culture, scientific inquiry and a host of traits which are associated with industrial capitalism (Gomes 1994, Cahoone 1996). Some define modernity in concrete material terms while others see it as ideology. Thus, there is no unified understanding of the concept. In the non-Western world, modernity is equated generally, with ‘development’ with its loaded subtext of higher living standards and modernisation which is

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synonymous with Westernisation. This is complicated further when feminists enter the debate: … the very distinction between modern and postmodern may need to be rethought by feminists; categories of periodization and the criteria used to define them often appear profoundly altered when women become the focal point of inquiry instead of men. Thus the category of the modern has itself become increasingly unstable, as it becomes apparent that the term embraces diverse and often contradictory normative ideals and narratives of development rather than simply describing an already given historical logic. (Felski 1992: 139) It is not my intention to resolve the conflicts over the term modernity or to establish a feminist definition. Instead, I use the word ‘modern’ as defined by the women I interviewed. This is critical as women’s perceptions of modernity are often ignored and lost in the labyrinth of debates. My interviewees often equated the rural with being traditional and backward, and the urban with being modern and progressive. Although I do not necessarily agree with their dichotomised categorisation, this is how they used the term ‘modern’ when explaining an important motivating force for their migration to the city. The women who gave this reason spoke of migration for wage earning in very particular terms: they wanted to buy beautiful clothes and gold jewellery. Thus, there was a construction of new femininities in terms of urban consumption. They were motivated not only by the opportunity to shop and to be entertained; they wanted to meet different ethnic groups and see how they live. In other words, their desire to experience city living was couched in terms of independence, expanding their view of the world and their wish for city sophistication. Hence, urban living was equated with being modern and village life was described variously as ‘boring,’ ‘behind the times,’ ‘not modern.’ The young women migrants in Stivens’ study of Rembau expressed similar views about the excitement in the city, in contrast to the boredom in the village. Stivens pointed out that a modernist ideology of freedom from familial control, growing individualism and materialism all contribute to what she defines as the ideological restructuring of women into wage workers (Stivens 1996: 173). In my study also, the women’s motivations for migration overlaps with their transformation from rural daughters into urban wage workers as the women only left their villages when there were jobs ready in the city for them. It is also important that none of the husbands of the women I interviewed expressed their decision to migrate in terms of consumption. Instead, the men talked of migration for earning a living to support their families. This notion of being a bread-winner for their families was also a new identity because previously, on their own farms, every member of the household worked in order that they could all live. In other words, the survival of the household was a collective effort and it was difficult to distinguish an individual’s contribution towards that end. However, with the individuated wage in city employment, wages are earned


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by the labour power of an individual and the notion of family members working collectively for the survival of the household in the city disappears. As their subsistence mode of production in their rural economy is replaced by the monetised economy in the city, men became the primary wage earner and the other non-wage earning members of the household became his dependents. How this new inequality develops relates to a gendered structure of the urban labour market. The consequences of the gendered employment Bidayuh women take up is discussed in Chapter 8. Thus, I would argue that wage earning in order to support a family is a ‘modern’ and gendered idea and that the women’s notion of what it means to be modern is also gendered because the majority of the women interviewed (especially single women)1 do not talk of their impetus for migration into the city for wage work in terms of supporting the family. Only men perceive themselves in such a bread-winner role. I have chosen the narratives of Cynthia, Jessica, Magaret, May, Marcia and Rosalind to illustrate the force of this most common reason for the women’s migration, that is, their motivation to become modern. For these women, migration was primarily motivated by a desire to live in an urban milieu, to escape from family pressures, to be independent and to mix in a multi-ethnic community. They viewed rural Bidayuh as backward and old-fashioned and were eager to learn new ways of living from other city dwellers whom they saw as sophisticated, up-to-date and ‘developed.’ None of them mentioned financial necessity as a reason for their migration. In addition to asking them who made the decision for them to migrate and why, I also asked them whether they preferred the city or the village, given that they had experienced living in both. Furthermore, I asked them if they thought Bidayuh women should remain in the village or migrate to the city and naturally, the topic of farming arose. I therefore inquired if farming was still an option for them. Cynthia (single woman, aged 23) Cynthia is the only one with a sixth form education among all the single women I interviewed. This makes her obviously over qualified for her waiting job2 in a food mall. It is her first job and she has been working there for three years. She earns RM420 a month. A friend introduced her to the job. She was on the verge of leaving when I interviewed her.3 Her ambition was to be a lawyer but she was rejected by all the local tertiary institutions. She took a six month computer course in order to enhance her opportunities in the job market. She had had three interviews for clerical jobs just before I met her. On why she left the village, she explained: I wanted to experience work in the city and living with others, not just with my family. I don’t want to depend on my family and I wanted a better career for myself. I want to quit this job and find more secure work in an office which is more suited to my qualifications.

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In comparison to many others, Cynthia’s family is comfortably off. Her stepfather is the headman of their village and he owns three vans. One is for his personal use, another is for his business of ferrying goods and passengers between surrounding villages and the nearest bazaar town. The third is left with his son from his first marriage and they pay someone to drive passengers between Kuching city and the village where his son lives. Her mother grows hill padi for their own consumption and cocoa and pepper. However, they can afford to wait till prices are favourable before selling their cash crops. When I asked Cynthia about farming she elaborated: No, I don’t want to farm. My parents are already farmers and they want their children and the younger generation to work in town. To work in the city is more modern (… kerja dipasar adalah lebih moden). People working in town have a higher status than farmers in our village. Factory women from agricultural households in Northern Thailand expressed the same view of not wishing to be farmers because of unstable income from farming (Purisinsit 1997). Cynthia’s response is not surprising given the State’s discourse on shifting cultivation as a backward, unproductive way of life.4 She believes that women should migrate from the villages as the city offers greater employment opportunities. I like living in the city. I have a lot of friends. There are more amenities and the transportation is good. We can also get information faster in the city. Cynthia pointed out that the down-side of city living is that there are a lot of undesirable people and if one is not strong, one can be led astray easily. She concludes that it would be best to live in the village and work in town but concedes that it is not possible in her case as her village is too far away. Thus Cynthia’s notion of modernity is ambivalent, which perhaps reflects the fact that she is the first generation of urban women wage earners in her family. As a result of her high academic qualifications, she has aspirations for a career in the city but is unsure of its moral cost. Given a choice, she would combine the security of living with her family in the village with the modern image of wage work in the city. Jessica (single woman, aged 24) Jessica works as a supervisor with the same employer as Cynthia. She completed her fifth form and this is her second job. A friend introduced her to it. She has been working in the food mall for over a year and earns RM400 a month. Prior to this, she worked as a sales assistant in a small mini-market5 for a year. She was recruited directly from the village, by the proprietor of the mini-market who knew someone in Jessica’s village. She was paid RM250 a month there.


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Her parents are farmers and they have three daughters and a son. Jessica is the youngest in her family. Her two older sisters are married. The eldest sister lives in another small town (near Sibu) as her husband works in the district hospital there. Her second sister lives with her husband (who is also a farmer) and two children with Jessica’s parents in the village. Neither of her sisters is in wage work. Her parents are comfortably off as there are no dependents now. They grow hill padi and some cocoa and pepper. They also own a rice milling machine. They get paid in rice or cash when other villagers bring their rice for milling. Thus they can wait till prices are high before selling their cocoa and pepper. Her brother, aged 28, lives at home and helps his parents on the farm in the day and operates the rice milling machine in the evening. Jessica is unable to farm because she was never initiated into the intricacies of padi farming. She was boarding in a secondary school6 and returned to her village only once a fortnight and spent only the weekends and school holidays in her home. She has only helped out in the weeding (buang rumput saja). It is of interest to add here that Jessica is the most educated in her family. All her other siblings have only a primary school education. She said that she left home for wage work in the city because it was boring in the village. Jessica is enthusiastic about city living: It is definitely better in the city. We can earn money easily (senang cari duit) and we are more independent. We can easily choose another job (senang pilih kerja lain). We can keep up with the latest in the city. We can follow fashion and act clever (bergaya pandai). In the village, we are left behind time (Dikampung, kita ketinggalan zaman). We have to wait for good pepper prices which is uncertain. Magaret (single woman, aged 36) At thirty-six years of age, Magaret is one of the older single women that I interviewed. She worked as a general worker in a gardening shop when I first met her. A friend introduced her to the job. The retail outlet is part of a large landscape design company which has its office in the same compound. She lives with a few of her colleagues at the back of the large detached house which serves as the office of the landscape company. The accommodation is rent free but as it is in the heart of the city, Magaret complains that the traffic noise continues unabated throughout the night. She therefore makes a point of returning to her village on her days off every week. When I asked her if she chose to work in the city after finishing school, she had this to say: I stayed in the village for two to three years after I stopped school. One day, a cousin [who lived in Kuching] came to ask me to work for him – to look after his children. I hid in the house and refused to come out. Later, another cousin came and this time, I agreed to work. … I decided that it is better to

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak have one’s own money. It is easier to move around and we don’t have to depend on others.

The theme of independence which is similar to the narratives of Cynthia and Jessica emerges once again. In the rural village economy, there is great interdependence among members of the household who farm together for the survival of all. However, these women are unable and unwilling to lead the hard life of farming. To stay in the village and not participate in farming would be unacceptable given the strong work ethic amongst Bidayuh women. More importantly, many rural households cannot afford to feed unproductive adult dependents. The alternative to interdependence (if they farm) and dependence (if they do not farm) is independence in the city. In addition, with increasing monetisation of the rural economy, education in the bazaar towns, greater infrastructural links to nearby towns and exposure to what it means to be modern on television and other media, it was no longer enough that subsistence needs were met. Consumption aspirations have also climbed beyond their parents’ ability to pay. Thus, a desirable modern lifestyle is only affordable if one is engaged in wage work and since there are hardly any employment opportunities outside of agriculture in the rural areas, migration to the city is the only option. In addition, consumption needs are only satisfied if one is living in the city. Magaret is the third in a family of five children. Her father died six years ago. Her mother moves between her second sister’s house in another village and their family home. Her mother has retired from full-time farming although she still maintains a cocoa garden. Magaret’s second sister and her husband are full-time farmers and they sell vegetables daily in the Farmers’ Market in the city. Her mother spends most of her time caring for this sister’s children. When I asked Magaret if she wants to farm she pointed out: I don’t want to farm because it is the work of the old, the work last time, not the work of modern times (… tidak mahu kerana itu kerja orang tua, kerja dulu … bukan kerja zaman moden). On the contrary, she feels that women should leave the villages for work in the city. The city has a higher standard of living because people are better educated and know more about things. There are also many interesting places in the city. Women should come out to work because village work doesn’t pay sufficiently for expenditure (kerja kampung tidak cukup belanja). But in the city, there are lots of bad people – thieves, cheats (… banyak orang jahat – pencuri, penipu). It is best to retire in the village because there are lots of relatives and people who will visit you when you are sick. Once again, the ambivalence about modernity surfaces. In the context of minimal welfare provisions, there is no safety net to rely on. Given the insecurity of


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their lowly paid jobs, maintaining their rural links with family and property is therefore important for old age and sickness. A few months after the interview, Magaret left her job and started work in a place which sold lottery tickets. It is in a bazaar town near her village. She works shifts but now commutes daily from home. I asked her colleague why she left and she was reported to have said that in her new job she can wear nice clothes and not have to soil her hands, unlike working with plants in the gardening shop. May (working mother, aged 28) With her short skirt and high heels, May, who has a passion for shoes, is every inch the urban modern woman. She is chatty and vivacious. As captain at the coffee-house of a local hotel, she earns RM600 a month. This is her second job which she found through a newspaper advertisement. She started her working life as a waitress in a large, popular Chinese restaurant in the city. May described her joy at receiving her first pay packet: ‘My pay was only RM180 a month but I thought it was so big. I had never seen so much money before in my life!’ Her uncle got her the job and she stayed there for nine months before moving to her present job where the pay was higher. She has been with the hotel for five years and met her husband there. Her husband has since left the hotel to work as a technician in one of the five electronic factories in Kuching. May’s father is Bidayuh and her mother Chinese. They both live in the village and there are seven children in the family. Two of her sisters are housewives in Kuching. Sister number six works as a waitress in a family leisure club. May’s husband has a Bidayuh mother and an Eurasian father. He was born and bred in Kuching. They have a one-year-old son who is looked after by May’s mother-inlaw. May’s urban household is complex and will be described in more detail in Chapter 8. May did not mention economic reasons for leaving the village eight years ago. As to why she left, she elaborated: I don’t like to stay in the village. It is boring and the people are backward. When I went home to stay with my mother after the birth of my baby, I used to come to Kuching in the day and return to the village at night. When I was pregnant, I craved for certain jungle fruits. I can’t even get them in the village but I can buy them in town. Life is just better in the city. Needless to say, she has no intention of retiring in the village and harbours no romantic view of the village. It seemed irrelevant to even ask about farming. No, farming is just too hard. I’m used to working for a wage (… sudah biasa kerja bergaji). My older sister [housewife in Kuching, married to a security guard of a hotel in Kuching] will go to the pepper and vegetable gardens when she is home from the city but I’m not so hardworking. I’m too lazy.

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak Those of us who have worked in the city since our single days can’t farm and can’t sit at home in the village doing nothing.

Marcia (single woman, aged 24) When I arrived for the interview, Marcia had just signed off from her shift as assistant manager7 of the food mall where Jessica works. She sighed with relief as we made our way to the opposite block of shops. During peak hours, she is rushed off her feet and she welcomed the end of her work day. Her accommodation, which is provided rent free by her employer, is reached via a dingy staircase at the back of a block of shop houses. Her room was at the top of the three-storey building. The door opened to a big sitting area where some men were sitting in their singlets and shorts, watching television. They were all staff at the same eatery but they slept on a different level and were there to watch television. At the back was a small kitchenette with a two ring stove and a sink. The toilet and the bathroom were also at the back. There were two rooms at the front and they shared a common balcony. Marcia shared one of the rooms with another female supervisor. The eatery where they worked is one of the largest in the city. There are more than ten stalls selling a variety of food ranging from noodles to dim sim to satay. Her employer leases the mall, rents out individual spaces for others to operate their food-stalls and employs an army of staff to prepare and serve drinks. The family enterprise also includes the fast-food rice stall. Although the coffee shop is an institution in much of Malaysia as a place to have a quick meal or drink or just to while away the time, Marcia’s boss started the whole concept of service by a friendly uniformed staff who will take orders, deliver them to your table and dispense tissue paper wherever and whenever needed. In a tropical thunderstorm, the waiters and waitresses will carry huge golf umbrellas and take you to your car. It was such a successful formula that they have a chain of such food malls in the city. Their staff consist mainly of young women from the villages. Some young men are also employed but they are in the minority. This is because men can earn more in labouring jobs and these were in abundance during the economic boom of the early to mid-1990s and during my field work. Marcia had been working for her employer for five years. It was her first job and she had moved up the ranks from waitress to being an assistant manager and by the age of 24 earned RM600 a month, a relatively handsome wage in comparison to a lot of other women I interviewed. She worked an eight-hour shift. The morning shift started at 6:30 a.m. and ended at 3:30 p.m. The night shift began at 3:30 p.m. and finished at 11:30 p.m. However, often the shifts ran over as the place had to be washed down and the floor cleaned at the end of the 11:30 p.m. shift. The shifts changed over every week. Marcia is bright and responsible and has an air of confidence about her. She wore her hair long and tied it into a bun at the back of her head. She wove her way amongst the tables and sorted out problems that customers had with their orders. She is competent in her job although her supervisory role, which includes the training of new staff, has made


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her somewhat unpopular. She commented that sometimes she is so stressed that she screams at the staff, and she now has a reputation amongst the staff as being fierce. Marcia completed Form 5 and once dreamt of becoming a primary school teacher but was rejected by the teachers’ training college because of her poor examination results. She spent a year at home in the village before her father found her the job at the food mall. Her father works as a labourer with the city council and spends two days a week in the village. When asked why she decided to leave the village for a job in the city, she has this to say: ‘We don’t have to ask our father for money to buy our own things. It is easier to get a job.’ Her mother is a full-time farmer and grows both hill padi and wet padi. They are self-sufficient in rice and Marcia attributes this to her mother: ‘She must plant her padi every year so that we have our own seeds to plant every year. She doesn’t like to get her padi seeds from others in the village.’ When I asked her if she will choose to return to farming one day, she replied: I don’t even know how to hold a machete. (Nak pegang parang pun tak tahu.) My mother doesn’t encourage us to farm. She doesn’t want us to inherit her work. It is all right to farm for fun but not as a full-time job. She wants us to get a more secure job. In fact, she wants me to study8 and get a job with regular office hours. When we were all in school,9 my mother would not allow us to follow her to the farm when we return home on weekends. My parents would only spend half a day farming on the weekends that we were at home. When I was in the village for a year before coming to Kuching, I tried to farm but I could not stand the sun. When I asked her if she preferred living in the city or the country, she replied: In the city we are exposed to more news, entertainment and shopping. We have more choices and freedom to decide to buy or not to buy, what to buy and where to buy. We have ‘life lessons’ in the city where we meet many different types of people. In the village, there is nowhere to go at night and we just stay indoors by 7:00 p.m. In the city, we can easily go to any celebration10 in town. The bad thing is that we meet all sorts of people in the city and they can lead us astray. For example, mad people11 (orang gila), tomboy [women who dress and behave like men], pondan [men who crossdress as women] and people who like to mind the affairs of others. It is also very noisy here.12 The traffic noise starts at 5:30 a.m. and continues until after midnight. I find it hard to relax and sleep. The best thing would be to live in the city on weekdays and return to the village on weekends. Rosalind (single woman, aged 20) Rosalind has been working for a year and a half as a waitress in the food mall where both Cynthia and Marcia worked. Like them, she is overqualified for the

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job as she completed Form 5. At RM270 a month, she earns less than them. One of the complaints of the employees of this food mall is that there is no clear wage structure and the arbitrariness of their salaries is a constant sore-point. This is her second job. Her cousin introduced her to it. Before this, while waiting for her Form 5 examination results, a friend introduced her to work as a petrol pump attendant for a month. She lives with her other female colleagues above another block of shop houses. The access is from the front of the row of shop-houses but it is more crowded and dingy than where Marcia lives. The layout is the same as Marcia’s except that unpainted plywood boards partition the open sitting area into three small bedrooms. Thus, the common sitting area has been sacrificed. It is also dark because the wooden dividing walls are not painted and it blocks the light from the balcony in front. A narrow walkway leads to the two light filled balcony rooms at the front of the building. Each of the small bedrooms in the sitting area accommodates two to three girls and they decorate the walls with big calendar cut-outs of their favourite film stars or singers. There is no privacy as the walls are thin. This is the place where they listen to music from their radios or cassette recorders and unwind after a long day. There is no television set. Rosalind is the eldest of six children in the family. Her younger siblings are all in school and her parents are both farmers. They grow wet padi and are selfsufficient in rice. They also have cocoa and pepper gardens and some old rubber trees. Rosalind said that she chose to leave the village because there was not much money in farming. She added that she is now old enough to find wage work and she felt that staying at home was useless. When I asked her about farming, she remarked: It is too hot to work in the farm. I know because I have worked a day with SALCRA.13 It is hard to find money in the village (… susah nak cari duit dikampung). Only old people stay in the village to work for SALCRA. As to whether she preferred the city or the village, she has this to say: There is work and money, so life is easier in the city. In the village, income depends on the weather. If it rains, there is no pepper and no money. The bad thing about the city is that there are many dishonest people. When we retire, we should live in the village as it is quieter, more peaceful, less dirty and people are more friendly. As with Cynthia, Magaret and Marcia, Rosalind held an ambivalent view of life in the city. Although they want to embrace the excitement of the city, the city is also viewed as a ‘big, bad place’ with danger lurking at every corner. In fact, two years after the interview, Jessica became a single mother and had to return to live with her parents in the village. The discussion on single women’s sexual vulnerability in the city will be elaborated in Chapter 7. They also feel insecure as it is a modern life without a welfare safety net. With low wages, living in the


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village and commuting to work in the city would cut living costs but this is only possible if their villages are within commuting distance from Kuching. Unemployment and retirement would also make city living unaffordable as there is no unemployment benefit and a monthly pension is only available to those in government service. Although making a living from the land is an undesirable alternative, it is at least something to fall back on when things do not work out in the city.

Economic necessity and migration The second most frequently mentioned reason for the women’s migration was economic necessity. Vicky, Angela and Alison are the eldest in their respective families and their financial contributions were very much needed by their families. They left the village in order to help their families. It is interesting that although these women gave poverty and financial support for their families as their main reason for migration, they similarly talked of a desire for the modern life like women in the previous section. Vicky (single woman, aged 23) Vicky is tall and slim and wears a ready smile. She works as a waitress in a family leisure club in the city and had been there for two years when I interviewed her. The family club is one of the oldest in the city and was first started by Charles Brooke as a recreation club for his officers. For a long time, locals could only enter the club as guests but not as members. Now the club is open to all but there is still a vetting procedure. Application for membership has to be supported by two existing members of the club and they have to be formally introduced to other members. The management committee is elected yearly and the president is often a government minister or a prominent community leader. Vicky found the job through an advertisement and she has this to say: ‘Although it is a waitressing job, it is not in a public place. This place has a bit of standard (… tempat ini ada sikit standad ).’ This is her second job. When she first arrived in the city, she scanned the newspapers and found a job as a door to door salesperson, selling electrical appliances. She received a 20 per cent commission on any item that she sold and earned approximately RM400 a month which is about the same as she is earning as a waitress now. She lives with her father’s younger sister who is a community nurse aide. Her aunt is married to a car salesman and they have three children. Vicky lives with them in a single-storey terraced house. Although Vicky does not contribute monetarily to the household, she cooks, cleans and looks after her cousins when she is not working in the club. Vicky is the eldest of eight children. Her father works as a labourer in road construction with the Public Works Department in Kuching. Thus her mother is the mainstay of the family farm.14 They grow padi and vegetables for the family’s consumption and a little cocoa for cash. As her mother is often ill,

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Vicky had to look after her younger siblings. Apart from the brother just below her, who is training to be a soldier, and the sister under him who is married with a one year old son, the rest of her siblings are in school – the youngest being four years old. She explained why she left home. I stayed at home for only two to three months after finishing school. I wanted to relieve my parents’ burdens (Saya nak meringgankan bebanan orang tua). Helping her family is a recurrent theme throughout the interview but she also admits that she is unable to farm because she is not used to it. Vegetable growing is not a problem but padi growing is out of the question. Her views on city living were similar to many of the others: I think women should come to work in the city in order to expand their experiences. We can mix with others [other ethnic groups] and this is not possible in the village. However, it is cheaper to live in the village. Water is free and we can grow our own vegetables. Expenses are big in the city. (Pembelanjaan besar dibandar). It is best to work in town but stay in the village. Explicit in the recurrent comment from the women interviewed about meeting different types of people in the city is that they can see how people from other cultures live and work and learn from them.15 As mentioned previously, they perceive city people as more progressive (lebih maju) and they are left behind (ketinggalan zaman) in the villages. This is in no small measure a result of the dichotomous discourse of the state. Rural areas are equated with being traditional and therefore backward. Urban areas are where development is happening and are therefore progressive. Vicky has since married and has a child of her own. She has also been moved to serve in the newly opened restaurant for western cuisine in the club. Her transfer is an acknowledgment of her good work but the pay is not any better. She says: The pay is low and I have to support my family. I have to budget very carefully every month in order to send home RM100. I would prefer to work office hours but I will continue working here until something better comes along because I need to help my younger brothers and sisters who are still in school. Although she is bright, with only Form 3 qualifications her options are limited. In addition, she does not like factory work as it means living in a hostel and she prefers to live with a family or on her own.


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Angela (working mother, aged 29) Angela is tall, composed and self-assured. I met her at the Sarawak Family Planning Association when she arrived early to see the doctor. She works as a housekeeper in a local hotel and earns RM400 a month. Her parents adopted a Chinese baby girl16 as is usual according to local custom because her parents were childless for the first few years after their marriage. It is believed that the adopted baby will bring younger brothers and sisters to the family. Angela was born soon after and her three other siblings followed. Her adopted Chinese sister married a Chinese man and left home early. Her father currently works as a foreman with the city council although he was a daily paid labourer (daily wage of RM8.00) when Anna left school. Thus, she had to seek wage work to help her parents with supporting the family. He is retired now but was rehired on a yearly contract basis and has a monthly salary of RM850. Her mother grows padi for their own consumption, vegetables and maize which she sells in the market. In a good month she can earn RM200. Anna’s husband works as a peon17 in the same city council office as her father. They have three daughters and a son and their ages ranged from 10 to 3. Anna lives in her parents’ house which is situated in a village on the outskirts of Kuching. Two of her unmarried siblings also live in the same house. She stayed in the village for a year after school before starting on her first job of packing dried instant noodles in a small factory near her village.18 She was recruited by the factory directly and was paid a daily wage of RM4.00. She stood on her feet the whole day and the conveyor belt went so fast that she often felt faint. She left after six months. Then a friend recommended she work in a local tile factory, not far from her village. She had to stick small pieces of mosaic tiles on to a cardboard paper measuring a foot square. Her fingers were hit by the floor supervisor every time a piece of mosaic tile fell out of her hands. She was paid a piece rate of RM6 for every 100 pieces of tile that she stuck onto the cardboard and she earned about RM250 a month. She left the place after four months. Her father’s friend introduced her to the next job with a landscaping company. She planted cuttings, sold plants and earned RM290 a month. Her employer was friendly and not fussy and she worked there for over a year until the business closed down. She met her husband, a Malay from Bintulu, after six months in this job. Anna and her husband returned to Bintulu where he worked as a security guard on contract with the branch campus of the University of Agriculture. Anna worked as a library attendant in the same university for the next three years. According to her, it was an easy job and she read books and had her best salary ever (RM500). They returned to Kuching as the branch campus closed down and Anna also had child-care problems. She did not work for a year on her return to Kuching but has since been a housekeeper in the hotel for over a year. When I asked her if women should work in the city, she explained: They should work in the city and get new experiences. Nowadays, young people cannot stand the sun. The modern generation doesn’t like farming

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak (Generasi moden tak suka tani.) They don’t know how to grow padi, pepper, cocoa and work in the jungle (… kerja hutan). The income from farming is also low (Pendapatan bertani pun kurang).

Alison (housewife, aged 26) Apart from her first job as a sales assistant in a mini-market, Alison’s job history over a period of eight years is that of a domestic worker. She left the work force more than two years ago to get married and a baby quickly followed. Alison is the eldest in her family and her father died when she was very young. She only finished primary school and left home at the age of 14. All my friends in the village left. Our parents can’t give us any money. We have to give to them. Alison was ambivalent when I asked her if she preferred the city or the village. If we have a fixed job, we should stay in town. If we don’t, we should return to the village (Jika kerja tetap, tinggal dipasar. Jika tiada kerja, balik kampung.) In town, we use a lot of money. In the village, without money we can still eat (Dipasar, pakai duit banyak. Dikampung, tiada duit pun boleh makan.) It is cleaner in town. Our body, our clothes are cleaner. In the village, when we cook with firewood, it is black all over. It is hard to use firewood. It is hard to say which is better. For my child’s education, the town is a bit better. Making ends meet on a single wage in the city is hard and she prefers the village for this reason. However, for her daughter’s education, the city is the place. As her own village is far and inaccessible, she has no choice but to stay in the city. Her husband, Jimmy, on the other hand, who is a welder, intends to stay put in the city. There is a chance of migration to another city as Jimmy is on the look out for something better and has a history of overseas migration.

Decision making about migration: a comparison From the discussion above, it is obvious that different women have different motivations for leaving the village. Those coming from better-off households, made their own decisions to leave the villages and their reasons were couched in terms of urban consumption linked to appearance – buying beautiful clothes and gold jewellery, boredom in the village, seeking new experiences and escaping from family pressures. One woman said, ‘I had a boyfriend in the village but my parents controlled me and did not allow me to go out and enjoy myself. One morning, I just decided to follow my friend to work in Kuching.’ Others did not want to be dependent financially on their fathers whom they perceived as difficult and unreliable. As one woman said, ‘My father will say that he has no


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money even when he has, so it is easier to earn our own.’ Factory daughters in Java similarly made the decision on factory employment on their own (Wolf 1992: 171). In Wolf’s study, only one factory worker said that she went into wage work in order to help her family. The rest of her respondents gave individual social and economic reasons; for example, their friends were already working in the factory or that they wanted to buy soap. Scented soap was a status symbol in the villages (ibid: 174). According to Lee, factory women in Shenzhen, South China, migrated from the villages, in order to evade arranged marriages by their parents but they represent their decision to their parents as alleviating familial economic burdens (Lee 1998: 83). When some of their parents disagreed, some women ran away from home (ibid: 75). This is in contrast to the Philippines where the migration of single women was mainly a household decision made especially by the father (Trager 1988: 83). However, some women in my study were also pressured by their families to leave in order to alleviate the poverty at home and to support younger siblings still at school. Almost all the women in my study, like their factory sisters in Shenzhen (Lee 1998), found their first job in the city through introduction by kin and friends who were already urban workers. This is in contrast to the situation in Taiwan where parents (usually fathers) decide on the factories where their daughters should work (Kung 1983). In this study migration is unlike those in many other cities as the women I interviewed did not join a pool of urban unemployed. In fact, many started out as poorly paid domestic workers in the homes of kin who were already living in the city. It might be said that young rural women migrants working for urban kin were often exploited as they were under-paid and overworked. Migration is therefore a complex process which involves not only the individual migrant but is enmeshed in social networks of kin and friends which stretch from their rural villages to the urban cities. These social networks help new migrants find jobs and in some cases provide them with a place to stay when they first arrive in the city.

City or country? The majority of the women interviewed (66 per cent) preferred to live in the city. In fact, all the single women were unanimous on this point. However, there were differences in opinion among the working mothers and housewives. Fourteen women (or 28 per cent) said that it depended on the individual concerned. Some felt that single women should work in the city while others qualified it by saying that only single women with at least Form 3 schooling should leave the villages as those with less education might end up being sex workers in the city. The assumption is that a ‘decent job’ would require a minimum qualification of Form 3. Still others were worried that single women might fall prey to unscrupulous men, become pregnant and be deserted. This concern is not without grounds as Jessica, whom I interviewed as a single working woman, later became a single mother and had to return to live with her parents in the village.

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Most of the housewives felt that married women should follow their husbands and live where they worked in order to monitor their activities. Only three (all working mothers) of the 50 women interviewed (or 6 per cent) felt that village life was preferable to city living. One woman felt that it was good to start a small business in the village, while the other two thought that the village was a better place to raise children as they would not fall into bad company. This is in contrast to Alison who stayed in the city because of her daughter’s education. Thus a woman’s position in the life-course will determine the choices that she makes. Working mothers and housewives have less freedom than single women in choosing where they would like to live. Some housewives stayed in the village to reduce the cost of living while yearning for the conveniences of city life, while others stayed in the city and made plans for retirement in the village. Those, whose villages are near and easily accessible saw little difference between Kuching and their kampung in terms of amenities. However, their attachment to the village is real not only because many still have natal family members living there but also because many stand to inherit land from their families. In other words, the participants in this study who are first generation migrants in their households are neither landless nor propertyless. As one husband whom I interviewed explains, it is from land that they can earn a living when the going gets tough in the city. Although farming is more physically demanding than wage work in the city, it still provides an alternative livelihood. This is articulated more frequently by those who are married and have families. Some, like the husband that I mentioned above, have already initiated the process of building a home in the village and starting a farm. There is a dual participation in the urban and agrarian sectors. According to the 1997 Internal Migration Study (Ishak Shari et al. 1997) for which 2,885 migrants were interviewed, 23.3 per cent wanted to remain in the city for life, 22.1 per cent wanted to return to their birthplace while 51.2 per cent were undecided as to their long-term plans. The rest (3.4 per cent) intended to migrate to another city. How many will eventually return to retire in the village is unknown. Table 5.2 below shows how the three groups of women interviewed are divided in their preference for living in the village and in the city. Therefore, rural–urban migration cannot be assumed to be a permanent process and the uprooting that the word ‘migration’ implies is negligible as there is a constant Table 5.2 Women’s preference for living in the village/city Participants’ preference for

Single women

Working mothers

Housewives

Total

City living Village living Depends on individual Total

13 —

15 3

5 —

33 (66%) 3 (6%)

— 13

6 24

8 13

14 (28%) 50 (100%)


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vacillation between rural and urban which reflects the complex web of social networks in both locales. Even when urban migrants do not frequently return home to their villages, they keep in touch through the comings and goings of other people. In Jakarta, Murray reported that after 40 years in the city, rural village links and village houses were still maintained (Murray 1991: 67). In the face of a precarious urban existence, land in the village and social networks are insurance policies not to be taken lightly. The women’s ambivalence about life in the city and the country is reflected often in their narratives.

Remittances and rural–urban relations Amongst the three groups of women interviewed, single women working in the city achieve the greatest autonomy from their wages and they are also the most valued and appreciated by their natal households in the villages. This is because they regularly remit on average 25 per cent of their monthly earnings to their households in the villages, even though their earnings are small. This is less than the average of 30 per cent that the electronic factory operatives remitted to their families in Peninsular Malaysia in the late 1970s (Tan 1986: 18). But this is similar to Wolf’s findings in Java where factory daughters remitted 28 per cent of their wages in cash and kind to their families (Wolf 1992: 180). Single women migrants from poor landless families in Bangladesh present a different case. They do not remit money at all because their families are shamed that they are unable to fulfil their obligations of protecting their daughters. They did not expect any money from their daughters and the young women kept the entire pay packet to themselves. This has to be understood in the context of purdah (female seclusion) in Bangladesh (Kibria 1995). In South China, parents do not rely on their daughters’ remittances because finding employment in Shenzhen is uncertain. On the contrary, they subsidise their daughters when they are unemployed and between jobs. In other words, Chinese daughters migrate to lessen their family’s subsistence burden rather than to help their families financially (Lee 1998: 75). In Java, working daughters gained prestige in their natal households by being able to buy family members small gifts, status symbols that are displayed in the house, and by providing financial aid in times of emergency. According to Wolf, ‘such contributions bring them higher status than would remitting a steady and dependable flow of cash to the family economy’ (1992: 207). McLellan’s study of factory daughters in Kedah in the early 1980s also revealed that although daughters lost status by working in factories, Malay mothers gained status by their acquisition of material goods19 which were proudly displayed in the homes (1984: 4–5). In rural Bidayuh households, the remittances from migrants are less for the acquisition and display of status symbols in the home and more often used for the education of younger siblings, for building a new house or improving the old homestead. In better-off households, there is an unspoken expectation that should the working daughters require any money in the future, for weddings and house building, for example, their parents would give back some of the

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money which they have remitted through the years. Joyce is one such case. Her mother saved a large part of what she remitted as a working daughter and later returned some of the money when she needed it to build a house in her husband’s village. Similarly, in more fortunate households like Jessica’s, mothers return a part of the remittances through gifts of gold jewellery which is perceived as a form of savings in a rural economy. Lee, on the other hand, reported that the remittances of Chinese factory daughters cannot be assumed to be for familial use. Money is sent home in order to keep it in safe hands as the women could not easily get to a bank, while others distrust the Shenzhen banking system (Lee 1998: 81). Although the single women in my study remit much less than the working daughters found in Salaff’s (1995),20 study it must be pointed out that unlike the latter, single women migrants in Kuching incur more expenditure than the women in Hong Kong who stayed at home with their parents. The single women migrants in this study generally spend almost half their monthly wages on food, transportation, contributions to the urban households of kin where they are lodging and for personal skills enhancement (for example, computer lessons). They are therefore self-supporting unlike the working daughters in Wolf’s study who are semi-dependent on their families (Wolf 1992: 207). As they live in the city, they are also more remote from direct parental control of their incomes. In comparison to their mothers in the village, they have more autonomy and control over their earnings. From Windle’s and Cramb’s discussions with Bidayuh women in the villages, women migrants are appreciated for their reliability in remitting money to their rural natal households. Although they earn less than male migrants, they are said to remit money more regularly than men and are considered to have greater commitment to their rural natal households (Windle and Cramb 1995: 7). In addition, single women are more likely than working mothers to quit their city jobs for extended periods in order to help their natal households during labour intensive agricultural phases like planting and harvesting. In contrast, working mothers and housewives remit a mixture of cash and food with the former remitting on average 15 per cent of their monthly wages. Housewives are the most irregular in remitting to their natal households and when they did, they often did so secretly. Support for kin can be a source of domestic conflict between husbands and wives. Some like Alison, Jenny, Paula and Tina remit to parents and parents-in-law on alternate months or give a small sum to both each month. Gerrits reported that in his study, remittances contributed to 8 per cent of the annual gross income of the village household (Gerrits 1994: 287), but I suspect that this may be due to under-reporting. Several of the women in my study pay their mothers or sisters for child-care. A few do not help their parents financially but give directly to their school-going siblings instead. I suspect that the financial support of migrants to their rural households are much greater in Stivens’s study of Rembau as she describes it as a combined family economic strategy in a remittance family economy (Stivens 1996: 229). Half of the women interviewed send remittances to their mothers rather than


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their fathers. According to Windle and Cramb (1995: 7) rural Bidayuh women when questioned about household expenditure, saw themselves as better savers and more efficient than men in financial management. In this study, some women said that they did not trust their fathers with money because they would drink it away, while others said that their fathers already hold the purse-strings in the family and hence their remittances would reduce their mothers’ dependence. Given the lack of comprehensive welfare provisions, women rely on support from kinship networks. The common exchanges are domestic labour for city daughters during child-birth and sickness, child-care by kin in the villages and village commodities like fruits, vegetables and rice. Rural kin also assist in the agricultural ventures of urban migrants. Conversely, city daughters help village mothers with farming when extra labour is required; single women help in domestic chores on their trips home to the village and the majority of women interviewed bring home meat, fish and other foodstuff from the city. In the absence of a welfare safety net, there are important links of support and co-operation between village and city households in order to ensure the survival of both. In fact, as shown in later chapters, the women’s natal households in the villages are urban women’s welfare safety net. However, what is uncertain is what will happen to the rural economy given that, as the single women marry, they reduce their remittances to their natal village households. If they do not return to farm and their remittances to rural households decline further, the stability of what Stivens calls the remittance family economy will be in jeopardy.

Conclusion In this chapter, the narratives of the women enrich the previous chapter’s discussion on the macrostructural factors affecting change. They give a glimpse into the reflections and perceptions of the women affected by these transformative forces. Although I do not deny that poverty is an important motivating force for migration, I argue that a structuralist explanation alone is limiting. People also choose, decide and act according to a host of other emotive reasons. The complex construction of what is modern and desirable not only motivated the women’s migration but was also instrumental in restructuring them into wage workers. However, I also suggest that decision making concerning migration rests not only on the individual but, in the context of poor households, the decision is taken out of the women’s hands as they are pushed out by their families. Similarly, migration cannot be seen as an individual endeavour as the complex process is embedded in a network of social ties. These social networks are important channels of information concerning city jobs as well as providing a point of entry for new migrants in the city. Although wage work in the city is perceived to be easy in comparison to rural agricultural work, the women’s lives in the city are anything but easy given that they are employed at the bottom of the personal services work hierarchy. They work long, unsociable hours in often dirty, repetitive, dead-end jobs. In addition, women in this study experience migration in both contradictory and ambivalent

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ways. Even as their gendered concept of what it means to be modern stirs excitement in single women in terms of consumption of clothes and jewellery, it is a source of anxiety for married women as they watch over their husbands. This will be further elaborated in a later chapter. Single women migrants also enjoy a lot of autonomy in terms of their control over earnings. This is because Bidayuh single women are self-supporting in the city where they work, unlike the working daughters in Java and Hong Kong. Their remittances to their rural natal households are highest at this phase of the life-course and they are much valued for their contributions. Working mothers and housewives remit much less to their natal households because of their responsibilities towards their own families and thus their importance in the former is diminished. Inspite of these differences, the lives of women migrants are embedded in a network of kinship ties both urban and rural. To a large extent, this is the result of a lack of state institutional welfare and child-care support. Reciprocal assistance and the circulation of household labour, material resources and support between urban and rural households are therefore vital for the survival and well-being of both. In other words, there is less disjuncture between the rural and the urban as migrants participate in both sectors. In the next chapter, I will examine the peculiarities of the personal services sector in which these women find employment.

6

Overqualified and underpaid Wage work in the personal services sector

In this chapter I want to explore the implications of the fact that the women actively chose to work in the personal services industry and rejected factory work. I argue in this chapter that their experience of wage work in this sector has to be understood against the backdrop of their expected labour contribution if they had remained in the village. The women in this study all worked in the personal services sector as coffeeshop waitresses, petrol pump attendants, domestic workers, housekeepers in hotels, cleaners and assistants in child-care centres. In the context of Sarawak, such work is full-time employment, except for some domestic work, and is feminised, apart from waiting at tables and working petrol pumps. The women are employed in small enterprises with an unpredictable pay structure and no career path. In the main, the work is repetitive, dirty, dead-end and frequently entails unsociable shift work. They work the hardest during public holidays when others are off work. Domestic workers often complained of loneliness and isolation, naughty children under their care, long hours and demanding employers. One woman who has been in domestic service throughout her work history said: ‘When I returned on a Sunday evening after a day off, the sink would be full to the brim with dirty dishes and I would have a big pile of laundry to fold and put away.’ Petrol pump attendants were often paid less than RM200 a month which was not even enough for basic survival because they had to pay for their own food, lodgings and transportation to work. It was also hot and unpleasant in the petrol stations in the sizzling heat of the afternoon. Thus women who worked in petrol stations did not stay for long. Sales assistants in supermarkets are on their feet the whole day and their wages were often cut to compensate for any shortfall in the tills. When they worked night shifts, they were afraid to go home alone at 10:00 p.m. as transportation was not provided by their employers. Coffee-shop and restaurant waitresses suffered from long hours on their feet as they moved from table to table and many complained of insufficient rest. Most coffee-shops are small family-owned businesses which remain open for long hours. Work days of 9–16 hours were mentioned by the participants. In a local chain of coffee-shops where some of the single women worked, the conditions were slightly better. They worked nine-hour shifts and had one day off

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a week. They had weekends off on a rotational basis. Their employer provided two main meals a day and free lodgings above the coffee-shops. Although beer promoters1 earned more than coffee-shop waitresses, they worked mainly nights and travelled out of town. Single women were therefore preferred by employers as they do not have domestic responsibilities and can work nights and be out of town. Beer promoters frequently complained of working in noisy, smoky environments such as karaoke lounges or discotheques and sometimes suffered verbal harassment from drunken male customers. At this juncture, it must be pointed out that employment in the personal services industry is often perceived to be highly sexualised because of the nature of the work. Adkins in her exploration of the links between sexuality and women’s employment in contemporary Britain, studied two tourist organisations, a hotel and a leisure park (Adkins 1995). She pointed out that women’s work in the service employment sector is deeply sexualised. Women employed in this sector have to look ‘attractive’ and respond when male customers pay them sexual attention. She argues that the sexual commodification of women workers through their work, through the rigid requirements of their appearance and the uniforms that they have to wear, produces a sexual power relationship between male customers and female workers. Adkins emphasises that although male workers are subjected to the same requirements of appearance and uniforms, they did not engage in this sexual work and are therefore not undermined by a subordinate sexual status. She concludes that the issue of sexuality is neither marginal nor non-economic in the discussion of women and the labour market, but is central in gendering the labour market itself. Sexualisation of the women’s work in this study is explicit in some cases as in the work of beer promoters, and less obvious in others, for instance assistants in child-care centres. They often have to serve customers of both sexes. The majority of the women also work in small family businesses and therefore have to deal with employers who are family members of both sexes. In addition, domestic workers are employed in homes and therefore do not have to interact with male customers. Nevertheless, the personal services sector is highly feminised. Apart from the work of waiting at tables and working petrol pumps, the jobs included in this study are dominated by women. At the end of the spectrum are domestic work and hotel housekeeping which are exclusively female domains. Age is yet another factor, with older women waiting at tables and housekeeping in the better establishments. This sector is also ethnicised in that most of the employees are from indigenous communities like Bidayuh, Iban and Malay to name a few. In other words, few Chinese work in this sector except as sales assistants. In waiting at coffee-shop tables and domestic work, locals are increasingly replaced by Indonesian workers, males in waiting and females in domestic work. In other words, the work-force at the bottom of the services work hierarchy is mainly young, female and non-Chinese. Implications for such a feminised and ethnicised sector of work is that it is undervalued and therefore lowly paid. The married women interviewed in this study earned half of their husbands’ monthly income despite the fact that they have the same, if not more,

Overqualified and underpaid

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years of schooling than their husbands who worked in male dominated sectors. This will be elaborated in Chapter 8. Few women in my study complained of sexual harassment in the course of their work although waitresses and beer promoters in coffee-shops, restaurants and karaoke lounges are particularly vulnerable. The only account of sexual harassment came from a petrol pump attendant, a 20-year-old respondent who told me in an interview: I was working one evening when a fat, balding old man drove up in his red sports car. He invited me to go for a drive with him (… pergi makan angin). I declined and he gave me his mobile telephone number and asked me to contact him. Why would I want to ring him? (Mana mahu talipon dia?) Although beer promoters sometimes mention talking back to drunken customers, sexual harassment at work was seldom an issue which the women brought up when talking about problems they encountered at work. Given this litany of employment woes in the personal services, I asked the women why they chose to work in this sector of employment as opposed to factory work. This is what the women had to say: I prefer to work in a home because I don’t have to find a room to rent. I also don’t have to buy my own food and drinks (… kerja dirumah orang tak payah cari bilik sewa, tak payah tanggung makan, minum.) (June, working mother) It is nice to work in a home especially if the employer is not fussy (… majikan tak cerewet). We can work at our own pace. My employer doesn’t complain much. She just eats whatever I cook. We follow our own schedule (… ikut aturan sendiri) and we are not rushed. If we work in a noodle or a biscuit factory, the working hours are long. (Cecilia, working mother) I have worked in a plywood factory before and it is noisy and dusty. The restaurant here is a much nicer place to work. (Sally, working mother) Factory work is terrible. It is very hot. (Diana, single woman) Working in a factory is very hard and the pay, low. The biscuit factory at Sungei Apong2 pays only RM5 a day for packing biscuits. (Judith, housewife) People say that factory work is easy work and we are not confined in the house all the time but we have to pay our own food and rent. We have to mix with all types of people which can bring a lot of problems. (Alison, housewife)

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak I don’t like working in a factory because many different types of races mix together and there is much gossip and quarrel. (Jacky, working mother) We cannot save if we work in a factory because food is not provided. My mother said that factory girls are too free. Many are made pregnant but they don’t have a husband.3 (Julia, housewife) We work shorter hours. A factory runs 24 hours a day. It can also be very dusty especially in furniture factories. (Janet, single woman) I can’t stand the shifts in the factory. Here [in the coffee shop] we only work two shifts but my friends in the factory work three or four shifts. The first shift starts at 7:00 a.m. and finishes at 3:00 p.m. Another shift starts from 3:00 p.m. to midnight and the last shift is from midnight till 7:00 a.m. The factory runs 24 hours a day. They tell me that their eyes cannot stand it and they cannot sleep (… mata tak boleh tahan dan tak boleh tidur.) (Elaine, single woman) I applied twice but the factory was not ready so I started here [in the coffee shop]. My village friend stopped work [in the factory] because her section was very terrible. (Kawan kampung henti kerja kerana bahagiannya teruk sangat.) I have three more friends there and they say it is very isolating. They cannot contact the village and their family in the village cannot contact them. If the supervisor is good, then it is all right. If not, it can be very bad. (Rosalind, single woman) At first I was interested in factory work but my sister who worked in a children’s garment factory in Johor4 was cheated. They say that her salary will be RM800 but she received only RM400. Girls from Sarawak are paid less than the girls from West Malaysia who get between RM800–1000. They say that girls from Sarawak come cheap. (… gadis Sarawak murah.) She also had to pay for her uniform when they told her it was free. They held her identity card5 and she finally got it back when she said that she had to change into the new identity card.6 When she left, they wanted to sue her for breach of contract. (Jane, single woman) I don’t like to live in hostels, so I didn’t try factory work. I prefer to live with a family or alone. (Vicky, single woman) I heard from friends that they have very strict rules. I don’t think I will be able to stand the air-conditioning especially if it is very cold and there is a smell. (Cynthia, single woman)


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It is obvious from the quotes above that the women were talking about two different types of factory work. The younger cohort of single women took factory work to mean employment in transnational electronic factories. Thus, their considerations were that of the rigour of the work regime and hostel living. In contrast, the older women interviewed saw factory work in terms of its exploitative conditions in small family backyard workshops. Therefore, their concerns were more about making ends meet. Others felt safe as a domestic worker in a home environment where food and lodgings are provided free by the employer in exchange for the protection of living with a family. There are problems of exploitation of domestic workers of course, but women like Alison and Jacky feel that the risk of problems arising from the congregation of workers of both sexes and of different ethnicity, in the work and living conditions of a factory are far worse than those of domestic workers. What the women in my study say about factory work makes an interesting contrast to what the Shenzhen factory women in Lee’s study say about work in the personal services. According to Lee (1998), although waiting at tables and serving in stores paid better, they were not morally appropriate for young single women living away from parental control. Such jobs in public places were associated with rendering sexual services to men while factory jobs were disciplined, regular and confined within the factory walls. In this way, women’s choices of the sector of employment to be engaged in is also very much an outcome of women’s construction of what is appropriate for their gender. A sector of employment is gendered not only by employers hiring policies but also by the women’s own gendered constructions.

Some experiences of women in this sector of employment In order to reveal some of the characteristics of employment in this sector, the work histories of three women are described below. They are illustrative of the points made earlier that wages in this sector of employment ride on a roller coaster and work trajectories do not necessarily follow any pattern of rising wages. In addition, wage earning in the city often takes a back-seat during labour intensive periods in the agricultural cycle when women return to the village to help out on family farms. However, it must also be pointed out that women’s employment trajectories are also outcomes of family expectations of what are deemed appropriate jobs for women. The work history of Lisa is a case in point. Her case is unusual in that her work history as a working daughter was very much shaped by family pressures. However, as pointed out earlier in this chapter, Bidayuh working daughters have a lot of leeway in choosing their own employment with minimum interference from their parents and elders. Elaine (coffee-shop waitress, aged 23) Elaine is the eighth in a large family of twelve children. After eight years at school, she stopped because she decided not to be dependent on her parents (‘… tidak mahu harap mak dan bapak’).

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Her first job at sixteen was as a domestic worker for her cousin who was a nurse. She spent three years there and by the time she left, she had a monthly wage of RM220. She had to look after two pre-schoolers aged five and three and an infant below one. It was exhausting as she often had to look after them at night as well, when her cousin was on night duty. When she left, she returned to her village and stayed for a year, helping her mother in the rice field. She next took a job in a small market town near her village as a coffee-shop waitress. Her monthly salary plunged to RM180. The hours were long. There were only three employees and it was difficult to get days off. They worked seven days a week. She finally left after six months. She moved to her third job in a photocopying shop in the same town. She suffered yet another drop in wages to RM150 a month. Customers would bring their documents for photocopying and she would operate the machine. It was often quiet and she left out of boredom after six months. She moved to Kuching and was in her fourth job when I interviewed her. She lived with her sister near her current place of work. Her sister is married to a tractor driver and lives in a squatter area with her husband and three children. As her employer provides meals, she buys her sister’s family incidentals and pays her own way in the household. She had been working as a coffee-shop waitress for over a year when I interviewed her. I am happy working here because it is not boring. There are different things that I have to do and I am always moving and doing something. With overtime, I can sometimes earn up to RM310 a month. I give my mother RM40 [a month]. I don’t give my father any because men are clever in finding money (… laki pandai cari duit).7 It is good to have our own money. We can go shopping and spend on ourselves. I like living in Kuching because our experience is wide and we are free to mix with others8 (… luas pengalaman dan bebas pergaulan). Although these women represent the more socially respectable rural–urban migrant wage earner, their narratives of the sociability of their environment, their sense of autonomy in earning and spending their own money and their rejection of factory work are reminiscent of sex workers in Murray’s study in Jakarta (Murray 1991: 125). These are attractions to a wide spectrum of women migrants and explain their acceptance of poor wages and stigma in the case of Murray’s sex workers. Monica (domestic worker, aged 21) Monica left school after six years of primary school. She was the eldest of four and her mother wanted her to help support her younger siblings. Her father, on the other hand, wanted her to continue her education. She was scolded so often by her mother that she decided to leave home at thirteen. She spent the next eight years working as a domestic worker in six different homes. Her first job


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only lasted three months. She was paid RM150 a month. She ran away as her employer was very demanding. In her second job, she was paid the same wage but the employer treated her better. However, she contracted malaria after two months and had to be hospitalised for a week. She decided to change jobs as her room in the house did not have any mosquito netting and she was afraid of getting malaria again. Her monthly wages moved up to RM170 in her third job and it lasted six months. Her parents needed her at a crucial stage of farming and she returned to the village for the next six months. A friend from the same village introduced her to her fourth job and she had a drop in wages to RM130 a month. She stayed for only two months as she and her friend (they both worked at the same place) did not get on with the employer. She subsequently returned to work for the employer in her third job and resumed her last pay there (RM170 a month). She was happy as she felt part of the family. She stayed for the next four years. Unfortunately, her employer who was a school teacher, passed away and her husband became the sole breadwinner. He was unable to afford Monica’s services and his parents moved in to help with the children and Monica lost her job. However, he introduced Monica to his friend and for the last three years, she has worked part-time there. She was paid RM200 a month for six mornings of household work a week. She also started to work an afternoon a week with another family for RM60 a month. She was able to take up these part-time jobs as she had moved in with her boyfriend, into free lodgings provided by his employer. Monica said: As domestic workers, we are sometimes accused of stealing and we also receive harsh scolding for breaking things. We apologise and explain that we didn’t do it deliberately but we are scolded just the same. We have to replace things that we break. I would like to try a different job but I am very shy and I don’t know what else I can do. I prefer to live out [not with the employer] and work office hours so that I don’t have to work from morning till night. Lisa (hotel receptionist, aged 24) Lisa is petite, pleasant and is third in a family of four children and has completed Form 5. Her two older sisters who are now housewives in the city were also educated up to Form 5. Her younger brother is the only one in the family who studied up to Form 6. Lisa started work when she was 18. At the time of the interview, she had worked in six different jobs in the past six years. According to her, her first job as a tour guide with the Sarawak Tourist Association was her best ever. She earned between RM700–1000 a month inclusive of tips and she worked for one and a half years. However, her parents disapproved of her extensive travelling as they felt that such jobs were not suitable for a woman and forced her to give it up. It was very painful for her to give up such an enjoyable job. She liked

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meeting people. She lamented the fact that she has not been able to reach the same level of earnings ever since. She was so upset with her parents that she went to live with her maternal grandmother in the village for two months. Her second job was that of a Carlsberg beer promoter and her monthly wage dropped to RM600. Her job involved travelling to smaller towns to promote beer in various restaurants and coffee-shops. Again her parents objected to her travelling. She was forced to give it up and her wages took another tumble in her third job as a sales assistant in a souvenir shop at the airport. She earned a monthly wage of RM400–500 but had to put in long hours in the evenings, especially if a flight was delayed. She stayed in that job for only four months and found her fourth job as a receptionist in a local hotel. Her pay took a dip to RM250 a month but she stuck it out for one year before moving to work as a receptionist in another local hotel. It was a bigger and more established hotel and her pay climbed up again to RM600 a month. Around that time, she married a Muslim. She worked there a year and decided to quit when she became pregnant and was unable to manage the 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift. She entered the work force again after the birth of her child and joined another local hotel as receptionist at her last pay of RM600. She had worked there for three months when I met her. Her son was two years old at the time of the interview and she was expecting her second child. A distant cousin runs a nursery of twenty five children with two assistants and Lisa’s child is there. She sees him only on her days off and in the evenings when she is working the morning shift. Child-care alone costs RM450 a month. After deductions for child-care, Lisa takes home RM150 a month. In spite of this, Lisa wants to remain in the work-force because of her abusive husband. She feels her participation in the labour market offers her some security for the future. The latest on Lisa is that she has moved yet again to become a receptionist at an international hotel. The women’s perception of wage work in this sector is not only coloured by their experiences but also by their knowledge of what awaits them in the village should they decide to return. In other words, whether paid work in the city is ‘easy’ or otherwise is often relative to farming and other unpaid work that they have to do in the village. We therefore have to understand what they say in the context of the requirements of their labour contributions in the village if they chose to stay.

Women’s and men’s work in the village In the agricultural cycle of shifting cultivation, the felling of trees is traditionally done by men while women clear the undergrowth. However, women nowadays also do the felling if necessary. The collection of jungle products during the felling and clearing of land for hill padi cultivation is mainly done by women. Various jungle leaves, fruits, shoots, firewood and rattan for making baskets are collected. Some of the baskets made are for their own use while others are sold for cash. The men construct paths to the farm while the women make the attap roofing for the farm hut. The slashed vegetation is allowed to dry for two to


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three weeks before being set on fire. Burning the fields occurs in the dry season of August and although the decision for setting the date for the burning rests with the men, the initial decision as to which land to farm is very much influenced by the women. Clearing of the farm occurs after the burn and both men and women participate in this arduous task. Debris that is not completely burnt is gathered into a pile and burnt again. Women and men then plant secondary crops such as cucumber, ginger, pumpkin, egg-plant in areas where ash accumulates. Women are also in charge of the different varieties of padi and vegetable seeds for planting. Padi planting occurs in late August or early September just before the arrival of the north–east monsoon in October. The men dibble and the women follow, sowing the padi seeds into the holes. After planting, weed control is the next task. Handweeding is done by women but increasingly, herbicides are used and this is done by both men and women. However, some women explain that usually men carry the heavy weedicide tank on their backs for spraying. Weeding starts from October through to January. No herbicide is used after that as it may destroy the ripening padi. Women continue to handweed between the secondary crops in the field. According to Gerrits, handweeding utilises 13.1 per cent of the labour required in hill padi cultivation while herbicidal weed control utilises only 9 per cent of the labour requirement (Gerrits 1994: 216). In other words, women do more of the back-breaking task of weed control. Padi harvesting occurs in March or April and as the padi ripens, the men improve the farm paths in order to facilitate access to the farms as they have to carry heavy loads of padi on their backs. Women collect rattan and bamboo for making baskets and mats in readiness for the harvest. Every household member participates in the harvest. After the major harvest, women return to harvest whatever is left behind accidentally or has not matured at the time of the main harvest. Some secondary crops are also harvested at that time. Traditionally, there are many steps in padi processing. Men are involved in the first part of treading the padi with their feet in order to dislodge the grains and the work of sieving, winnowing and drying the padi grains is done by women. However, Gerrits notes that there is no longer a strict gender division of labour in the different stages of padi processing (Gerrits 1994: 202). Guarding the drying padi grains from pets and pests is usually the work of the very old, the very young, the pregnant and new mothers. Pounding the rice in order to dehusk the padi is definitely in the women’s domain. The most labour intensive stages of hill padi cultivation are harvesting, undergrowth clearing and handweeding, in that order. Given the gender division of labour described above, it is not surprising that Geddes (1954: 81) concluded, ‘Although it is the basic concern of both, farming is even more an occupation of women than of men.’ They are not only the mainstay of their farms, rural Bidayuh women both young and old are mainly responsible for all household work like cooking, washing and child-rearing. Some men would cook, wash dishes and their own clothes and take care of the children, but they are in the minority in the Bidayuh

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village. These domestic chores were often only done by men when their wives were ill. The arduous tasks of collecting firewood and carrying water were also the domain of Bidayuh women. Thus, women rose early in the morning between 3:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. in order to do the housework, feed the chicken and pigs, cook the family’s morning meal and pack lunch before going to work in the fields between 6:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. It must be added here that women were also responsible for preparing food for the poultry. They would return from their farms between 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. only to resume domestic work once home. Older women and older children performed child-care in order to release the labour of other women in the household for agricultural work. Although productive work in the fields was seen as having higher priority than domestic chores, women were still the ones who were responsible for the latter. A woman leader in the DBNA pointed out that although the Bidayuh customary laws (adat) were egalitarian by virtue of women’s crucial contribution to food production and the household, in practice there was great gender disparity in Bidayuh society. Men were considered the heads of households but women were the main incomeearners when the prices of conventional cash crops were poor, as they sold jungle products, vegetables and secondary crops in the markets in Kuching and other nearby market towns. The traders in the farmers’ markets and Sunday markets in Kuching are predominantly Bidayuh women. I disagree … that there is no sex discrimination in Bidayuh society. The written adat may say so but practice is contrary to the adat… The Bidayuh who trade their goods at Sunday markets are mainly women making many of them the main bread-winner of the family. The time women spend in housework and in farming is considerable. (Drebra 1993: 6–7) There is little written about the domestic work performed by the various individuals in the rural agrarian household. Geddes (1954: 81) however, provides us with a glimpse. He reported that young adolescent girls had to look after the household’s poultry, releasing them from their cages in the morning and putting them back in the evenings. They also fed the pigs in the evenings. They dried the padi, helped to pound it and gathered firewood and edible ferns, leaves and shoots from the jungle. They also collected large green leaves for wrapping cooked rice for farmers who took their lunch to the fields. They caught small prawns, fish, snails and frogs in the river and helped with the cooking, and with the care of younger siblings. A young boy who had no older sister had the same chores but as Geddes pointed out, There is, however, a difference between days spent by boys and those spent by girls on infant care … In the case of a girl, such a day gives less opportunity for relaxation, for she usually still has to help with domestic duties, such as drying the padi. In the case of a boy, an infant is often merely a restriction on the scope of his play … The lot of boys who do have sisters


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old enough to take care of the younger children is an easy one. Most of their days are taken up in idleness and play. To be born a boy in Land Dayak culture is usually a passport to a carefree childhood. (ibid: 81) As for adult single women, their labour contribution to the household was no different from that of married women except that they did less child-care. Given the harsh and demanding work required of Bidayuh women in the village, it is not surprising that paid work in the city is viewed as comparatively ‘easy.’ For a start, single women (apart from those in domestic work) who live in lodgings provided by their employers have far less domestic responsibilities in comparison to their counterparts in the village. Similarly, married women employed in the city enjoy maternity leave9 and therefore have more time off work than their mothers in the village. Although Geddes noted that child-bearing offered the only brief respite for rural women from the hard work in the fields (ibid: 81), it was often of a short duration. Lydia’s comparison of herself with her mother in the village illustrates this point: My mother does everything my father does but not necessarily the other way around. Both my father and husband will only cook, wash dishes and look after the children when their wives have just given birth but normally they don’t. My mother had the luxury of a seven-day confinement and I had 44 days.10 The women that I interviewed were therefore, in the main, accepting of their poor work conditions. When I asked them what strategies they used in order to overcome problems that they encountered at work, many mentioned ‘don’t get involved,’ ‘just bear with it,’ ‘be patient,’ ‘keep quiet when towkay [boss] scolds,’ ‘ignore the problem,’ ‘just pray in our rooms,’ ‘scream at the children,’ ‘just quit.’ Only one woman mentioned speaking directly to the person concerned and another said that she consulted her supervisor. Their non-confrontational stance is a reflection of their vulnerability as they are unprotected by unions, are atomised and isolated in their different work places and have few opportunities to develop a sense of workers’ rights. In addition, I found that the women in this study did not have entrenched identities as workers. They did not expect to find employment fulfilling and paid work was merely a means to earning a wage. Few would be enamoured by dirty, repetitive and lowly paid work that does not have a career path. Instead, it is the experience of city living and the autonomy that a wage afforded, however limited, which was more powerful than the employment experience per se. Not only is this because they are the first generation of female wage earners from their households and employment is a new dimension in their lives, but also, because they have a pragmatic approach to paid work. Although some women would like to leave this sector of work for something better, a lack of paper qualifications and a limited job market means that many have little choice but to stay. Magaret

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who works in a retail garden shop and earns RM450 a month is on the look-out for a better paying job. I would like to work office hours but my choice is limited. I don’t have any qualifications. I only finished nine years of schooling. If I have the chance, I would like to be a tailor or hair-dresser.11 Up to this point, the employment experiences as described in this chapter affect all women regardless of their positions in the life-course. However, the paths of the three groups of women in this study begin to diverge when they make a decision as to whether to stay or to withdraw from the labour market as they marry and have children. I use the word ‘decision’ with caution given that these women occupy the lower socio-economic strata and in the absence of a welfare state, the decision that they make can only be a very constrained one. Once again this is a modern decision as it is a decision that their mothers in the village never had to make, as they had to farm throughout their productive lives. It is also a gendered decision as it would not even occur to men to withdraw from the labour market. It is precisely because women’s employment is shaped profoundly by marriage and child-rearing that this research is set up to study single women and women with children. However, the latter group diverges once again, with those remaining in paid work and those opting to withdraw from the labour market. The next three chapters will look at women in the different positions in the life-course and the choices that they have at each phase of their lives.

1 Squatter housing where some of the women lived (single dwellings)

2 Double storey and multiple households

3 Stacking goods in a mini-market

5 Working in a photocopying shop

4 Housekeeping in a local hotel

(a)

(b)

6 Waiting (a) at tables in an eating mall and (b) for customers outside a souvenir shop

(a)

(b)

7 The work of (a) a domestic worker and (b) a petrol pump attendant

8 Dish-washing behind busy coffee shops in the evening

7

Sex and salaries Single women migrants in the city1

In this chapter, I discuss the choices that single women migrants have now that they are in the urban labour market. Unlike married women, withdrawal from wage work is not an option for them as it is the raison d’etre for their migration into the city in the first place. Instead, they can choose to marry or not to marry, and who to marry, if they decide on the course of marriage. This is a choice that their village mothers did not have as village women gained adult status through marriage and child-birth. This will be elaborated later in this chapter. However, with wage work in the city, single women migrants are self-supporting and marriage is no longer a necessity but a choice. In looking at this issue, I draw upon the work of historians documenting the changes in the lives of single women urban migrants in nineteenth century Europe. Comparison between nineteenth century Europe and late twentieth century Sarawak is relevant because women in both instances were/are facing massive transformative forces although the structural forces effecting changes in Europe at that time was wrought by the industrial revolution. In both instances, waves of young women from peasant households migrate to the city for employment. However, it would appear that the long drawn out changes in the last century in Europe have somehow been compressed and accelerated in the context of late twentieth century Sarawak.2 Comparisons will be made with other south-east Asian countries wherever possible, although most studies of working daughters in the region have tended to focus on their employment experiences and natal families rather than on marriage. As in nineteenth century Europe, late twentieth century Sarawak has a large rural population which lives off the land. Just as members of a peasant household in Europe had clearly defined duties based on their age, gender and position in the family, so does a rural Bidayuh household. In what Tilly and Scott (1987) call the family economy in pre-industrial Europe, daughters who were old enough were sent out to work as agricultural labourers and domestic servants. However, the difference is that young rural Bidayuh women are not sent out by their parents and do not hire themselves out as farm hands. In this study, they entered the personal services sector instead. Unlike English and French parents in that earlier time, Bidayuh parents do not choose their daughters area of employment nor do they have much control over their daughters’ wages3 although there are some exceptions. In one case among the women I interviewed, Jane

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had more than a third of her monthly wages deducted and put into a bank account which was directly accessed by her father. In another case, Monica did not remit any money to her parents but gave something under 20 per cent of her monthly wages directly to her school-going sisters.4 When discussing the changing family form during the first and second industrial revolutions in Europe, Seccombe (1993) argued that family forms and the mode of production are closely enmeshed and the transformation of the former will follow closely on the heels of the latter. In other words, a certain mode of production will facilitate the reproduction of a certain family form while impeding the development of others. He pointed out that the capitalist mode of production severed the bonds between adult children and their parents as the individuated wage could not sustain anything more than a nuclear family of parents and their children. Seccombe further stressed that the process of proletarianisation meant that those who did not stand to inherit any productive property or a father’s trade had to sell their labour as free workers in the labour market. Thus, the young left home to find employment, spent their wages as they liked, married a spouse of their own choice and lived wherever they could afford. In this way, familial bonds with one’s natal family eroded over time. Tilly and Scott (1987) on the other hand, were interested in the impact of industrialisation in Britain and France on women’s paid work. Although they acknowledged that changes in the mode of production wrought important changes in women’s wage labour and the family structure, they were circumspect as to the speed and the extent of those changes. They argued in an earlier essay that family structures in urban areas were more a continuation of rural patterns rather than a disjuncture (Scott and Tilly 1982). They pointed out that the transformation of family relationships in the context of structural changes was more gradual and complex and involved the adaptation of traditional values in new situations. Traditional families then, operating on long-held values, sent their daughters to take advantage of increased opportunities generated by industrialisation and urbanisation. Industrial development did not affect all areas of a given country at the same time. Rather, the process can best be illustrated by an image of ‘islands of development’ within an underdeveloped sea, islands which drew population to them from the … less developed areas. The values of the less developed sector were imported into the developing sector and there were extended, adapted, and only gradually transformed. (ibid: 49) Women in different parts of Europe had different experiences at different times of the changes wrought by the massive structural changes in the late nineteenth century. Tilly and Scott argue that an evolutionary model of change which assumes an inexorable structural force pushing all women along a single path must be abandoned. This discussion of the gradual erosion of family ties and the impact of the individuated wage in the city on the autonomy of young migrants is relevant to

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the discussion of the rising number of illegitimate births in the hundred years between 1750 and 1850 in many European cities (ibid: 59). According to Scott and Tilly, there were several reasons for this. First, the loneliness and isolation in the city added to the pressure to find a spouse. Second, as many of the young women at that time were in domestic service, marriage was an avenue of escape allowing them to become mistresses of their own homes. As premarital sex for women was premised on a promise of marriage, irresponsible suitors meant single motherhood for abandoned women. Social mores which dictated courtship behaviour in the village were not enforceable in the urban centres and many women were caught unawares when they first arrived in the city. The increasing numbers of sexually vulnerable women in the city, removed from family protection and assistance, resulted in a sharp rise in illegitimacy. This, Scott and Tilly argue, is yet another example of the persistence of old cultural values in new situations (ibid: 57). However, Shorter provides a contradictory view (1975: 258–61). He argues that the increase in illegitimate births in that period of European history was a consequence of dramatic changes in values. According to Shorter, young wage-earning women were exposed to individualistic and hedonistic values in the city and rebelled against parental authority. The sudden rupture of parental control and guidance gave the young women in the city the opportunity to find self-expression through romantic love and sexual encounters. Where parents and village elders previously supervised the choice of eligible marriage partners, courtship, betrothal, marriage and the setting up of a new household, young women in the city were left unsupervised. They chose their marriage partners through ‘new’ notions of romantic love rather than the prospect of land inheritance, and sexual ‘liberation’ resulted in illegitimate births. These discussions have relevance to my study because although there are no statistics on illegitimate births in Sarawak, the sexual exploitation of young single women migrants has been a major concern. The Ministry of Social Development and Urbanisation commissioned a state-wide study on single mothers in December 2000. In this study, three interviewees became pregnant as single working women and were deserted by their men. The interview material in my study, and my long contact with Bidayuh women in this sector of work, has led me to agree with the arguments of Scott and Tilly (1982). As they pointed out, the peasant values that young women brought with them to the city were reflected in the types of employment that they chose. The wage work which they entered was not a radical departure from work that women traditionally did in the home in the past. This is particularly so in the types of work performed by Bidayuh women in the personal services sector in Kuching. The sexual behaviour of young Bidayuh working women in Kuching was frequently more a consequence of village values operating in new situations than the outcome of drastic changes in values as a result of new found freedoms. In order to better understand this, I will now return to the rural Bidayuh village and discuss courtship and marriage patterns there.

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Courtship and marriage in the village Although match-making by parents was common in the past, Geddes’ study of a Bidayuh village called Mentu Tapuh in the early 1950s5 provided some more recent insights into the courtship pattern of the Bidayuh. According to Geddes (1954: 12), young men often looked for potential spouses from villages other than their own. A young man might visit a friend or kin in another village during a festival in the hope of finding a wife. Sometimes he might be forced to spend a night in another village on his way back to his own village after a visit to the bazaar and meet a girl in that neighbouring village. If he decides to court her, he would find an excuse to be in the village more and more frequently and might eventually stay in the village with a relative or even with the girl’s family. It would not be difficult to find villagers who would accept him into their household, as additional labour was always welcomed. Thus, a suitor’s village of origin and family background would be known and his intentions tacitly understood in the girl’s village. A young woman at a marriageable age of seventeen or eighteen would have her own bed and mosquito net, although young children often slept with their parents under the same mosquito net. Her bed was placed near a door and parents sleeping in the same room would usually know when a young man visited to court their daughter at night. After many frequent visits, he would be asked about his intentions regarding marriage. In this way, pre-marital sexual activity between single people was tolerated in the village as marriage was expected to take place, and a woman would only have a sustained affair with a man that she intended to marry. A man intending to marry a girl would give her, through her father, gifts of a sarong, a piece of cloth, a pair of earrings and a ring. If these were accepted, the marriage was approved and the man could sleep with the girl at night. In other words, premarital sex was legitimised by the suitor’s promise of marriage. In a village, such a promise was not easily broken as the girl’s parents and village elders could be counted on to enforce the customary laws (adat).6 According to Geddes (1954), in a Bidayuh village, pre-marital sex and adultery were not regarded as very serious offences if pregnancy did not result. Men caught sleeping with single girls were fined by the girls’ parents. Sometimes the fine was extracted by the village headman. If pregnancy occurred, the sanction was marriage. If the man was already married, the man would be fined for adultery. Pregnancy out of wedlock was a serious offence as it was believed that it would bring disaster and bad luck to the whole community. Parents of illegitimate children were shamed because of this, although the children bore no stigma themselves. The father of the child was also expected to pay for the maintenance of the mother and child. If the woman refused to name the father of her child, she would be fined. Although the customary laws concerning courtship and marriage remain largely the same, courtship patterns have changed. Nowadays, boy meets girl at village parties where an amplifier to play loud music is set up in the village ‘square’ for discotheque type dancing. All this would occur under the watchful

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eyes of everyone in the village. For Christians, Bible study and choir practice provide additional avenues for meeting potential partners. Courtship among young adults these days would include visits to the nearest bazaar, picnics at nearby waterfalls and beaches and chats on the verandah of the girl’s house. The courtship period is normally short and lasts from a few months to a year. However, a pregnancy will herald a quick marriage. Indeed, it has been said that such a method has been used to circumvent parental objections to a potential partner.

Bidayuh weddings – then and now Geddes also reported that at the time of his study, there were no religious rites accompanying a marriage (Geddes 1954: 46). The bride and the bridegroom’s friends and relatives gathered in the household which they would join in marriage. Village elders and the fathers of the bride and bridegroom would instruct the couple on the rights and responsibilities of marriage. Some rice wine (tuak) would be passed around to enliven the gathering and the marriage was thus publicly acknowledged (ibid: 47). The village weddings of the women that I interviewed retained the same simplicity. They were still simple affairs. An exchange of rings is usual but sometimes even that is dispensed with. The bridegroom frequently gives the bride small items of gold jewellery such as a pair of earrings, bracelet, necklace and a piece of cloth or sarong. Other gifts included a token sum (RM50–100) to the bride or to her father and a sarong for the bride or to her mother. There are no hard or fast rules. Sometimes there are no gifts, just an exchange of rings. However, a small gathering in the village is the norm. It serves as a public announcement and acknowledgment of the marriage. If the couple come from two different villages, those who can afford two receptions will have one in each village, but normally only one is held. The expenses of the reception are normally shared between the bride and the groom but the partner and his/her parents who host the wedding reception will pay more. One woman said that they had a ‘cowboy wedding’ (kahwin cowboy) because they did not have a reception in the village but only registered their marriage in the district office. The simple Bidayuh weddings mentioned by the women in my study are in contrast to the Malay wedding ceremonies in Rembau as documented by Stivens (1996), where the level of consumerism in the village is explicitly demonstrated in the gifts that the groom gives to the bride. They include all manner of modern consumer goods as well as the paraphernalia of the modern woman (ibid: 187) and cosmetics, handbags and platform shoes are mentioned. The simplicity of the Bidayuh wedding in contrast to the lavish Malay wedding in Rembau is again evidence of the adaptation of old values and customs in the face of new contexts. Many of the Bidayuh women I interviewed express very pragmatic views about lavish weddings. Jocelyn, a working mother said: If we have a proper wedding [registered and legally recognised], we can also be happy. We don’t need to go to the restaurant or hotel. A big wedding can

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak also end in divorce. (Kalau kahwin betul-betul, bagus juga. Tak payah pergi restoran, hotel. Kahwin besar-besaran, kita boleh cerai juga.)

In early nineteenth century industrialising Europe, cohabitation was a common phenomenon and often marriage occurred only after child-bearing. As a marriage licence and the pastor’s fee were expensive, many working class couples replaced the church wedding with informal marriage rites in front of a small circle of family and friends (Seccombe 1993: 52). There are parallels between the informal marriage proceedings amongst the working class in nineteenth century Europe with the marriage customs as practised by the Bidayuh women in my study.

Bidayuh households in the village According to Geddes (1954: 35), in Bidayuh villages the most important economic unit was the household where land and property were held in common. He pointed out that there was no widespread kinship system above the household level. Any village level groupings were temporary and co-operation existed for specific tasks. In Geddes’ study of Mentu Tapuh in the early 1950s, nuclear families consisting of the conjugal couple and their children were found to be in the minority (Geddes 1954: 36). Instead, the majority were extended families which included aunts, uncles, in-laws, spouses of siblings and grandchildren of the conjugal couple. Forty years later when Gerrits did his study in another Bidayuh village, nuclear families were found to be in the majority (Gerrits 1994: 111). Perhaps it can be concluded that fragmentation of extended households into nuclear households in the agrarian rural economy began with the individualisation of landholdings and monetisation through cash cropping, and has been accelerating this century. In this study, the majority (70 per cent) of working mothers and housewives live in nuclear families. Single women have been excluded from this calculation because they mainly live in accommodation provided by their employers. There is no fixed rule as to which household a newly married couple would join. If one of the spouse was an only child, they would join her/his household as they would inherit an established household. The youngest son or daughter had a duty to care for his/her aged parents and that would also determine the household in which they would live after marriage. Apart from such cases, they were free to choose from either parents’ households. The general principle of Bidayuh inheritance is that the son/daughter who lives with his/her parents and looks after them in their old age will inherit the family home. Even if the family home was built with remittance from migrant members of the family, they have no inheritance rights to the house if they live in the city and do not look after their aged parents. In addition, [A] son or daughter who marries may not use the land of his or her parents’ line until such a time as a child is born from the marriage. The effect is that

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a person who marries into a village is bound to the household of the parents-in-law, as a junior partner in a co-operative team which works, eats and lives together, because he cannot get any place to make his own separate farm. Thus the system of land tenure protects the integrity of the community by keeping a new-comer on parole until he has actually mixed his blood with the community stream. (Geddes 1954: 12) Having children was therefore very important as the couple could then set up their own household and become full members of a village community. When a newly married couple joined a household, it was merely a transitional stage. The household became a nuclear household once again when the couple moved out after the birth of their first child. In other words, single women in the village had to marry and become mothers in order to achieve adult status and economic security.

Sexuality and young women migrants One significant difference between the Bidayuh women in this study and the factory daughters in many other countries in the region is that the former are remote from parental control. In city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong, women commuted daily from their homes (Salaff 1995, Lim 1983). In Indonesia (Wolf 1992) many factories were located in close proximity to villages and women were bussed to their work-places. When this was not possible, the women either lived in hostels provided by their employers or took out boarding rooms in nearby industrialised villages. Most of the single women in this study either lived with kin in the city or in rooms above their work-places provided by their employers. Many returned to their villages only once a month, usually after pay-day. Thus, they were able to manage their own money. The migration of single women to the city for wage work has also upset the courtship patterns of old. With the exception of domestic workers who work in isolation from others, most of the young women worked amongst their peers in coffee-shops, petrol stations, child-care centres, restaurants and hotels. On Sundays and other days off, young female migrants would go out together with their work-mates to meet kin and friends from the same village for a meal and a jaunt in town. Churches on Sundays, the museum gardens, the Reservoir Park, the Waterfront and eateries and shops around the bus terminals in the city centre were favourite places for socialising. Young women met men from different ethnic communities,7 their family and employment background unknown and unfamiliar to them. The departure of women from the village also meant that their sexual activity could no longer be monitored by parents and village elders. Although living in the city away from family and earning their own wages gave single women autonomy, the flip side was that they were also vulnerable. Pre-marital sex for young women migrants continued as in the past to be an expression of marital intent or of anticipation of an impending union. Few young women would be

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reckless enough to start an affair with a man without first eliciting a promise of marriage. However, with greater labour mobility and anonymity in the city, many men deserted their pregnant girlfriends on discovery of their condition and there were no parents or village elders to force a marriage or to mete out punishment. Although there are no statistics on illegitimate births in Sarawak, it is common to hear of migrant women returning home to the village with fatherless children. City life is exciting but it also evokes fear and anxiety in the women. Stivens had similar findings in her study of Muslim women in Rembau. She wrote of ‘the ideological conflict [for village folks] about the release of young labour to the wickedness of the city and the world and the fears about unsupervised, moden women’ (1996: 170). Low wages meant that young single mothers had no choice but to return to live for a spell with their parents in the village. Although divorce carries no stigma in the village, having illegitimate children does. The child bears no shame but the mother does. As mentioned earlier, three women interviewed in this study became single mothers. One single woman became involved with a married Iban man who had a wife and children in the village. Another single woman was living with her Iban boyfriend at the time of the interview. His family disapproved of their relationship but could not enforce any sanctions. However, not all such prenuptial cohabitation ended in illegitimate children, and many do eventually marry. In fact, pregnancy would trigger a public announcement of their union in the village of either partner. One housewife said: I was two months’ pregnant when my husband brought me back to his village to meet his parents. There were no exchange of rings or gifts. We merely had a small thanksgiving meal (makan selamat) and invited his relatives. Thus, the context in which young Bidayuh meet and select a partner is very different from the 1950s. However, it must be pointed out that in the village, even now, sexuality is collectively managed by the elders of the village (including the parents) and customary laws are administered in an even-handed manner to both women and men. In the city, courtship has less direct parental and community supervision and women no longer enjoy the protection of egalitarian customary laws. They are at the mercy of impersonal multi-ethnic communities that do not have an understanding of the operations governing sexual liaisons in Bidayuh villages. Women therefore have greater autonomy but this also has its attendant risks. If urban single motherhood either through divorce or abandonment is on the rise, women’s participation in the labour market becomes one of necessity8 rather than individual choice because in the long run, many would return to wage work in the city.

Marriage partner selection Low wages, mounting living costs in the city and their new found independence have fostered pragmatic values amongst single women. They send some money

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home but also save and spend money on themselves. They learn the value of money and the difficulties of not having any. Thus the criteria for an eligible marriage partner have also changed. A man who is a good hunter and an industrious farmer would be favoured in the village, while in the city, it is his earning capacity that would be a desirable trait. A single woman knows that marriage to a man with a steady income is not only her best escape route from a lifetime of poorly paid employment but her future living standard depends on her husband’s occupation. All the single women (with the exception of one who did not want to get married) say that they have no wish to marry farmers but prefer men with money earning potential. The most important criterion is a regular income which would guarantee financial security. Elaine, a single woman remarked, ‘My mother said that I should look for a man with a salary and not a farmer.’ Josephine, who is in her thirties and engaged to be married to a technician professed, ‘I will never choose to marry a farmer.’ A working mother said that she would advise her daughter to go for a man with ‘… enough income, a fixed job and not just casual employment (… cukup pendapatan, kerja tetap dan bukan kerja mainmain).’ Nancy, another working mother added: It would be good if one’s husband had a secure job with a pension.9 He could work continuously without stopping until he reached retirement. (Bagus jika laki ada kerja tetap, ada pencen. Bekerja berturut-turut tanpa berhenti, sampai pencen). It must be pointed out that marrying well is not the only aspiration the women had for their daughters. On the contrary, all the women who had daughters said that they want their girls to succeed academically and have white/pink collar jobs, if not professions. I did not interview many men, but one of the husbands I interviewed explained that he had enrolled his daughter on a diploma course in computer programming because such a qualification would enhance her chances in the marriage market. He felt she was likely to marry someone who had higher, if not the same, qualifications as her. In contrast to this husband’s view of paper qualifications, Agnita, a working mother, saw them as quite a different kind of insurance: I told my daughters to study hard and get good jobs because without education, you cannot survive. Nobody can steal education from you. Others can steal your husband, but your knowledge and education (ilmu dan pelajaran), nobody can steal. If someone else attracts your husband, you can still survive. These gendered views speak volumes about the vulnerability that women feel and their need for independence from men. It also shows that women want a marriage for their daughters which is different from their own. Barbara at eighteen married a widower twenty years her senior. He has an Indian father and a Chinese mother and works as a clerk in a government statutory

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body. He has two sons by his first wife. Barbara has a baby boy and wants more children but her husband said that he is old and refused. She suffers daily verbal abuse from her adolescent step-son and her husband spends almost the entire weekend playing mahjong in his friend’s house. She is unhappy and regrets marrying him. She has this to say concerning the selection of marriage partners in the village and in the town: In the village, marriages are better because spouses are nearer in age and they love one another (… mereka dekat umur dan sama suka sama). In town, we want to look for someone who works in an office, a stable job and income. Look at me. I ended up with a man twice my age and someone I don’t love. Jill, a working mother commented, ‘People used to marry for love. Nowadays, people marry for money.’ Agnita added: Marriage is very dangerous nowadays if you don’t know how to deal with it. Women are keen to get men with money especially when they [the women themselves] don’t have good jobs. To marry for money and not for love, as the interview material indicates, reflects an economic pragmatism which disputes any notion that romantic love was the new self-expression of young female migrants to the city. This is in contrast to Wolf’s study of factory daughters in Java where she found her respondents marrying ‘quickly on the basis of sexual attraction and flirtation’ (Wolf 1992: 216). One possible reason for this is that marriage for rural Javaneses women were typically arranged by their parents and were viewed as economic partnership more than romantic liaison. In South China, young factory women migrated from their villages in order to evade marriages arranged by their parents (Lee 1998: 77). Sexual attraction as a basis for marriage and factory daughters’ choice of their own marriage partners reflect an increase in their decisionmaking power. In the case of Indonesia, this is an outcome of their economic contribution to the household.

Rejection of marriage Most Bidayuh women choose the course of marriage. However, some working daughters resist marriage. I encountered several domestic workers10 in their late thirties who have chosen to remain single. Working Javanese daughters on the other hand, do not see such a ‘choice’. To marry or not to marry, is a nonquestion, according to Wolf because marriage is almost universal in Java (ibid: 218). Parents marry off their daughters early as a way to control their sexuality. Among the thirteen single women I interviewed, only one, Cindy, said that she had no wish to marry. Cindy had been a domestic worker for her entire

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employment history. At thirty-nine she was the eldest in her family. Three of her sisters who were in their thirties were also single which is unusual. She explained why she wanted to remain single: I don’t want to marry because as a single person, I can enjoy myself if I have my wages. (Saya tak mahu kahwin. Bujang dapat enjoy jika ada gaji.) If one marries the wrong man, for example a gambler, life will be worse. Nowadays there are many divorces and separations. After one or two children, they will divorce. Listening to the sad stories of others, I’d rather not marry and enjoy my freedom.

Conclusion As with the working daughters in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore (Salaff 1990) and South China (Lee 1998), women can choose whom they marry as opposed to the arranged marriages in the days of their grandmothers. The women are also getting married at older ages partly through parental encouragement in order to lengthen a daughter’s years of monetary contribution to the natal household (Salaff 1990: 123). However, in this chapter, I argue that single women enjoyed a brief window of time and space for self-indulgence but they confronted their new found freedom with a certain measure of ambivalence. When women contemplated marriage, they approached the process of mate selection with pragmatism and chose marriage partners who, they hoped, would enable them to leave paid work. However, as we will see in the chapters that follow, marriage and children bring with them a totally different set of decisions.

8

Marriage, money and men Working mothers and their households

In the previous chapter, we looked at the choices open to single women. We also saw how women approach partner selection: they hoped to find a husband whose earning capacity would allow them to escape the drudgery of their paid work. Given that the women in this chapter and the next have in the main, married men with steady incomes, the next question was whether they now had what they desired and why some were still in paid work. I wanted to know the meaning marriage had for those who had already embarked on this path. They were the majority of the women I interviewed and I asked what happened to them after marriage. Some women have remained in the work-force while others have left. I wanted to know the reasons behind these choices. For those who remain employed, I was interested to know whether earning a wage in a monetised economy transforms women’s relationships to the men in their lives and consequently shifts the gender contract between women and men. Pfau-Effinger uses the concept of a gender contract as opposed to gender relations which she sees as being more deterministic: … the concept of gender contract emphasises more explicitly the contribution of all actors, including women themselves, in the reproduction and changing of structures. The gender contract concept thus implies greater reference to the action dimension than the gender relations concept, which implies greater stress on structural factors. (Pfau-Effinger 1993: 389) Not all the issues of paid work and marriage would be addressed in this chapter. Markers of marital equity such as the domestic division of labour and the management of household finances would be discussed in the next chapter where comparisons were made between working wives and housewives. Here I look at the reasons behind working mothers’ employment trajectories, their views on marriage and the question of autonomy.

Paid work and life-course squeezes It was not so much marriage but children which were the deciding factor in the lives of the women in this chapter. It was very common for a child to follow

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quickly after marriage. The average number of surviving children each of these women had was three (range: 1–6). Although I did not ask them questions concerning fertility and family planning, one reason that I deduced from my questions on the preferred sex of children, was that children were viewed as important physical and financial supports for old-age. Since there were (and still is to this day) no adequate, affordable child-care services in the city, women often had no choice but to withdraw from the labour force during the years of child-bearing and child-rearing. In the village, there was no disruption to mothers’ productive work in the fields, as women could combine agricultural work with child-rearing. Women worked flexible hours on the farm and also carried their young ones with them to the fields. In other words, they could control the time and pace of their work and incorporate child-rearing into their routine. In the village, there was also a support network of kin to draw upon for assistance. In the city, without the assistance of kin, the stance of the government as to who should be responsible for child-care was a crucial determinant to women’s ability to participate in the labour market. The state views child-care as an entirely private, individual affair and there is no provision to enable women to combine paid employment and child-care. Even in the economic boom years of the early 1990s, when there was an acute labour shortage in Malaysia, women were merely expected to juggle their multiple roles as mothers, wives and workers. When foreign domestic workers (particularly Indonesian and Filipina) were hired in order to release professional, middle-class Malaysian mothers into the work-force, the government imposed a levy on their employment. There is no comprehensive tax incentive for employers to provide child-care facilities, although the Ministry of Industrial Development has a special Industrial Building Allowance (IBA) for the purpose of encouraging manufacturers to provide accommodation and child-care facilities for their workers. Thus, the provision of child-care in Malaysia is minimal, haphazard and ad hoc. As affordable child-care is almost non-existent for low paid women in Sarawak, they either have to stay at home to look after the children themselves or enlist the help of kin and friends for child-care in order that they may enter wage work. When they do get paid work, it is often near their home or else involves hours that conflict least with their domestic arrangements. With their lack of qualifications and in the employment context of Sarawak, wage work options for these women are limited to low skill, poorly paid work. Fifteen (63 per cent) of the working mothers interviewed, entered paid work when they were single and left the work-force when they married and had young children: their participation in the labour market took second place to their duties at home. Three of the working mothers had had uninterrupted employment since they started wage work as single women because they relied on extended family members, neighbours and informal networks to provide child-care. Six working mothers had never been employed prior to their marriage and they entered the labour market only after the arrival of their children. They had married straight after school. There are no labour market statistics in Sarawak to indicate the percentage of married women who are employed and the sectors of employment

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where they work. I therefore do not know if women’s employment in the formal sector of Sarawak generally has one life-course peak or two, with women working after they leave school and again when their children are school-age. In Salaff’s study of Chinese women in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, she found that women’s labour force participation pattern is single peaked (Salaff 1990: 115). Chinese newly weds often live with the husband’s parents and new daughters-in-law would be asked to quit their job for housework so that other young unmarried daughters could continue their employment. This is particularly so for women who do not earn enough to justify paying someone else for child-care. This is contrary to the findings in Java where Wolf reported that motherhood did not necessarily push women out of the labour market. In rural Central Java, factory women were not migrants. Married women lived with their parents and continued factory employment, as factories were located nearby their villages thus allowing families to take care of children (Wolf 1992: 232). The majority of working mothers in my study migrated as single women for paid work in the city, then married and stayed on in the city. Only a minority lived with their parents in villages on the outskirts of Kuching. They therefore did not have a network of kin at hand for child-care. Those who were unable to hold down full-time jobs because of domestic responsibilities entered the informal sector of lowly-paid, part-time house-cleaning and laundry work. The story of Sue is an example of this. Sue (cleaner, aged 45) Sue lived with her family in a squatter settlement about six kilometres from the centre of the city. Wooden planks were thrown on the soggy ground to make a path for pedestrians and motorcycles. Her house was on stilts. Old wooden seats were left on the outer verandah, which also acted as a laundry drying area. The zinc roof over the verandah was rusty and leaky and patched over with bits and pieces of thin plywood, collected from discarded boxes and crates. Although the roof of the house was low, it was cool because it was surrounded by coconut, banana and papaya trees. A bouquet of brightly painted flowers made from tincan cutouts greeted visitors above the main entrance. The living area was spacious and two settees were arranged at right angles against the wall. Two bedrooms opened onto this area. A stand-fan provided a cooling breeze on hot days. Separated by a low wooden wall, the cooking and dining area ran the width of the house. When I arrived for the interview, Sue was at the market and her youngest son was cooking some noodles with the radio blaring. I decided to sit on the verandah as it was cooler and this attracted the notice of her neighbours who gave me sidelong glances. At 45, Sue had five surviving children, three of whom are married. She worked as a cleaner in an office for RM300 a month. Her husband drove an ESSO petrol tanker and earned RM700 a month. He also worked as a gardener, cutting grass and pruning hedges during the weekends, which added an extra RM400–500 to his monthly income. Sue also received another RM100–200


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a month from the three older children. Sue’s most educated daughter completed sixth form (although she did not pass the examinations). She was married to a Malay immigration officer and to Sue’s chagrin was now a housewife at a border-post. Sue explained: It is a waste that she has schooling and does not work (Sayang dia bersekolah tapi tidak kerja). I gave her schooling. She should work but her husband does not allow her to.1 (Saya kasi bersekolah, dia mesti kerja tapi laki tidak suruh). However, this daughter was most constant in giving her money. I have given Sue’s own description of her work history. I think she does a better job than I can, given her complex employment history in numerous part-time jobs with multiple households. My husband’s mother is Bidayuh and his father is Chinese. When we married, we lived in the village until the first two children were born. Later my husband found a job with a company that sells timber, sand and cement. The towkay supplied everything. I came here [Kuching] with one pot, clothes in a bag and one gunny sack of rice (Saya turun sini, bawa satu periuk, baju dalam beg dan satu guni beras). He drove a five-ton lorry and worked for the same company for six years. After that, he became a driver for Telecoms. He worked there for three years and as it was a temporary job, he switched over to Sime Darby where he worked for the next twelve years. He was retrenched and found this present job through a friend. I only started to work when he started at Sime Darby in 1986. My children at that time were fourteen, thirteen, twelve and seven. The youngest wasn’t born yet. They were old enough to look after themselves and we needed the money. I started as a cleaner in the house of my mother’s younger brother who was married to a Chinese woman. I cleaned and ironed and worked from 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Sundays only. I started on RM80 a month and by the time I left eleven years later, I was paid RM130. My Chinese aunt recommended me to my next cleaning job. I worked one full day and two half days in the week [Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays] on top of my regular Sunday cleaning job with my aunt. I was paid RM250 a month and I got lunch as well. I worked for six to seven years but stopped three years ago. My youngest son was between three to four years old when I started with the second employer and I used to take him along when I went to work. He was too scared to even go to the toilet. He was a very good boy. He didn’t disturb anything in the house. While I did the ironing, he would sleep on the mattress. I would bring my own milk for him. I had to set the burglar alarm before I left the house in the evenings. It took me two evenings to learn how to operate it. When I started work with my second employer, I was also cleaning for his sister twice a month and earned RM50. I worked for her for ten years. On

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak Tuesdays, I worked for someone else for RM30 a day. On Thursdays and Fridays, I worked for another woman and got RM50 for two full day’s work in a week. She gave me her used clothes and they were very nice clothes for my children and grandchildren. It was a pity that I was too fat to wear her clothes. When I worked full-days, I got lunch as well. But I only worked for over a year with my last two employers. All the work that I did was recommended by my Chinese aunt. My sister was at first working in the office where I am working now but she gave it up because she cannot stand the air-conditioning. It is a permanent job and I get EPF.2 (Ini kerja tetap dan ada EPF ). I paid RM36 for two sets of uniform. I wouldn’t change jobs now, I’m too old. (… tidak mahu pindah kerja lagi, sudah tua). When I retire, it is more lucrative for me to look after women who have just given birth (Bila saya pencen, lebih lumayan jaga orang beranak3). It is good to be employed as we do not have to ask money from our husbands, it is embarrassing (… tak payah minta duit dari laki, malu). Last time, I used to see other people eating ice cream, I had no money to buy some. Now it is different (Dulu tenggok orang makan ais krim, pun tidak ada duit beli. Sekarang tidak sama.).

As in the agrarian village economy in rural Sarawak, which depends on the availability of household labour for farming, urban households are dependent on the cash-earning capacity of their members. In urban households, the number of wage earners to dependents must therefore be carefully balanced to ensure the survival of all.4 When the number of dependent children is greater than the number of wage earners in the household, the financial squeeze often means that women need to find wage work to supplement their husband’s income. In such cases, husbands often found employment for their wives and the burden of secondary earnings fell on married women. As there is no concept of a family wage, men do not feel that they have failed if their earnings are insufficient to support their families. There is no stigma, therefore, in assisting the wife in getting a job. The wife’s earning capacity is held in reserve to be drawn on in times of the household’s financial need. This is in contrast to the village economy where women combined their productive labour in the fields with domestic responsibilities continuously throughout their lives. The narratives of Marjorie and Jacky illustrate this. Marjorie (gardener, aged 35) Marjorie lived at the other end of the same squatter settlement as Sue. Her small wooden house was on stilts as it floods when it rains heavily. The entrance led to a small living area with a television set in pride of place. One of the bedrooms opened onto this area. A narrow dark corridor led to a kitchen at the back. Her husband built the house from leftover construction material from his work sites. Her eldest daughter, aged thirteen, served us Milo when I arrived one evening for the interview.


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Marjorie is the eldest in her family. She left home at seventeen after spending a month in the village after finishing her Form 3 examination. Her first job was that of a domestic worker with her aunt (her mother’s younger sister) in Serian. She was paid RM150 a month. She was not interested in child minding and said that her cousin was ‘naughty.’ When she scolded the child, the father would scold her in return. She left after a month. She found a job in the canteen of the Kuching Port Authority (KPA). Her father worked in a sawmill nearby and she went in to ask for a job. She was paid the same monthly wage of RM150. She enjoyed her work as many people ate there and she was kept busy. She met her husband who was a frequent customer in the canteen. She left after six months when she married at eighteen. She left the work force for fourteen years and in that time had five children. Her husband earned RM800 a month as a construction worker and wages were calculated daily and paid twice monthly. There was no annual or sick leave and a day without work was a day without pay. He used to be in a work group of twenty but it had dwindled to six at the time of the interview. When his employment became precarious, he found Marjorie a job as a gardener with the Kuching City North council. At the time of the interview, she had been working for over two years. Her take home pay was RM400 a month. She said: When I stopped work at the Kuching Port Authority and married him and had children, I was dependent on him to earn money (… harap dia saja untuk cari duit). Now that my job is going to be permanent, I will continue working until I retire (… sekarang kerja tetap, lanjut saja sampai pencen). I have to help him. One alone is not enough (Dia satu orang tak cukup). Things are expensive – school and books are expensive5 (Barang mahal – sekolah, buku pun mahal ). I save nothing at the end of every month. I was trained for three weeks and then they gave me gloves, boots and a uniform and I started work. Three of us work in a group and we are given an area to look after. We start at 7:30 a.m. and break off for lunch at 11:30 a.m. I take my own lunch. We start again at 1:30 p.m. and finish at 4:30 p.m. My husband gives me a lift to and from work. I like my job because it is not tiring and I will be made permanent after three years. When we go out to work, we also gain new experiences. If others can work, why not us?

Jacky (senior shop assistant, aged 32) I went to meet Jacky and her husband on her day off and she took me to her house. I parked the car a short distance from the main road and we walked up a gravel path. She lived next door to her sister and another cousin was on the other side of her. Their love of plants was evident as the garden was luxuriant and overflowing. It was a spacious double-storey house, built of brick and cement on the ground floor and wooden planks on the first floor. As her baby was just beginning to walk, all the furniture was pushed against the wall, leaving

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a large empty space in the centre of the living room. The best part of the house was the balcony upstairs. It was cool and balmy and afforded a beautiful view of the hills opposite the house. This was also the place where Jim, Jacky’s husband, nurtured his rare finds in the jungle. Jim worked for the same landscaping firm as Jacky. He acted as a seed and seedling collector in the jungle and also as the local interpreter for his boss who was an Englishman. When he was not out on his trips to the jungle, he cut the grass in the nursery. He earned RM850 a month. He was, however, an industrious man and earned an additional RM300–400 in commission on the sales of white goods and other products.6 Jacky, on the other hand, worked as a senior sales assistant in the retail gardening outlet of the landscaping company. She was the eldest in a family of six children and was one of the most educated of the working mothers I interviewed. She married young, at eighteen. She became pregnant with her baby in sixth form and left school without taking the examinations. She started wage work when her baby was one year old. Her mother was able to provide childcare and she wanted to earn some money. A supervisor at this landscaping company introduced her and she was paid a daily wage of RM9 for working in the nursery. She could take home over RM300 a month (with overtime pay) and enjoyed her work as she made many new friends. Her first child, a son, had Downs Syndrome and was frequently ill. She worked irregularly for two years in the nursery taking months off when she became pregnant with the second child. When she returned to work for the same company after the birth of her second child, she was placed in the wood cutting section. She had to work the plywood-cutting machine and was paid a lower daily wage of RM6. At this time, her monthly wage took a dip to about RM200 a month. She no longer enjoyed her job as she had lost all her friends in the nursery section. Furthermore, her eldest son was often sick and consequently, she left after a month. Her second son also had Downs Syndrome and she left the labour market for five years. Tragedy struck in 1992. Her two sons died within two months of each other. The eldest was six and the second was three. After the birth of her third son, she returned to work in the same company. This time she was placed in their retail gardening outlet. She was paid a monthly wage of RM380. At the time of the interview, she had worked for two years there and was promoted to the position of senior sales assistant with a monthly wage of RM550. She often had to work overtime and, with commission on the sale of plants, she could take home as much as RM750 a month. This is what she said of her work: My boss asked me to learn to use the computer but I’m not interested in working in the office. It’s boring. I’m more interested in dealing with plants and customers. I am interested in plants even in my own home. But sometimes this [j ob] has its problems. Often the staff are slack in their work. They are only waiting to go home and they make big issues out of small things. The till is also often short.


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Between the two of them, Jim and Jacky had a household income of RM2,400. Jim paid RM130 a month for his motorcycle. He also bought the food. Jacky paid her mother RM200 a month for child-care and her sister RM100 for breastfeeding her child. She also paid for the electricity, her bus fare to work and the premium on her life insurance policy. She regularly saved money in the bank and was also involved in a revolving scheme with relatives in the village. She believed in continuing wage work: If I work, I can help him7 and there is more to spend. One person earning is not enough. I’m also used to working. The narrative of being in paid work to help husbands was recurrent. It was not only mentioned by Marjorie and Jacky but also by several others that I interviewed. It deserves some explanation. In semi-subsistence farming in rural Bidayuh areas, cash earning through seasonal wage labour in nearby bazaars is left to the men. Women take care of their families’ landholding while men leave the village to earn cash during the lull stages of the agricultural cycle. Cash earning is seen to be in the province of men so ‘helping men’ through paid work is not a reflection of an emerging modern value associated with the western bourgeois family of male bread-winner and female home-maker, but is a continuation of an old cultural concept derived from the agrarian economy.

Working wives and their husbands: marriage in the 1990s So far, I have discussed women’s domestic responsibilities and life-course squeezes as the two major factors affecting women’s participation in the labour market. I will now turn to the third factor – the disparity between male and female earnings. Although this is relevant to all women regardless of their marital status, I have decided to discuss it in this chapter because comparisons of the earnings of married women to those of their husbands make the consequences of such income disparity more poignant. The married working mothers in my study earned an average monthly wage of RM504 in comparison to their husbands’ average monthly salary of RM1286. The women’s monthly salary was 39 per cent of their husbands’ monthly wages and yet, half of the eighteen married working mothers had the same years of schooling, if not more, as their husbands. Women whose names are in bold in Table 8.1 had the same or more years of schooling as their husbands. Most of the women were overqualified for the type of work they did. There is also no correlation between their educational levels, years of working experience, the type of work that they did and the wages that they earned. On the other hand, the majority of the husbands of working mothers had additional credentials such as a driving licence for trucks and other technical and mechanical skills. Gender labour segmentation was not the only reason for the wage disparity between working mothers and their husbands. Fifteen of the working mothers had a history of interrupted employment. They were employed when they were

36

29 44 32 39 31 40 33 38 24 34 28 35 32 37 34 45 33

Angela Gina Jacky Jean Jill Jocelyn June Kylie Lisa Lydia May Marjorie Mandy Nancy Sophia Sue Tina

Age in years

9 9 13 4 9 6 6 9 11 9 11 9 11 6 9 0 9

9

Years at school

Hotel house-keeper Hotel receptionist Senior sales assistant Hotel house-keeper Senior sales assistant Sales assistant Part-time cleaner Association house-keeper Hotel receptionist Club house-keeper Restaurant waitress Gardener for city council Club receptionist Kitchen hand Hotel house-keeper Office cleaner House-keeper

Cleaner

Job

Married working wives

Agnita

Name

400 700 750 360 850 560 100 600 600 290 600 400 450 370 550 300 450

750

Monthly wage in Ringgit

30 46 33 49 41 46 36 42 33 38 24 37 22 52 37 44 41

44

Age in years

Husbands

9 11 9 9 6 6 6 6 9 11 11 6 11 6 11 6 13

11

Years at school

Supervisor of cleaners in city council Peon in city council Small time business-man Seed collector and direct sales Chauffeur and bouncer Porridge seller Oddjobber Construction labourer Government chauffeur Technician Soldier Technician Construction labourer Barman Engine attendant Mechanic Truck driver Clerk

Job

1,200 500 2,000 (?) 1,200 940 5,000 (?) 550 1,200 1,200 1,200 650 1500 800 450 750 1,500 1000 1,500

Monthly wage in Ringgit8

Table 8.1 Summary of the wage disparity between working wives and their husbands according to educational level, occupation and monthly wages


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single and had been out of the labour market for an average of eight years each. In contrast, none of their husbands had had their employment interrupted by child-rearing and other domestic responsibilities. Kylie,9 who had three years more schooling than her husband but earned half his monthly wages, regretted being out of the labour market for thirteen years. She said that she would be earning much more if she had been able to continue in paid work without any interruption. Given that the women’s earning capacity was half that of their husbands, and in the absence of any meaningful welfare assistance, divorce or desertion by their spouses would trigger a survival crisis. Single mothers10 knew this only too well. Self-reliance and the difficulties of depending on men were therefore recurrent themes in the women’s narratives when I asked them about the meaning of wage work for them and whether married women should remain in the labour market. I asked these questions of all the women I interviewed regardless of their marital or employment status. Below is a sample of what some of the women interviewed said: We should continue working after marriage. We, women must earn for ourselves. Save our own money. We cannot depend on our husbands. (… Kita perempuan mesti cari duit sendiri. Simpan duit sendiri. Kita tidak boleh harap suami.) (Rosalind, single woman) In this modern age, we should continue working after marriage. We can share expenses and help our own family. Also, should a woman divorce, she still has her own resources. (… Jika dia bercerai, dia masih ada pegangan.) (Cynthia, single woman) It is not to say that when we marry, we can’t work. If we can get someone to look after our children, we can work. I want to continue working after marriage and children. My mother told me, ‘Don’t stop working even if your husband ask you to stop because he might bully you or have another woman. What if he doesn’t give you any money and your child has no milk?’ I agree with my mother. It is better to have your own income, however small, as it is from the sweat of our brow. If we want anything, we can go ahead and buy it. We don’t have to depend on others or ask for money from anyone. If we divorce, we don’t have to depend on maintenance. With or without a man, we can live! (Marcia, single woman) We should continue to work in order to support our family and for our own personal use. If we don’t go out to work, we have to ask for money from our husbands and we can’t depend on them. If they are good, they will give us some. If they are not good, they wouldn’t. One day, they may get fed up. It is better to have our own income. (Agnita, working mother)

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Mandy, a working mother who was ten years older than her husband had this to say: I am still young, so I must work hard to save for my future and for my old age. What if my husband changes and leaves me? Who will help me? I save money for bad times and for when I need it. Dorothy, who worked as a beer promoter, was divorced and with a son to bring up on her own knew only too well the unpredictability of life. She commented: It is much better to work because the household of married people is not always steady. If we don’t have a job, there is no savings. If we marry someone from a different place, how do we manage if he leaves us. Every day, I hear [from my colleagues] about men who are drunks, womanisers, who give enough money for children and the kitchen only. Some wives don’t even have their own money to buy panties. We have to get the umbrella ready before it rains. Even if we are divorced, we still have a job. If we don’t have a job, when there is a problem at home it gets worse. At least when you are working [outside], you can release tension from the house. (Lebih bagus kita kerja kerana rumah tangga orang yang kahwin bukan selalu steady. Jika kita tiada kerja, tiada simpanan. Jika kita kahwin orang lain tempat, macam mana nak lari jika dia tinggal kita. Tiap-tiap hari saya dengar – laki kaki botol, kaki perempuan, kasi duit cukup untuk anak dan dapur saja. Bini tiada simpanan sendiri, sampai beli seluar dalaman pun tidak boleh. Kita mesti sedia payung sebelum hujan. Jika kita divorcekah, kita masih ada kerja. Jika tiada kerja, jika ada problem dirumah, makin teruk. Jika kita ada kerja, kita boleh release tenson dari rumah.) Sally who was also divorced and a mother said: I don’t want to marry again. It is better to continue working especially if it is a good job. Nowadays it is also difficult to rely on a man (Sekarang, harap laki pun susah.) If your husband leaves you, you still have a job. If you don’t have a job, you will have to look for one. You might as well keep on working even after marriage. Reviewing what these women said leads one to ask why there was such insecurity about marriage. Unlike some Chinese men, who would have mistresses rather than divorce or abandon their first wives, the husbands of the women in this study do not earn enough to sustain two households. Abandonment or divorce is inevitable when men find new partners. Although there are no statistics on divorce for marriages under native customary rights, the women’s perception was that divorce was more prevalent in the city than in the village. This could be because village elders often mediate in marital conflicts in rural communities. As mentioned in the previous chapter, a married man in the village caught for


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adultery would be fined. If a child should result, he would have to pay for the maintenance of the mother and child. Although divorce is not a stigma in the village, adultery is and in a close village community, villagers can exert powerful sanctions through scorn, gossip and ostracism. In addition, the high labour turnover and men’s geographical mobility in the urban areas meant that it was almost impossible to extract monthly maintenance from an errant husband. The fact that the wives’ wages could not support a family and were a mere 39 per cent of their husbands’ monthly wage contributed in no small measure to their fear and anxiety about marriage and their desire to earn an independent income, however small. The break-up of a marriage, for a woman unable to earn a wage sufficient to support her family, could spell disaster. Many women who were separated or divorced from their husbands, and had no kin to look after their children, had to leave them in the Salvation Army Children’s Home when they needed to seek wage work. Husbands, on the other hand, differed in their opinion as to whether marriages were better now compared to those of their grandparents in the village. Of the six husbands that I interviewed, only one thought that marriages nowadays were more problematic. Two felt that it was the same, in that there would always be good and bad marriages. However, three of the husbands said that marriages were better now. Their opinion was that marriages nowadays were legally registered and therefore, men could not simply run away from their responsibilities unlike the marriages of old. Kenny, whose father was a school teacher who taught in different villages, illustrated this point by saying that his father had two wives in two separate villages. However, only nine of the fifty women interviewed (18 per cent) felt that marriages nowadays were superior to those of their grandmothers’ in the village. In the village, women worked alongside their men in the fields. They would go to the padi farm in the morning together and return together in the evening. The family unit was primary and there was little time left in the week to be devoted to peer group leisure activities. To be sure, the men went off on hunting and fishing expeditions with their mates and the women wove and cooked together, especially during major cultural festivals, but these activities were not on a regular basis. Marriages in the city were different. Husbands and wives were employed in different locales and often had no idea of each other’s activities throughout the day. With a six-day working week and shift work, the time that they spent together was further diminished. The majority of the women interviewed were anxious about infidelity and abandonment and held a pessimistic view of marriage. Nowadays even with a marriage certificate, men have girlfriends outside. Before, there was no marriage certificate but marriages were lasting. This is especially so for men who work in town. They always go travelling and like to go to pubs and karaoke lounges. Sometimes I ask my customers why they go for other women and they say that it is like food, they need variety. I told them that if I were their wife, they go out in front and I will go out

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak behind.11 (Sekarang ada surat kahwin pun ada girlfriend luar. Dulu tidak ada surat kahwin, pun kahwin kekal. Laki kerja pasar, selalu travelling dan kaki pub, kaki karaoke. … You keluar depan, saya keluar belakang.) (Dorothy, working mother, divorced – beer promoter) In our grandmothers’ time, marriages were happier. Everybody just stayed in the village and other women had their own husbands. In town, men could tell us lies and we wouldn’t know. In the village, they were too tired to go anywhere. Now, when my husband comes home after midnight from the army mess, I will ask him many questions. (Lydia, working mother) Women nowadays go for money (Perempuan sekarang janji duit …) and don’t care if the man is married or not. It is better not to be rich. I see middleaged men bringing in young women for a night in the best suite in the hotel and it makes me sick. (Tina, working mother – hotel housekeeper) With shift-work, husbands and wives spend much less time together unlike before when they worked together in the farm and went home together. They spent more time together which makes for a happier marriage. (Jacky, working mother)

Given the constraints of child-care, life-cycle squeezes and anxieties about straying husbands, one could begin to wonder if it is indeed meaningful to talk of married women exercising choice as to whether to leave or enter wage work. However, many women I interviewed were committed to paid work. Marjorie mentioned gaining new experiences through work, Jacky spoke of being used to working and Dorothy talked of releasing household tension through work. Others were in paid work partly out of boredom in the home. Thus, women participated in the labour market not merely for monetary rewards but also for peer support and a social network outside the confines of the household. In the next section, I will attend to the age-old feminist question as to whether women’s employment increases their autonomy and independence.

Autonomy through wage work? In the West where women’s employment has been viewed as emancipatory, women’s participation in the labour market has been perceived to be advantageous on two counts. First, paid work confers financial independence on women wage earners. Second, entry into the labour market is seen as an escape from the oppressive confines of domestic life. Analysis of the impact of women’s entry into the labour market on their autonomy and status has long concerned feminists. However, dichotomous approaches which pitched productive labour in the public economic sphere against reproductive labour in the private domestic sphere dominated the debates in the 1970s and early 1980s (Ward and Pyle 1995). As


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pointed out by Stivens, ‘… in many of the discussions about autonomy, women are being judged as to how closely their state approximates that of the allegedly free and autonomous male subject/agent. Moreover, this is clearly the White, middle-class male of the liberal, humanist imagination’ (Stivens 1994a: 378). Similarly, Sharma when discussing the problem of the link between women’s employment and their autonomy, in the context of India, said: If neither men nor women are expected to operate as though they had distinct and individual interests separate from those of the household and if household survival generally presupposes a high degree of financial and practical co-operation among its members, then perhaps we must formulate the problem differently. Instead of asking whether wages permit personal emancipation we should perhaps ask how they alter the nature of the individual’s commitment to the household. (Sharma 1990: 242) I agree with both Stivens (1994a: 185–6) and Sharma that an individualistic view of ‘personal autonomy’ does not take into account cultural differences in specific societies. Research in the south-east Asian region has shown that women’s relationship to their earnings are very much integrated with their households. Wolf found that in Java, working mothers channelled more of their earnings into their households when compared to unmarried women factory workers (Wolf 1992: 249). Similarly, Salaff documented that married working women in Singapore did not perceive their employment as conferring independence as their earnings went into supporting their families (Salaff 1990: 128). In a situation where there is no minimum wage let alone a family wage, as in the case of Malaysia, married women’s wages are very significant to their households. This is particularly so for the stratum of women workers in this study. As with Salaff’s working mothers in Singapore (ibid: 129) and Bangladeshi garment factory women (Kibria 1995: 301), many of the women in my study paid for tutors for their children in order to improve their school performance. The working mothers that I interviewed did not want their daughters to end up with the same low pay, dead-end jobs they had. Without any state pension, they also viewed their children’s education as an insurance policy for old age support. Many families were therefore committed to paying for extra tuition in order that their children may succeed in school.12 Many of the women in this study therefore re-entered the labour market in order to invest in their children’s education.13 The narratives of Jean and Tina are illustrative of this. Jean14 (club housekeeper, aged 39) Jean is the third in a family of seven children and the first five siblings in the family had only primary school education. Jean herself spent only four years at school. She did not choose to work in the city, but at seventeen her mother pushed her out to work in order to help the family. She worked as a domestic worker for a friend

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of hers and earned RM200 a month. She left after two years when she married at nineteen. She returned to the labour market fifteen years later after six children. When she rejoined the labour market, her children were aged 12, 11, 10, 9, 7 and 6. The youngest had just entered primary school. Her husband spent twelve years in the police force and left to be a driver on RM560 a month. He took up an additional job working as a bouncer for a seafood restaurant from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. every evening. That job brought in an additional RM380 a month. As the children grew, expenditure mounted and Jean was compelled to return to wage work. She had been working for the past seven years as a housekeeper in a recreation club and earned RM360 a month. She spent more than half her monthly wage on her children’s private tuition fees. Her eldest son had a congenital heart defect and stopped school after the third year in secondary school. At the time of the interview he had recovered after an operation and worked as a store-keeper for RM320 a month. He gave Jean RM100 for living at home. Her second daughter finished fifth form and was taking computer classes in order to improve her chances in the job market. The rest were still in school. Jean said: I will continue to work as my children need the money. I want my children to go [academically] as high as they can – to be doctors, teachers, engineers. Moreover, I am still young and should work. The children are old enough to look after themselves and it will be boring for me to stay at home. My husband gives me money but it is not enough. The more children we have, the more we spend. The older they grow, the more they need and the less I have for myself. Tina (hotel housekeeper, aged 33) Tina is one of six women who started wage work only after marriage and children. She married at sixteen, immediately after Form 3 and had five children aged 15, 14, 11, 8 and 3. Her neighbour helped to look after her youngest child (her only daughter) when both she and her husband were at work. However, shift work suited her because when she worked nights, she could do housework in the morning and be at home when the children returned from school. Her husband was a clerk in a government office and earned RM1,500 a month. However, with the children growing and four at school, his earnings were badly stretched. In addition, their second child had recently won a place in a prestigious government residential school for academically promising students. Although it was a non-fee paying school, he had to buy books and special uniforms for the many compulsory extra curricular activities in school. They too, sent their other children for private tuition. At the time of the interview, Tina had been working for close to two years in a hotel as a housekeeper for RM450 a month. It was her first job. She commented: I started work when my second boy entered the Junior Science College. My family is big and expenses kept mounting (… pembelanjaan makin


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bertambah). His [husband’s] salary was not enough (Gaji dia pun tak cukup). As they go to secondary school, we need more money for books, shoes, school-bags, uniforms. My son in the Junior Science College spent RM3,000 when he first entered the school. His books and uniforms were so expensive. The more activities they have, the more money is needed. Before I started on this job, I did some direct sales. My husband is an Amway member and I joined Avon. I used to sell to my friends and neighbours but I earned only RM50–100 every four to five months. It was not enough, so I asked a neighbour to help me find a job. My husband didn’t ask me to look for work but I wanted to help him and also to gain some experience outside. I was very shy at first as I had never worked [outside the home] before but I’m better now. Although my aunt [father’s older sister] and her husband are both farmers in the village, their children are all highly educated. They are university graduates and one is a YB [title for a local assemblyman]. I want my children to study as high as they can. I want my daughter to have high status (… berpangkat tinggi), to become a doctor. She could speak by the age of one and can talk very well now. I have to save for their further education. It was obvious that for Tina, education was an important investment in her children’s future and that she participated in the labour market to enable them to further their education. In the absence of state child-care provisions, a woman’s independence through paid work was not simply a matter of contributing to household expenditure, it also increased her dependence on other women. Kinship ties between women were significant as 48 per cent (24) of the women interviewed felt that only female kin were eligible to care of their children. These women felt that those with no blood-ties would not do a good job. In this study, nine of the working mothers (38 per cent) depended on female kin for child-care. However, mothers and mothers-in-law who frequently provided domestic labour, especially child-care to their daughters and daughters-in-law, were often resentful of the extra burden placed upon them. Linda, a single mother explained: My mother keeps complaining that because of my son, she can’t work in the farm. She complains a lot. When she washes a bit of clothes, she will complain that her hands can’t stand the detergent.15 I can’t depend on my younger sisters either. They only go home to sleep and do nothing.

Conclusion Returning once again to the question of independence, the answer as to whether women gained autonomy through wage work is complex and contradictory. Although women’s earnings gave them greater discretion to manage their household contribution and personal spending, they were also more dependent

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on their support networks. The women’s interests were therefore very much tied to their households and it was difficult to speak of a separate, individual ‘autonomy.’ Although single women enjoyed a certain measure of freedom, when they chose marriage and established a new form of family which was different from their village mothers, a new dependence on men emerged. This was because of the gendered nature of the capitalist labour market which rewarded them inequitably. Working mothers in this chapter continued to participate in the labour market because of their household financial needs, for their children’s educational future and no less because of the insecurity that they felt in their marriages. However, these were not the only reasons as women also remained in paid work because of its intrinsic rewards and their commitment as workers in spite of the less appealing nature of their work. As they could not afford private, commercial child-care, they had been assisted by their mothers, mothers-in-law, sisters, neighbours, husbands and older children. Thus, working mothers harnessed the resources and support networks available to them in order to earn a wage for their household’s survival and for their own sense of security.

9

The hand that rocks the cradle leaves wage work Bidayuh housewives1

Given the women’s insecurity about marriage as discussed in the previous chapter, I wanted to know why the housewives left the labour market and how they experienced this change. The housewives were mostly a younger cohort of women in comparison to the working mothers of the previous chapter and their children were therefore also younger. They also had a network of kin but because of various circumstances (including differences in residential locales, the close spacing of their children) they had not tapped into them in order to continue being employed. First, I wanted to know if the old Western bourgeois family ideal of a male breadwinner and a female housewife had been imbibed by the Bidayuh through exposure to the mass media. This question was prompted by Alison, a housewife in my study, who constructed motherhood and domesticity this way. People say that women without a permanent job should marry and look after their own children. Otherwise, we have nothing to show for it. (Orang cakap, tiada kerja tetap; tiada hasil jika tidak jaga anak sendiri.) Even if she has a decent job, she should stop if her husband earns a big salary because it is better to look after her own children. My sister in the village, carries her child to the fields when she works. How can a child grow this way? My friend Sandy2 is different. She married a government officer. I really admire her because they have their own, good, permanent house. It is most suitable for her to be a housewife. Others, who shared Alison’s bourgeois family ideal, represented the decision to leave regular paid work as a show of love by their husbands. Kim remarked, ‘If your husband loves you and is good to you, you don’t need to work. If he is bad and doesn’t give you money, you also have to work.’ I was curious to find out if this notion of the dependent woman is widespread amongst Bidayuh housewives. Second, as the dichotomous separation of male breadwinner and female housewife represents a new form of family for the Bidayuh, I was interested to know how the women experience this. In doing so, I compare them to women of their mothers’ generation in the village where the idea of a ‘housewife’ is alien to their culture.

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Third, as marriage is the site where most married women work out their gender contract with their men, I was curious to know if women in paid work had more leverage at home. To do this I decided to look at the two traditional feminist markers of marital equity – the domestic division of labour and the management of household finances and compare the housewives with the working mothers of the previous chapter.

The Bidayuh housewife: a Western bourgeois family ideal or economic pragmatism? In neighbouring Indonesia, Murray reported that the stereotypical image of an ideal woman is that of a dependent housewife who shops for her happiness and that of her family. This consumerist message imbibed by many women is conveyed through mass media advertising, for example, on television and in women’s magazines (Murray 1991: 128–36). Given that the women in this study are exposed to similar trends in advertising and had married wage earners in order to escape the drudgery of their employment, I was interested to know if Alison’s and Kim’s construction of the Western bourgeois family as their ideal family was common. From my interviews with the housewives, the lack of child-care, their experiences of wage work, their low wage levels and the strain of toiling inside and outside the home were major reasons for their withdrawal from the labour market. Nonetheless, the majority of housewives were very ambivalent about their dependent status as full-time homemakers and only three (23 per cent) wanted to remain permanently out of the work-force. However, they were torn between the needs of their young families and their need for cash earnings. It is therefore very likely that as their children become less physically dependent, most housewives will re-enter the labour market. Given the women’s ambivalence about being housewives, it is interesting that Alison has constructed the bourgeois family as her ideal family. This is particularly so as the rural Bidayuh concept of femininity does not construct productive work and marriage and motherhood as contradictory and mutually exclusive. On the contrary, women in farming communities often have to carry the double burden of productive and reproductive labour. Alison had only six years of primary education and left home at fourteen. It seems likely that Alison’s bourgeois family ideal was an outcome of her migration to the city. With exposure to Western television programmes and other forms of media like women’s magazines, her adoption of a Western bourgeois family ideal is hardly surprising. In the village, the boundary between productive labour in the fields and domestic labour at home is blurred when activities in both spheres criss-cross into one another (this is evident in Alison’s narrative of her sister). Women carry the young on their backs while they toil in the fields while lactating mothers at home dry, collect and store the harvested paddy grains. In addition, the strong work ethic amongst rural Bidayuh meant that a life of domesticity, when child-care is seen to be no longer necessary, is frowned upon and regarded as sloth. This is well illustrated by Amy’s unhappiness over talk in the village as described below.

The hand that rocks the cradle leaves wage work

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Amy (25 years old) I knew of Amy as she was previously employed as a domestic worker in a friend’s home. She left the job when she married over three years ago and had not re-entered the workforce. They have kept in touch and whenever she is in town, she will stay with my friend. I did not know her personally prior to the study but knew her older sister who was a domestic worker in the household of friends. Apart from her second job as a helper in a school canteen, her four other jobs were all in homes as a domestic worker. She obtained all her jobs through the recommendations of kin and friends. She lived in the village with her mother-in-law and her two-year old daughter. Amy and her husband came from the same village and she lived a stone’s throw from her father and married sister. Her husband worked as a road builder in Kuching and lived in quarters provided by his employer. He returned to his family in the village every weekend. Amy’s mother had recently died and her father made bamboo money boxes for a handicraft souvenir shop in Kuching. Amy and her youngest sister helped their father sometimes, and Amy could earn RM20 a month from the sale of the bamboo money boxes. Amy preferred the city to the village but said it was cheaper to live in the village. It is better in the city as we can buy all sorts of things. It is easier to find a livelihood and it is easy to have a lot of friends from other cultures (… senang cari duit dan senang dapat banyak kawan yang lain bangsa). I don’t like farming because it is very hard work. Our livelihood is dependent on the weather. If the paddy fails, we get nothing. Amy’s preference for the city was also due to the fact that she was unhappy in the village. Her aversion to farming led to a lot of criticism from fellow villagers. Although she had a young daughter, her mother-in-law and neighbours expected Amy to leave the care of her daughter to her older sister who had her own children of similar ages. In this way, Amy’s labour could be released to help her mother-in-law in the farm. Amy elaborated: I will be happy if people just leave me alone and not talk about me (… tiada orang kacau dan tiada orang cakap). People talk about me not working in the fields. They say that I am lazy and ask why a man can be so stupid and not divorce his wife and get a more hardworking one: someone who will earn her keep. As mentioned earlier, the talk in the village reflected village attitude towards child-care which was seen as secondary to the work of farming.

For the sake of the children’s education Another reason that housewives gave for their withdrawal from wage work was that of their children’s education. Increasingly, Bidayuh mothers emphasize the

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need to give their children the chance of as high an education as possible. This was most prevalent amongst the housewives in comparison to the other women interviewed. I hope she [when speaking of her only child] will be better than us being servants (Harap dia bagus daripada kita jadi amah). (Amy, housewife) She [her only child] must have more education. We Bidayuh are left behind because we have little education (Dia mesti ada lebih pelajaran. Kita orang Bidayuh ketinggalan zaman sebab kita sedikit pelajaran). (Julia, housewife) The growing sense of education as a long-term investment in their children’s future and as an insurance policy for old age meant that there was a shift in these women’s conception of child-rearing. Whereas children were formerly seen as requiring minimal supervision and pushed into productive labour in the fields as soon as they were physically able, now children remained dependents for longer. In the village, school-going children frequently lived away from home in boarding schools. This reduced the level of child-rearing undertaken in the village. This was not the case in the urban context where children lived at home with their parents and commuted to school daily. Not only were their contributions to family coffers postponed; once education was seen as pivotal to future earnings then child-rearing took on a different emphasis. Parenting became more intensive and children’s schooling was seen to require close attention. As family size dropped from an average of eight in their natal households to four in their own families, each child was viewed as an even more valuable asset than before. However, four children – two boys and two girls – was seen as the ideal as any more was viewed as a drain on limited financial resources especially given that schooling was paramount. Sons were perceived to be especially valuable as income earners and therefore as monetary support in the parent’s old age while daughters were valued not only as financial contributors but also for the physical care they would provide in sickness and old age. As an insurance policy, two of each sex was felt to be desirable. However, Bidayuh housewives were torn between staying at home to supervise their children and going out to earn extra for their education. Housewives were also the most numerous in not wanting anyone else to look after their children. It is best if we can look after the children ourselves. If they are taken care of by others, we wouldn’t know if they are pinched and scolded. (Amy, aged 25) Servant girls are too lazy to look after children. They prefer to watch TV. They don’t give the children enough to eat. (Barbara, aged 21)


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I have given space to the women below because in addition to their emphasis on child-care and their children’s education, they give us a glimpse at their ambivalence as dependent housewives after being earning single women. Gloria (29 years old) Gloria spent four years helping her parents on the farm when she finished her Form 3. She saw her friends coming home from working in the city with pretty clothes and jewellery and decided that she should do likewise in order to earn her own ‘money for clothes and gold jewellery’. She worked a total of five years prior to having her first child. She first worked as a coffee shop waitress for seven months at a monthly wage of RM150. The long working hours (the shop opened at 6:30 a.m. and closed at 10:00 p.m.) and the lack of sleep finally got to her and she gave her notice. Her boss had a brother who ran a private child-care centre and he recommended her to work there as a nursery assistant. She liked children and stayed there for over a year and earned RM200 a month. She could not get along with her employer’s daughter in the long run and fled. A friend at the village next recommended her for domestic work with a school teacher in the city. Her monthly pay dropped to RM170 and she worked there for over a year. She became bored and left for her last employment as a beer promoter. She earned between RM300–400 a month depending on how much overtime she did. She continued working in that job after marriage and when her first child was four months old, she paid her sister in the village to look after her baby. She was in the same job until her second child arrived a year later. Her third child was almost two at the time of the interview. She lived in the village at the time of the interview and complained that there was no fridge to keep meat or a washing machine for her laundry. Several families (all her siblings) shared a generator which supplied electricity. When talking about migration to the city, Gloria had this to say: It is better for single girls to go out to work in town. But it is better for married women to stay in the village to look after their own children and to cook. If they [the children] are looked after by others, you don’t know if they are beaten, whether they have eaten or not. Married women have their responsibilities, unlike single girls. It was interesting that Gloria expressed anxiety about others caring for her children because, earlier in the interview, when I asked her if it was all right for a non-kinswoman to look after her children so she could return to work, she said: Any reliable woman will do because they have to be paid. If you ask your sister, you have to pay; if you ask others, you have to pay too (Suruh kakak mahu bayar, suruh orang lain pun mahu bayar). This contradiction is frequently encountered in the narratives of the housewives. It can perhaps be speculated that Gloria and other housewives like her, who have

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limited access to suitable employment because of a lack of qualifications, justified their withdrawal from the labour market by prioritising child-care. However, as the dichotomous separation of breadwinner/housewife is a relatively new form of family for the Bidayuh, Gloria, like many housewives was extremely ambivalent about her dependent status. Ideally, Gloria would like her husband Kenny to earn enough so that she could be a full-time mother and homemaker, given the drudgery of her employment outside the home. However, she felt that it was easier to earn one’s own money than to ask for money from her husband. When men were the sole bread-winners in the family and women became financially dependent, women felt that any money given to them for housekeeping should be channelled towards improving the living standards of the family and none should be diverted to their own personal use. The issue of housekeeping money will be elaborated on later in this chapter. Joyce (28 years old) Joyce is petite and when I first interviewed her in her kampung house, she was expecting her third baby. Her second pregnancy ended in a stillbirth and both she and her husband were naturally anxious about her impending delivery. As her husband’s village is less than 20 kilometres from Kuching, they decided to build their house there. He bought a small parcel of land and Joyce’s mother helped them with money to build the house. As Joyce pointed out, it was money which she had remitted as an earning daughter. It was a small onebedroom house which Joyce kept scrupulously clean. The electricity came from her parents-in-law’s house and they had a huge tank outside the house to collect rainwater. Her parents-in-law enclosed an artesian well into a bath-cum-laundry area and this was where they bathed. Joyce hoped that one day they could return to live in her village. Joyce lamented their inability to grow any fruit trees or cultivate any cash crops, as land was scarce. However, her husband was industrious and grew vegetables and corn in the immediate vicinity of the house. In the meantime, Joyce spent extended periods of time in her own village, relieving her mother of the task of caring for her bedridden father. Joyce came from a large family of eleven brothers and sisters. She left home after finishing Form 3 and started work at 17. She spent the next seven years as a domestic worker in four different homes. Her first monthly wage was RM150 and she stayed in that job for a year. A better paying offer came along and she moved to Miri with her new employer. She was paid RM300 a month, but after two years she felt homesick and wanted to moved back to Kuching so that she could see her family more frequently. She worked with the next family for three and a half years at a monthly wage of RM200. She next replaced her older sister in her place of work and spent the last six months prior to her marriage working for that family at the same wage. She left the work force four and a half years ago. As a non-earning partner, Joyce was guilt ridden when she used housekeeping money for her own consumption. Thus, her own personal interest was


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indistinguishable from that of her family’s. She had this to say of her new status as a housewife. I feel guilty when I spend anything on myself because now we spend much more on her toys and snacks. Although there is less money, I think it is better to stay at home after marriage so that we can look after the children and ask them to do well in school (… jaga anak, suruh anak pandai belajar sekolah.). Joyce felt strongly that education was the only avenue for upward social mobility for her children and said that she could give them everything they needed to succeed at school. However, her wish to stay at home in order to supervise the children’s schooling was tempered by the fact that she was aware that education could be expensive and so she was considering re-entering the work force. When my children are old enough to look after themselves, I want to work in order to earn money for their schooling. I also want to help my husband out. I prefer to work nights because I can do my housework in the day and I can sleep. When my husband comes home from work, he can look after the children and I can go off to work. Jenny (30 years old) Jenny was a resourceful mother of four. She was married to a lance corporal in the army and after spending ten years in an army camp in Sibu, decided to get her husband transferred out. When a top-level army officer visited the camp she set up an appointment to see him. After much persuasion and tears on her part, her husband was finally transferred to the army camp in Kuching. She had plans to own two houses. Her husband had applied for a low-cost house in Kuching so that in the future, their children could stay there when they worked in the city. Jenny was also making preparations to build another house in her husband’s village. Without her husband’s knowledge, she borrowed RM15,000 from the bank to buy Amanah Saham Bumiputra (ASB).3 She bought building materials with the money she made and slowly accumulated enough to start work on the house shortly after the interview. There was a SALCRA oil palm scheme in her husband’s village and, on his retirement, he hoped to earn a living transporting oil palm fruits to the mill. Jenny came from a family of eight children. Most of her siblings had at least eleven years of schooling. One of her younger brothers was in sixth form and another was a university student. She started wage work at seventeen. I learnt typing for a month but had no money to continue so my mother4 asked me to go out to work. My first job was as a sales-girl in a supermarket. I was paid RM190 a month but I left after only two weeks. I couldn’t stand the air-conditioning. I felt dizzy and cold all the time. I was nauseous and looked pale. I was constantly sick. I spent the next [one] year as an

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak amah [domestic worker] to my sister. She paid me a monthly wage of RM100. The work was easy because my brother-in-law did most of the cooking.

She left the work force eleven years ago and had no intention of returning. She had this to say about her change of status from a single earning daughter to being a housewife. When I was single, I had no savings. Now, I have to save a bit. Before, I could spend anyhow but now I have to think carefully before spending even RM10. But it is better to stay at home and let him work hard. Husbands have no time for children. They will be neglected if both parents work. If you just give children money but not your time, they will not obey you next time and you will have discipline problems. I hope my children will follow my brothers and sisters and become teachers and other types of professionals like doctors and go to university. However, a crack appeared and her ambivalence showed when I asked her about the next generation of women in her family. It is really up to them [her daughters] whether they decide to work or not after they marry. If my daughter-in-law wants to work, she can. It depends on what they want to do. It is not fair to ask her to stay at home because her parents spent money on their daughter’s education and they cannot get any money from her when she marries. When we mix with others in town, we want to follow them (… ikut cara orang bandar). If others have a car, we want at least a motorbike. If people go out to work, we also want to go out to work. In the last sentence above, Jenny expressed very aptly, the demonstration effect of living in the city. Bidayuh women like Jenny felt the need to emulate city dwellers in order to ‘catch up’ and not be left behind (ketinggalan zaman) in the race to become modern. For the majority of the housewives interviewed it was a relief to be out of the labour force. Their poorly paid work was dirty, boring, repetitive and exhausting. This coupled with raising a young family was all too much for the few who had tried. Barbara, for instance, returned to her previous job as a waitress in a restaurant when her baby was five months old. She worked in the evenings after her husband returned from the office. However, she found it all too gruelling as she had to do the night feeds after a hard night at work and she gave up after a month. Julia too, tried to work after the arrival of her daughter. After I had my daughter, I started to work part-time again. A friend who was a beer promoter introduced me to a job as a waitress in a coffee shop. I worked from 6:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. and earned RM7 a night. I needed the extra money and my husband’s sister helped me with my child. I worked for


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seven to eight months and had to stop because we moved here and there was no one to look after my daughter. But I’d rather not work, because working outside the house is difficult. You have to catch a bus and employers work you so hard. If you have a good job with EPF [Employees Provident Fund] it is better that you work. But if you work like me, not permanent and not in a good job, it is better not to work. Many housewives felt that those with higher education and credentials should be in the employment market. Their withdrawal from the labour market was therefore one of economic pragmatism given their low wages and their inability to afford child-care. As mentioned earlier, only three housewives (23 per cent) shared Alison’s preferred notion of a full-time home-maker and a male breadwinner.

Domestic division of labour The domestic division of labour has always been used as a measure of how egalitarian marriages are for women (Hochschild 1989, Dempsey 1997). This is particularly so for women in paid work as entry into the labour market is not just one of straight forward liberation from the confines of the domestic sphere, but a double burden if they also perform the bulk of unpaid household work for their families. It is obvious that the main difference between working mothers and housewives is that the former are engaged in wage work outside the home and the latter are not. In the previous sections we discussed how the housewives articulated this difference in terms of their decision to stay out of the labour force. The next question of course is ‘What happens in the home?’ and ‘What are the differences in terms of the domestic division of labour amongst working mothers, housewives and their village mothers?’ In order to make these comparisons, let me first explain how the nature of housework has changed from the village to the urban household and what it was like for village mothers. Research in America and elsewhere has shown that the introduction of technology into the modern home often meant an increased work-load for women (Probert 1989: 77–85). The introduction of superfine flour, manufactured cotton cloth and changes in domestic technology, such as the use of the cast-iron stove in the nineteenth century, all led to a heavier domestic work-load for women. In a similar way, the women’s move from a village household to one in the city has meant a concomittant change in lifestyle and an increase in domestic labour requirements. Both rural and urban households have differing standards of cleanliness. Sweeping and mopping were less of a priority after a hard day’s work at the farm. In addition, friends and kin in the village often visit each other and there is less control over the cleanliness of one’s surroundings when betel-nut juice is spat here and there by older visitors. Domestic refuse is also frequently thrown into the jungle at the back of the house. In the city, however, cleanliness of the home is given more emphasis through public health education campaigns and

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there is the constant bombardment of advertisements on television for various cleaning agents that would keep the house spotless. Laundry in the city is also more demanding than in the village. Being employed in the formal sector requires a different type of attire than if one is toiling in the fields. Ironing children’s school uniforms is now an added chore in the city whereas it is not in the village. In fact, ironing is almost unheard of in the village except for very special occasions. In addition, meals in the city are more varied than in the village. With health education campaigns, women are taught how to prepare nutritious meals for their families. Meals in the village consist mainly of rice with accompanying side dishes of boiled wild ferns, bamboo shoots and other vegetables grown in the padi farms. Sometimes salted fish is included. Fish, snails and frogs are added only when caught. Meat is a special treat during festive occasions. In the city, a greater variety of food is available and its purchase and preparation are more time consuming than in the village. As Paula, a housewife put it: When the children only drank milk, we [Paula and her husband] could eat simply, but now that they are growing, they need to have a balanced meal of vegetables, meat, fish and fruits. Julia, another housewife added: I used to eat meat only once a month but now that my husband’s income has improved, we can have either meat or fish everyday. In the village, leisure time is often used in work-related ways. Women make items of utility such as baskets for carrying jungle produce and padi from the farms, implements for winnowing and mats for drying padi. In the city, a woman demonstrates her house-keeping skills not only in her daily household chores but also in making small decorative items for the house. Several housewives did crochet and cross-stitch, while another quilted blankets. Mothers in the village appear to receive little help from their husbands. One single woman that I interviewed explained: Even when a woman is pregnant, she has to work in the fields. When she comes home, she has to cook, wash the clothes and fold the dried ones. Men will just say that they are tired and maybe keep an eye on the kids and that is all. June, a working mother who lived in a village near Kuching, had this to say: It is terrible to have a husband who does not help with housework. Women are often tired working in the fields, they give birth and also do [domestic] work at home. They look haggard quickly. Men go out to work and watch


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TV when they return. They will scold their wives if the housework is not finished. They will not look after their children and when they see that they [the children] have not bathed, they will again scold their wives. But women also go out to work [being employed] nowadays (Teruk jika laki tidak tolong kerja rumah… . Laki keluar kerja, balik tenggok TV. Nak marah jika kerja rumah tidak habis. Anak pun tak mahu jaga, nanti tenggok anak belum mandi, marah bini lagi. Tapi sekarang perempuan pun keluar kerja). In contrast to their mothers in the village, working mothers in the city received more help in domestic work from their spouses, children and other members of their households. However, the washing of clothes appeared to be entirely a woman’s job because in both nuclear and composite/extended households, none of the men did any laundry. In nuclear households, husbands and older children often cooked/reheated meals (especially lunch), they washed the dishes after themselves and husbands also shared the chore of buying food provisions for the family. For instance, Sue’s 13-year-old son and Nancy’s 17-year-old son cooked their own lunch. June’s 11-year-old son cooked the rice and either June or her husband cooked lunch and dinner. Jacky’s husband works flexible hours and he too, cooks the dinner. Gina’s 18-year-old daughter and her husband also managed the dinner while Tina’s husband cooked both breakfast and dinner. It must be remembered that most of these women worked shifts. Only two working mothers did the food shopping for the household entirely by themselves. Thus, it can be said that in the urban nuclear households of working mothers, there was greater equity in the domestic division of labour than their mothers’ households in the village. However, men in composite households on the whole carried less of the domestic work-load as women in these households divided the domestic chores amongst themselves. I asked Ruth, a single mother living in an extended household if she had any free time. She answered in the affirmative but when I queried further as to what she does in her leisure time, she replied that she washed clothes, cooked and looked after her children! In other words, her idea of free time was time outside of paid work. Without interviewing other household members, especially the men, it is difficult to ascertain why working mothers enjoyed greater equity in the domestic division of labour. One possible reason was that the lack of support networks (especially in the case of the urban nuclear household), made it imperative that household members pulled their weight in order to ensure the survival of all. Another likely reason was that working mothers were less willing to tolerate an inequitable domestic division of labour given that they also contributed financially to the household. This was evident in that there was greater conflict over the domestic division of labour amongst couples where the wives were in paid work rather than housewives. Mandy for instance, worked in the same place as her husband and sometimes they were on different shifts. When Mandy was on the morning shift and her husband was on the night shift, he did the cooking and other domestic chores with much loud complaining. This Mandy considered unjustifiable and hence it was a source of much domestic strife.

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Nancy similarly remarked: We quarrel a lot at home. I have to do all the housework after my work hours. Even though I arrive home late, I still have to cook dinner and do everything. I get nothing for all this work. Unlike working mothers, housewives have the least conflict with their husbands over the division of domestic labour. The housewives assumed all domestic responsibilities in exchange for their withdrawal from the labour market. Thus, the husbands of housewives were less involved with the running of the home in comparison to the husbands of working mothers. These findings are similar to those in contemporary Australia where Dempsey pointed out that some of the conditions where a husband is more likely to do more housework and child-care are as follows: his wife is engaged in wage work, the husband shares the provider status with his wife, organising alternative child-care is difficult because of the wife’s working hours and when the wife struggles for a more equitable distribution of domestic labour (Dempsey 1997: 87). Although their village mothers were in the main responsible for domestic chores, they also worked alongside the men in the fields. These housewives, on the other hand, inhabit a sphere of domesticity which was quite removed from their husbands’ world of employment. The separation of the men’s work-place from the household and the housewives dependence on their husbands’ wages was a direct result of their husbands’ entry into paid work in the city. Thus, their insecurities and anxieties about their marriages and their husbands’ fidelity were more pronounced than that of the working mothers. Marriages were happier before. Even though there were a lot of mouths to feed, there were no money problems. Food was not a problem too. Now, everything needs money. Last time, many husbands just farmed unlike now where they come out to work in the city. Now, if husbands earn a lot, some will womanise and behave like bachelors and not take care of their families. (Joyce, housewife living in the village) Janet, a single woman had this to say of her sister who was a housewife living in the village: I see the tension in my sister, when her husband returns late from work. She is worried that he has another woman in town. In the old days, both husband and wife lived and worked in the village. All the housewives lived with their husbands and children in nuclear families, with the exception of two women. One of these women also had a niece living with her. The niece had just started employment as a clerk in the city and was the daughter of an older sister who lived in the village. The other housewife lived with her widowed mother-in-law in the village and was visited by her


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husband on weekends when he returned from his job as a labourer building roads in the city. The three housewives in this study who lived in the village no longer farm like their mothers.

Management of household finances Another area of interest to feminists is the management of household finances as it is related to the question of marital power being derived from the control over money (Hochschild 1989: 220–1). Dempsey’s study of inequalities in marriage in present-day Australia, similarly discussed decision-making between couples concerning income (Dempsey 1997: 105). This was certainly the case historically, in late nineteenth century Europe when the family wage economy was prevalent. The wages of family members were pooled together to form a common fund (Tilly and Scott 1987: 105). This fund paid for household expenditure. It was also usual during that period for the wives of working-class men to hold the purse-strings of the family (ibid: 205). In low-income households, management of household funds was more a chore than a source of power for women. Supriya Singh’s study of income management by Anglo-Celtic couples in presentday Australia also found a prevalence for joint bank accounts and the different ramifications of pooling money in the marriage (Singh 1997: 112). In Javanese households, Murray (1991: 73) reported the pooling of earnings in nuclear families within multiple family groups. However, in my study, a common household fund was very unusual. On the contrary, the utilisation of and decision-making about each member’s contribution to the household could be contentious and a source of conflict. Cecilia, a single mother who lived with her parents in a large extended household of eleven, complained that her father and brother did not pay their fair share of the household utilities. On the other hand, they complained that she was overly calculating. In Cecilia’s household, gender and generational power relations came into play. It was therefore problematic to view Cecilia and the men in her household as sharing a collective goal and a common interest. In this study, I found that some household members may share some bills and not others, although they lived under the same roof. They may pay cash to each other for services rendered5 or pay in kind. This could be an acknowledged exchange or it could be an unspoken agreement.6 Thus a household was not an irreducible domestic unit with a joint common interest and status but had internal politics all of its own. In a contemporary study of Bangladeshi women working in garment factories, Kibria found that urban working-class women handed over their entire paypacket to their husbands in order to bolster the financial authority of the male heads of household. This was because males were traditionally viewed as responsible for the financial security of the family and the fact that the women in their households had to augment family income eroded men’s financial authority. In return, the women were given a small allowance to supplement housekeeping and for personal expenditure. Lower middle-class women, on the other hand, got to retain their wages because their husbands wanted to dissociate

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themselves from working-class men who needed their wives’ wages. Lower middle-class men considered it a matter of pride and honour not to take money from the women in the family (Kibria 1995: 297–301). Patriarchal family relations had different consequences for women of different classes as they negotiated the terrain of bolstering male authority at home. I was led to ask whether working mothers in my study handed over their pay-packets to their husbands in return for a small allowance, and whether the converse was true of the housewives. In other words, did the husbands of housewives hand over their pay-packets to their wives for housekeeping given that all domestic concerns were seen to be in the purview of their wives. I avoided questions on decision-making within the household as it is an area which is fraught with difficulties and current research tools are highly inadequate in uncovering the complexities involved in marital decision-making especially over money (Dempsey 1997: 109–10, Singh 1997: 97). All the working mothers in this study kept their own wages and did not relinquish them to the males in their households. In addition, seven out of the 18 who are married (39 per cent) were given a fixed housekeeping allowance of approximately one third of their husbands’ monthly wages, and for some this was not enough. The rest did not receive any housekeeping allowance from their husbands. This was in contrast to the housewives who all received a housekeeping allowance of approximately 42 per cent of their husbands’ monthly earnings.7 In other words, housewives received more of their husbands’ wages as housekeeping money. Alison was the only housewife who received her husband’s entire monthly pay-packet and returned to him about 16 per cent of his monthly earnings for cigarettes and other incidentals. Five housewives received approximately 22 per cent of their husbands’ wages while their husbands held the purse-strings of the family. Seven housewives received approximately half of their husbands’ monthly earnings for housekeeping. In other words, all housewives received a housekeeping allowance while this happened to only a minority of working wives. It also appeared that when working wives received this allowance from their husbands, it was generally smaller than that received by housewives. However, all working mothers kept their own wages and exercised discretion over their contributions to household expenditure. In Vogler and Pahl’s study of organisation of money within marriage in Britain in the mid-1980s, they found that inequalities between husband and wife were greatest in households where the housekeeping allowance prevailed. The husband had the last word on the amount of housekeeping allowance the wife should have especially when she was not earning and there was also a difference in their living standards. In their study, perception of living standards was measured by financial deprivation where respondents were asked if they had cut expenditure to make ends meet over the previous two years. In households using the housekeeping allowance system or one of the female managed systems,8 wives had experienced more intensive cuts in their living standards and had less personal spending than their husbands.


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These differences in living standards and in access to personal spending money were remarkably persistent within income groups and within social classes, which suggested that they were associated with the allocative system per se rather than with income or class. (Vogler and Pahl 1993: 78) Most of the working mothers interviewed, could not give an exact figure for their monthly contributions to the household as they were random and informal. However, a rough estimate would be that working mothers ploughed at least half and sometimes all of their monthly earnings into their household. Two working mothers said that they were living from hand to mouth and had no excess money to save each month. Many were anxious about escalating costs and an inability to save for a rainy day. Food was the single largest item of household expenditure, followed by house mortages9 and instalment payments on motorbikes/cars.10 The third item of highest expenditure was schooling for their children.11 Many looked back on their single days and lamented that they no longer felt free to spend on themselves, always putting their children’s and families’ needs above their own. Below are what the working mothers said: When I was single, after payday, I would go to the shopping complex and buy clothes. Even if something cost RM60, I would dare to buy it. But now, I only buy clothes costing RM20. I want to save for my son’s future. I would rather buy him books than spend on myself. (Linda, sales assistant) When the children were small and not yet schooling, it was easier but now as they grow, it is getting expensive – bus fares, pocket money, books. Our budget is very tight. When we first married and his salary was small, we still managed to save to buy a fridge. It is getting harder and harder to save now. (Gina, a hotel receptionist) I spend more on my son than on myself. There is milk and clothes to buy for him. (Jacky, senior sales assistant) Having a baby put up my monthly expenditure by a lot. Sometimes we don’t have enough money. We have to budget very carefully. (Mandy, hotel receptionist) As discussed in the previous chapter, it was difficult to talk of women’s wages as increasing their individual autonomy as their earnings were often submerged under the weight of their households’ and children’s financial needs. However, if working wives were compared to housewives, the former did enjoy more discretionary spending when compared to the housewives as there was more money available in a dual earning household than that of a single wage earner. In addition, where frugality was the order of the day, all married women whether in or

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out of the work-force were vulnerable to financial mismanagement by their husbands. This is true for middle-class women in Australia (Dempsey 1997: 106, Singh 1997: 67, 71). The women in my study were no different. When husbands drank and gambled excessively and ran low in funds, women had to dig deeper into their own pockets in order to make ends meet. Nancy, a kitchen hand in a restaurant, married a man who was fifteen years her senior. He worked as an engine attendant in a government department. When we first married, he played poker and he drank. Now it is Toto and Empat Ekor.12 He doesn’t give me money and doesn’t save. He spends between RM30–50 every week on gambling and is broke by the middle of the month. I then pay for the children’s pocket money. I also spend more on their clothes and other schooling expenses. When my youngest daughter was one and a half years old, I started to work planting grass on the road verge as I couldn’t get enough money from him. … [In the city] money enters easily and leaves easily. Even entering a [public] toilet, we need money (… wang senang masuk dan senang keluar. Masuk jamban pun pakai duit). Geraldine, a housewife, had a similar story to tell: When I was small, we were so poor that I remember following my mother to other people’s houses to ask for rice. When we ran out, we ate tapioca and sago. My parents controlled me when I was young. I had a boyfriend in the village but my parents said that I could not have a boyfriend. I could not go out to enjoy myself. One morning, I just decided to follow my friend to Kuching. My mother couldn’t stop me, so she advised me not to be cheated by men and become pregnant. My first job was waitressing in a pub. After a month in Kuching, I met my husband in the pub. I asked him if he was serious about me and he said that he wanted to marry me. I took him home to the village to meet my parents. We didn’t have a party in the village or anything. We only went to the registrar’s office. I was seventeen at that time. He said that I shouldn’t work anymore13 and I have stopped working for twelve years. He smokes and gambles all sorts of things – mahjong, cards. Before the youngest son was born, he owed people money here and there. I had money in hoi but I used the money to pay his debts. He cannot earn enough to support all of us. I always scold him and we often quarrel especially when he comes home late. He will just leave the house when I quarrel with him. He said to me, ‘You are very lucky to marry me because otherwise you would stay in the village.’ I tell him, ‘You are very lucky to marry me. You don’t give me money and I don’t ask.’ We used to stay with my mother-in-law and her brother. He [the latter] used to give me money but there was a lot of talk in a large family. I save money and give it back to help my husband pay [his gambling] debts but he doesn’t appreciate it. I don’t ask what he does with his money or we will quarrel.


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As housewives were totally dependent on their husbands, they felt that their husbands should not be burdened with supporting their own natal households. Housewives were less likely than working mothers to remit either money or goods to their parents. When they did, they remitted secretly, as it was a source of conflict between spouses.

Conclusion The majority of working mothers and housewives represented their decision to either participate or not participate in the labour force as a response to the imperatives of their households. This was especially the case with regards to their children’s education. Working mothers engaged in paid work in order to secure their children’s educational future and housewives withdrew from wage work for the same reason. However, housewives suffered more ambivalence in this matter than working mothers. Married working women enjoyed a more equitable distribution of domestic household chores than either their village mothers or the housewives and they quarrelled more over it. In the case of the housewives, there was no conflict concerning this, as they perceived domestic labour for their families as a fair trade-off for their withdrawal from paid work. In other words, both working wives and housewives renegotiated their gender contract in the context of a new family form, which was different from their mothers in the village. Both working wives’ partial financial dependence on their husbands and the housewives’ total dependence on their husbands made them vulnerable to divorce and abandonment. Not only were they less likely to remit money or goods back to their natal households, but they were likely to return to live in their natal households in the village for a time when a marriage broke down. Alternatively, they may send their children back to be cared for by village kin. They walked a tight-rope between two worlds – the village and the city, between independence as single women and partial/total dependence as wives. Up until now, we have met some of the women, in the context of what they said about rural–urban migration, paid work, marriage, children and family. In the next chapter, I want to bring all the fragments together in order that four women can talk of their lives in a more holistic manner.

10 Holding their own Four women and their stories

In the previous chapters, I have integrated an analysis of women’s experience of employment with their attitudes towards marriage and the demands of their households. I have also attempted to show the internal workings of their households and how their experiences of work, family and gender relations have changed from those of their village mothers. In this chapter, I focus on four women in order to locate their personal struggles in the context of the expanding opportunities facing them and their families, and the moves that they take to reinvent themselves in response to these. Their migration for wage work in the city has given them new possibilities and yet low wages and urban motherhood has its own constraints. Two of the women in this chapter are single mothers. One was abandoned as a pregnant single woman and the other was divorced after the birth of her third child. The other two are married working mothers. Although these four women share some commonalities with the other women in this study, their narratives are selected not because they are typical or representative. On the contrary, they are presented here in order to show the diversity and the richness of their lives. So often in studies of change, structures and transformative forces in society are given precedence over the perceptions and experiences of social actors. As Giddens rightly criticised: ‘… social actors are often perceived as either “cultural dopes” or as mere “bearers of a mode of production” ’ (Giddens 1979: 71). Throughout this book, I have attempted to show that the women I interviewed are not merely passive pawns shaped by external forces but are also active agents in choosing the paths that they take. However, I do not wish to overemphasise the degree of their agency. Abu-Lughod (1990a) warned of the tendency to romanticise our research participants and to reconstruct them as voluntaristic and capable of self-determination. This is particularly so in order to compensate for the common portrayal of an essentialised, passive, victimised Third World subject. One way to overcome the problem of an essentialised and reified subject is to ground the actor socially and culturally as suggested by Ortner. Agency is not an entity that exists apart from cultural construction (nor is it a quality one has only when one is whole, or when one is an individual). Every culture, every subculture, every historical moment, constructs its own forms

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of agency, its own modes of enacting the process of reflecting on the self and the world and of acting simultaneously within and upon what one finds there. (ibid: 186) In previous chapters, I have fragmented the women’s narratives into the different themes and issues for analysis. Here I want to reintegrate the lives of each of these four women in order to show how they have to walk a tight-rope between acting and responding to external material realities. The narratives of these four women demonstrate in no uncertain terms that life is not simply a clash of opposing monoliths, such as paid work and domestic work, autonomy and dependence. The multiple layers of contradictions are held in tension with each other and are both cause and consequence of the decisions that they make. Ruth, a divorced working mother, had to make do for the moment and yet is stretching the limits of what is possible by defying the law, in order to achieve the longterm goal of house ownership. Kylie submitted to her responsibilities as wife and mother but resisted her dependence by engaging in informal trade in order to generate an income. Cecilia, a single mother, is in a dominated position as a maid in a middle-class household and yet she has power over others as a source of monetary loans in her village. Agnita was an abused housewife before she rose to become, in her own words, a ‘modern woman – brave and not stupid like last time’. We see here that women’s ‘agency’ encompasses a range of practices from enhancing material conditions of life to transformation of self. It is precisely because of this multiplicity of projects and the contradictions in the women’s lives which these narratives portray, that I have chosen them. However, in giving the reader a better sense of the complex women behind the ‘voices,’ I tread on dangerous ground. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, ethnographies are plagued with problems of positionality and authenticity. These difficulties become even more acute, given the privileged space that I wish to allocate to their narratives. These first person accounts are transcribed and translated1 from the interviews, but the questions I used to elicit these women’s narratives have been edited out. These stories all begin with a description of their natal families, and this is simply because that was how I started each interview. Because of the sheer volume of transcribed material from the two-hour individual interviews, I have ruthlessly edited any repetition, paraphrasing, pauses and back-tracking. By smoothing the creases and reorganising the order in which some of the material appears, so that it reads better, it is inevitable that I have imposed my writing style on the narratives. Although I edited, I did not add my own words in order to change the sense and meaning that the women conveyed. With these four women, the good rapport established during the interviews led to a very engaging situation where they opened a window into their lives more fully than others. Ruth for instance, was the participant I mentioned in Chapter 3 who asked me why I was ‘interested in the stories of poor people.’ Kylie and Cecilia were also closer to me in age than a lot of the other women I interviewed. In addition, Cecilia’s employer of twelve years is a white middle-class woman.

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She was therefore familiar and relaxed when interacting with Western-educated women. I knew Agnita through the SFPA. I took up office space in the SFPA building for five months during the research and Agnita was frequently there because of matters related to the Women’s Programme which was organised by the Association. As my husband worked in a hospital, I was also a resource that Agnita tapped into when she needed advice on who to consult, and how to go about it, in the medical network. The narratives demonstrate how these four women use their knowledge of their society to maximise their opportunities, and negotiate the terrain of their everyday lives in order to hold their own in the world they live in. As Giddens (1979: 73) remarked, ‘every competent actor has a wide-ranging, yet intimate and subtle, knowledge of the society of which he or she is a member.’

Making do, stretching limits Ruth (31 years old) [Ruth was a waitress in a coffee-shop. She met her husband in the city and married him when she was seventeen years old. She was thirty one at the time of the interview, divorced with three daughters and lived with her sister in the city. Her sister built a house on a piece of land given by the government as part of a squatter resettlement scheme in the city.] My mother had ten children and I’m the seventh. The youngest in the family is mentally handicapped and lives with his adopted mother in the village. My father died when I was 6 years old and my mother never remarried. We were very poor. My eldest sister and brother never went to school. My third brother was lucky because he was the first to go to school. Now he works with Shell in Miri. All my older sisters are married and they live in the village. Brother number six is a construction worker. I never went to school because we were poor. The sister under me spent six years in primary school. I’m closest to her and I now live with her. Her husband is Chinese and he works as a plumber with a daily wage of RM25. My younger brother is learning under him and he also lives with my sister. My sister has two boys – one over a year old and the other only one month old. My mother is also living with my sister now and helping her with her new baby. My mother is over 70 years old and she moves amongst her children. She goes wherever she is needed. I have three daughters aged 11, 9 and over a year old. So there are ten of us all together in the house. I have been separated from my husband for over a year now. He is Indian and a drunkard.2 We quarrelled the whole time. He did nothing but sleep. I had to work through my pregnancy and I had to leave the kids at home. He never paid the bills and when he didn’t pay the rent for four months, the landlord chased us out of the house. We moved in with my sister but he could not get along with her, and he finally left us. He has never come back to see us and yet he lied to his mother that he gave us RM200–300 every month.

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Life is very hard. My brother-in-law earns about RM800–1000 a month, my younger brother earns RM600 and I earn only RM310. I give my sister only RM50 a month for food. My own bus fare to and from work already costs RM40. My daughters go to school in a van and that cost RM43 a month. They don’t take lunch to school so I give them some pocket-money and that adds up to another RM20 a month. I bought a wardrobe costing RM580. I’m now paying RM65 every month for nine months. I never buy any clothes for my children and myself except on big festivals for example, Gawai [harvest festival], Christmas and I spend less than RM40 on clothes for myself. I have to be very careful with money as the children always need things for school. I hardly give any money to my mother although she also helps me with my youngest daughter. When I can save a bit, I give her RM10–20, the most is RM20 and that, only once in three months. My sister really helps me a lot. My younger brother is hopeless. He spends all his money on drink. I will not be able to stay with my sister for long. I will eventually have to move out to a place of my own. Her children are young now, but they will grow and she will have more. Soon there wouldn’t be room for all of us. I cannot afford to buy anywhere so I built a house3 on government land, hoping that when the government wants the land back, they will give me another piece of land in exchange or something as compensation. My two older brothers, (the one in Miri and the construction worker) helped me with RM600 and I borrowed another RM200 from my towkay [boss/employer]. RM50 is deducted from my pay every month for the loan. With RM800, I built the house with the help of my younger brother and a nephew.4 My nephew is now living in the house with his wife and children. My dream is that one day I will have a proper house for my children and me. So you see, I must work. Although I would prefer part-time work so that I can look after my children, I really need the money. This job is good because I start early at 7:30 a.m. and finish early at 3:30 p.m. I get free meals too, except for dinner. The towkay is very good to me and I also give him good work. Our job depends a lot on the towkay. The good ones will give us food, clothes, crockery, empty containers. I don’t get involved with the quarrels of others in my work-place. I cannot imagine myself not working. I have worked since I was 14 years old. I didn’t like farming because I cannot stand the sun and the hard work. My mother and brother encouraged me to work in the city. I had no money to buy clothes and so I left the village. I started off as an amah [servant] of my sister’s friend for RM80 a month. It was quiet and lonely and I didn’t know how to get around town. I also didn’t like housework much. I left after a month to join my sister, washing dishes in the hospital canteen. I was paid RM100 a month and the towkay provided food. My sister5 and I rented a room and I worked there for three years. I really enjoyed the freedom then. I married my husband at 17. We merely exchanged rings and had a small party [reception] in my village. My husband never gave me any money so I had to return to work. My former towkay also had another coffee-shop in Padungan and he asked me to work there. I made drinks in the coffee-shop for a year and was paid RM150 a month. When

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we were first married, we stayed with my mother-in-law but later we moved to a rented place. I had to quit my job because it was too far to get to work. I next worked in a rattan furniture factory. I had to cut and clean rotan for RM5 a day and meals were not provided. I ran away6 after a month and never went back. I went to ask the towkay in a coffee-shop near my house for a job and I worked there as a waitress for three months. I earned RM150 a month. The towkay went bankrupt and I lost the job. I was pregnant and so I stopped for over a year. When my baby was 6 months old, I started working again. I returned to my old towkay in the hospital canteen. My wages went up to RM250 a month and I worked from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. I worked there for five years. I really enjoyed myself there as I had lots of friends to talk to. My husband was never at home and my mother-in-law looked after my baby. I stopped again and had my second child and went back to work when she was 3 months old. I worked in a factory packing pepper and earned RM5 a day. It was very dirty work. My body was covered with pepper dust. I worked there three months and then quit. That is why I don’t like factory work. The pay is low and food is not provided. Next, I went to work as a kitchen hand in a noodle restaurant. I earned RM180 a month but my hands and feet could not stand being soaked in water for so long; so I left after six months. I found another job as a waitress in a chicken rice shop and was paid RM200. The work was easy, we had free meals and the hours were not long. I worked for a year but there was no increase in pay so I left for another job as a coffee-shop waitress that paid RM260 a month. I only stayed eight months as I didn’t like the fussy towkay. I had no time for my children, no time for housework and I was pregnant with my third, so I left. After my third child was born, I had no one to look after the children so I started to work part-time, during the weekends. I went back to the noodle restaurant and worked as a kitchen hand from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. for RM25 a day. I worked there for three months and when my mother came to help us, I started working full-time in my current job. I have been in this coffee-shop for a year now and my wages have moved from RM290 to RM310. We have to continue working even if we have money because money goes so quickly. Even if our husband is responsible, we should still work because we don’t have to ask him for money for everything. I also don’t like to stay at home because it is lonely. I must go out to work. This is the reason why I like the city. It is easy to find work in the city. In the city, you know many things and have many types of experiences. But it is not so bad in the village. I go home once a year to my brother’s place. I don’t take the children as it is a two-hour walk from the bus stop. I take them biscuits, sugar, chicken and vegetables. In the village, they have land, rice and can grow things. They sell a little to get some money. Although they are not rich, they are happy. When they sell their crops, they can save. I work in town and I cannot save a cent. When you are poor, it is all the same wherever you are. You don’t die of starvation but you struggle and live to see another day. When I had to transfer my children to the primary school near my sister’s house, I met the principal. I really look up to him. He has two sons and two daughters. They are highly educated and have good jobs. I think it is nice to

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have two sons and two daughters. The daughters will be good to their aged mother and can also do the house-work. The boys can be big brothers to their sisters and can be the head of the family and support the family. Men are strong and can do anything. I will not force my children into anything. They have to try their luck in the world, in their job and marriage. I don’t think of the future. I live from day to day. I will go mad if I think too much. I will let my daughters make their own choices. I will tell them not to choose a drunkard for a husband, like me. He must also not be choosy in the type of work he does. He must be hardworking – not work one day and rest two days. A good wife is like me – not choosy in her job and hard-working. If the woman is not working, she should stay at home and look after her own children. It is not good for our children to be looked after by people not related to us. They will not be close to us if we are not with them always. Last time, marriages were match-made by parents. There was no such thing as free choice. Yet people were married until death. Nowadays, there are lots of problems: the wrong job, wrong behaviour, jealousy, financial problems. I sometimes feel that I have been wrong. I go out on my own and I never ask my husband for permission before leaving the house. Husbands can be jealous when you do this.

From Ruth’s account, she enjoyed the freedom of her years as a single working woman, living with her sister in a rented room in the city. After her marriage at seventeen, her work history had the characteristics of many working mothers, whose entry and departure from the labour market are punctuated by the needs of their families. She was ambivalent if life in the city was indeed better when talking of her brother in the village, but she also recognised the fact that she could not farm and it was easier to get a job in the city. Like Alison, whom I discussed in the previous chapter, Ruth started paid work in the city at fourteen and imbibed the ‘non-Bidayuh’ notion of an ideal family of female home-maker and male bread-winner. However, she found this model of an ideal family increasingly untenable given her experience of marital failure. Ruth’s narrative gives us a glimpse into the harsh realities of life for a single mother who has lost the financial security of marriage and had to make ends meet without any state welfare assistance. Under such circumstances, the importance of support from the other women in her family, namely, her mother and sister cannot be overstated. Her regrets at her own assertiveness and independence which she regarded as contributing to her marital failure, reinforces the second wave western feminist point that an adequate wage is critical for a woman to be able to make choices. With a labour market segmented by gender, and the low wages that she earned even when working full-time, her experience has been shaped by the intersection of class and gender. By building an illegal structure on state land, she made a calculated move and hoped to be compensated with another piece of land in order to build her own house or else be given a low-cost house. At her wage level, the cheapest subsidised low-cost house built by the state government is still beyond her

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Women workers, migration and family in Sarawak 7

reach. This move could back-fire and the squatter house could be demolished without compensation, but it was a risk which she was willing to take as she had little to lose and much to gain. Her strategy of building a dwelling on state land was based on her knowledge of the ways in which the government often compensated squatters. In other words, state intervention in assisting the poor with housing was critical for women like Ruth. Her narrative was one of making do as a poor single mother and yet pushing the limits of what was possible in terms of a shelter for her family. In idealising the headmaster’s children who were well-educated and comparing them to her own, she was drawing on aspects of middle class culture. In giving her daughters what they needed for them to choose a life for themselves, she was articulating the hope that they would not choose a life like her own, but that of the well-educated children of the headmaster. However, she was aware of the material and financial constraints in her way. Ruth’s narrative was one of ambivalence about whether she would have been better-off in the village or in the city although I believe she would have migrated nevertheless. The initial excitement of meeting people of different races in the city led to marriage with an Indian and she was ambivalent as to how she had contributed to her marital break-up.

Submission and resistance Kylie (38 years old) [Kylie worked as a housekeeper in an association which had rooms for rent. She lived with her husband and children in a squatter resettlement scheme in the city. Kylie was 38 years old at the time of the interview.] My parents still live in the village but none of us live with them. There are six of us. We are all girls except for the youngest. My brother is also the only unmarried one left. My eldest sister’s husband is in the Field Force and they live in the army camp. She finished Form 3. My second sister studied only up to Primary 6. She is married to a policeman and they now live in Perak. They are both housewives. I’m third and I stopped after Form 3 as I failed the exam and could not continue. The fourth sister is the cleverest and finished sixth form. She is a staff nurse in the Sarawak General Hospital and her husband works for Shell in Brunei. He earns 7,000 Bruneian dollars and they are rich. They have just bought a house near the airport. Her husband is part-Chinese and part-Indian. Sister number five is a policewoman married to a Kadazan policeman and they live in Sabah. She stopped school after Form 5. My youngest brother is a supervisor in the company that has the contract to run the canteen in the airport. He too finished Form 5. My husband studied only up to Primary 6 and he is a driver with FAMA.8 He earns RM1,200 a month and gets more if he travels out of town. My eldest son finished Form 5 and has been working for one and a half years as a telephonist in Shell, Bintulu. His salary is RM2,500 a month. He sends us RM500 a month but my husband said that we should not touch his money. We save it for him. My

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daughter is 16 and has a small scholarship. We are also keeping the scholarship money for her. She wants to be a teacher or a lawyer. I want her to study to as high as possible and get a good, permanent job with the government. My youngest daughter is still in primary school. She is 11. They are both very good girls. They do the laundry during the weekends so I have time to relax. One son and two daughters are enough. It is hard to support too many, especially if they are good in their studies. I earn RM400 a month but I get tips on top of that. In a good month, I can earn RM600. I normally save RM100 a month in the bank but if I get RM600, I would save RM200 for that month. My husband is good. He doesn’t drink or gamble and gives me RM500 for housekeeping every month. He pays all the bills9 and also for his motorbike. He took a loan from the government for that and his salary is deducted by RM55 every month. He also buys all the meat and fresh vegetables. I use the housekeeping money for dry provisions, toiletries, bus fares for the two girls and whatever they need in school. I also spend RM100 of my own wages on food for the family. In addition, I spend RM100–200 on myself. This includes bus fares to and from work and sometimes clothes for me and the children. They are more expensive nowadays compared to when they were small. Now they want to wear nice clothes and shoes. I started to work at 19. I didn’t want to be dependent on my parents and I couldn’t stand the sun and the rain in farming. I can only do light work. My first job was as a waitress at the Holiday Inn. I got the job through an advertisement in the newspaper. I worked together with three or four of my classmates and it was great! I started at RM270 but at the end of two years, I was earning RM350. I married the year I came to the city and when I had my baby I had to stop as there was no one to look after him. I stopped work for 13 years and I regret it. If I had been able to continue, I would have lots of money by now. When I wasn’t working, I sold all kinds of things – pots and pans, crockery, sarongs, gold jewellery and second-hand Triumph bras from Singapore. I had to wash and iron them first. They were of very good quality. I sold the pots and pans and crockery from catalogues and they were popular with housewives. I took sarongs, gold jewellery and the Triumph bras from traders in the city. I used to stand outside factory gates on pay-day and wait for the girls to come out. The sarongs and bras sold well with them. The sarongs sold for RM18 each if they paid cash and RM24 if they paid by instalments. The bras cost RM6 each by cash and RM12 by instalments. Gold jewellery, I sold to neighbours and friends. One year, I sold RM20,000 worth of gold and I received a RM2,000 commission from the towkay at the end of that year. I hardly sell anything now. I don’t have the time. Six years ago, a friend asked me if I wanted a job as housekeeper at the —— headquarters10 and I said yes. I have been there ever since. The work is not heavy. It is quite relaxing and I can read the newspaper every morning. I start at 8:00 a.m. and I return at 3:00 p.m. At the end of the month I finish later, sometimes at 5:00 p.m. and even 6:00 p.m. but that is rare. The only thing that I don’t like about my job is that I have to ask the tenants for rent at the end of the month and I feel shy to do that. I don’t like to ask but if I don’t ask, they don’t pay.

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I think a woman should work. It is easier if you work. It is hard to depend on your husband. I will advise my daughters to work or their education will be wasted if they just stay at home. I definitely want to work. It is boring to sit at home especially when I no longer have small children. You don’t see a cent sitting at home. If you have your own money it is easy to buy things that you like, for example, clothes. If your husband has a big salary, even better. When they both earn, they can buy a house, a car or anything they want. I go home to see my parents in the village at least once a month for one or two nights each time. When it is Gawai [harvest festival], we stay four to five nights. We go home as a family every time. I spend RM60 each trip as I buy my parents biscuits, sugar, cakes, Milo and sometimes soap. I don’t give them any money because my sister who is a nurse supports them. They grow mainly pepper and a little rice. They also grow some vegetables around the pepper garden. When I leave, they give me fruits. I like village life a lot. I hope to build my own house in the village when my husband retires. Land in town is small but there is lots of land in the village. A house in the village is not expensive. It can be built with RM8,000–10,000. For RM30,000, it will be a very good house. In the village, the air is clean and water from the mountains is free. Life in the village is easy. In town, we have to pay for everything. My house11 here is on stilts because when it rains, it floods as this is swampy ground. Both Ruth and Kylie were working mothers but financially the difference between them could not be more stark. Kylie’s circumstances were far superior to that of Ruth as a single mother. Although both their total household incomes were comparable, the number of dependents were more than three times in Ruth’s household when contrasted with Kylie’s. Ruth was in paid work for survival but, for Kylie, it improved her spending power and provided extras for herself and her daughters. Kylie talked of building a second weekender house in the village while Ruth was defying the law and taking risks for a roof over her head. For Kylie, a house in the village was a place where she and her husband could eventually retire to, as it was cheaper to live in the village with a meagre state pension which her husband was entitled to as a state employee. Kylie regretted her withdrawal from the labour market for thirteen years but in spite of her domestic responsibilities, she was able to circumvent her dependence on her husband through her informal trading. She submitted to her gender role as wife and mother in the early years of her marriage but found enterprising alternatives to earn an income. It was interesting that Kylie represented her years of informal trading as non-work because it did not guarantee her a fixed and regular monthly income. Unlike Ruth, Kylie did not harbour any ambivalent views about a woman being independent and assertive. On the contrary, she disapproved of a life of domesticity when child-care was no longer necessary. Kylie was ambitious for her daughters and wanted them to have a career for themselves while Ruth’s hopes for her daughters’ future was constrained by the reality of her circumstances.

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Dominated and dominant Cecilia (38 years old) [Cecilia was 38 years old and had been working as a domestic worker with a white, middle-class woman for twelve years. She was a single mother and lived with her parents in an extended household in a village on the outskirts of Kuching. She commuted daily by bus to her employer’s home.] I am the eldest in a family of ten children and I started work as a maid when I was 13 years old. My father was a policeman and my mother grew rice. My father could only support us up to primary school. The youngest two in the family were the luckiest as they finished Form 3. When I first started work as a maid with a Foochow [one of the Chinese dialect groups] family, I was paid only RM30 and I stayed with them for five years. At the end of that time, I earned RM70. I never saw any of that money because every cent went into supporting my family. I was very tired at the end of five years and returned to help my parents in the kampung [village] for a year. A friend then introduced me to work as a maid with an Orang Ulu family. I received a monthly salary of RM120 and I worked there for a year. I decided to try something different and was introduced to work as a tally clerk in a sawmill. I earned RM6 a day plus overtime until 9 p.m. I could take home between RM200–300 a month. I had to measure and record the length and width of planks. I met my daughter’s father, who was an Orang Ulu, in the sawmill and we stayed together for three years. I was 24 years old when I became pregnant. He fled when I told him. I was devastated and didn’t know what to do. I was stuck with a baby and no husband. Nowadays, we know what to do. We can go to the clinic. All we need is money. I returned to my parents in the village and had my daughter there. I stayed for a year in the village before I came out to work again. This time, I worked in a cooking oil factory. I filled bottles with oil and was paid RM5 a day. I left after a few months because I couldn’t stand the smell of oil all the time. Since then, I have been working here. I have been working for Helen for twelve years. My sister used to work here but she stopped when she married her husband who is a soldier. They now have seven children. I start at 8:30 a.m. and finish at 12:30 p.m. I started with a daily wage of RM5.50 for half a day’s work. Now I take home RM360 plus EPF. Helen is very good. She knows when to give me a raise especially when inflation is catching up. The only trouble is that I waste a lot of time catching the bus. It is nice to work in a home especially if the employer is not fussy. We can work at our own pace. Helen doesn’t complain much. She just eats whatever I cook. We follow our own schedule and we are not rushed. If we work in a noodle or a biscuit factory, the working hours are long. I had wanted to be a cook or a kitchen assistant but when I was 19 I didn’t know how to get a job like that and there was no one to help me. I earn a living in two ways. One by working outside and another by working inside – my own work of farming. I work on my vegetable garden every day when

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I come home from Helen’s. I sell my vegetables at my sister’s work-place.12 My customers pay me at the end of every month and I can collect more than RM10 a month. I also have a small food business – a joint venture with two friends. We make lemang13 and kueh [cakes]. One friend looks for the bamboo in the jungle. The other friend cleans the bamboo and I scrape the coconut. We cook the rice and stuff the bamboo together. I scrape the coconut by hand and we use 30–40 coconuts at a go. We take orders and each of us can earn RM60– 70 each time. I also make bak chang14 for sale. I also do direct sales of Avon and Revell products. I have been selling Revell for two years and only started Avon a year ago. When the products from one company is not selling, I will switch company. I earn between RM40–100 from the two products but I can’t get this amount every month. It just means that I can get my own cosmetics free. I use the money I earn to buy the products so I don’t have to dig into my own pocket. I also get an income from lending money to my friends and relatives. I lend them small sums of RM10–100 and get RM2 for every RM10 (sepuluh dua). I can get between RM150–300 a month from this. I am very careful with my money. I don’t spend anyhow. I have to target carefully every month. I have to keep tab of people who owe me money including relatives. That’s the way I am. Ours is a big household. My father has retired now and does small contracting work. He gets a pension of RM400 a month and all together he can get between RM1,000–2,000 a month. My mother doesn’t farm any more but babysits for sister number seven who works in the noodle factory. She sends her daughter everyday to my mother before going to work. Brother number four is a wood-cutter and a labourer earning a daily wage of RM30–35 when there is work. His wife is also a Bidayuh but from a different kampung [village] and they have four boys aged 13, 8, 7 and 3. My niece from sister number three also stays with us. She is 16 [Form 4], a year older than my daughter and they go to school together. They are good company for each other and she is like my own daughter. I help my father to support her. I will also depend on her when I grow old. A big family living together is difficult. Everybody uses water, electricity and telephone but nobody pays. I have no husband but I still have to pay. The bills alone cost me RM130. I contribute another RM60 to the kitchen (belanja dapur). My daughter’s Maths tuition costs RM35 [a month] and I give her RM1 a day for pocket money. Her bus fare to school is RM22 a month and mine to work is RM38. I bought an insurance policy for my daughter’s education15 and I pay RM137 every three months until she is twenty-one. As she grows, I need more and more money. I hope she will be a nurse, a clerk or secretary – something with a good salary (gaji lumayan). I will continue working for Helen until my daughter gets a job after Form 5. I want her to continue working even after marriage and I will look after her children, that is, if my son-in-law welcomes me. I also want to be a farmer, planting vegetables, maize, roselle trees. I will employ others to dig and prepare the ground (cangkul) for me. That is why I like to stay in the

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village. If you plant padi, you can plant maize and other vegetables in the padi farm. You can mix and plant them together at the same time but harvest at different times and get profit (peruntungan). Town people only have the town and all they can do is to roam the shopping complexes. In the village, we have the village and we can go to town if we want to. I will marry again but only if he works for the government (kerja perintah). There is [ financial] security (ada jaminan). Ever since I was 19, there were many men who wanted to marry me. Just last month, I had a suitor. If I have to marry a farmer or a labourer, I’ll say: ‘No. Thank you.’ Many people have asked me but I’m not interested unless it is someone better-off. I also don’t want to leave my daughter yet. My neighbour did just that. She went off with her new husband and left her daughter with her mother. She is the same age as my daughter and they used to be good friends. She was caught shoplifting and is now in the rehabilitation centre.

Cecilia’s narrative is a good illustration of the work of women who lived in the village and participated in the labour market in the city. Her work ranged from unpaid domestic labour at home, market gardening, cooking delicacies and cakes for sale, trading from catalogues and money lending to wage work in the city. The myriad of income-generating activities doubled Cecilia’s monthly wages as a domestic worker and, by all accounts, she was a successful woman in the village, whom others went to for short-term loans. Unlike Kylie, Cecilia did not represent her other activities as non-work. On the contrary, she was very clear when she said that she demarcated the ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ As an unmarried single mother, she had found independence and financial self-sufficiency and was reluctant to enter into marriage again. The men in her household were envious of her success and criticised her for being shrewd and calculating. In response, she argued that she had to account for every cent of her money as she had no husband to fall back on and had to ensure financial security for herself and her daughter. She also complained that they did not pay their share of household bills. The gender relations of power between Cecilia and the men in her household had shifted from the time when she first returned from the city ‘stuck with a baby and no husband’ to the present, when she is a woman of independent means. Cecilia’s support of her niece was also an investment for her old-age. In a situation where there was no state pension, investing in the young in order that they would take care of the old was a strategy employed by most. When her daughter becomes economically independent, Cecilia would be an employer of others in her village to work her farm. Although her money lending activities enabled her to generate revenue, she was also envied by others as it was a source of power. She was dominated in her class position as a maid in a middle class household, but she also dominated others in her village as a money-lender and a potential employer.

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From abused wife to modern woman Agnita (36 years old) [Agnita worked as a cleaner with the city council. She was 36 years old at the time of the interview and lived with her husband and children in a squatter resettlement area in the city.] My parents had five of us and I’m the youngest. The first three only went to primary school. Brother number four is lucky because he was supported by an Iban family who reared pigs. He worked for them and they sent him to school. He is the only one to complete Form 5. He now works for a bank and is married to an Iban clerk. He is the one who introduced me to my first job in Kuching. I didn’t complete Form 3 because we were too poor. I was always in the top ten in class when I was in primary school. I wanted to study very much but my parents were not keen on education. My parents thought that education would bring laziness and we would not work on the farm. I remember an incident when I was in Primary 4. My father was angry with me and threw my textbooks into the bathroom. When I see my old classmates who are nurses and teachers now, I feel so sad. I sometimes think that I was born into the wrong family. Now I ask my children to study hard and not waste the chance I never had. I stayed a year in the kampung before coming to Kuching. There is no money in the kampung and I wanted to experience life in town. My brother found me a job as a waitress in a hotel. I enjoyed my work there and I met many friendly customers. I earned RM300 a month and I worked for two years. I stopped when I married at 19. I met my husband in the pub of the hotel. I was a housewife for ten years. After my youngest daughter was born, I learnt tailoring. My husband works as a cleanliness supervisor for the city council. He is the person to contact if you want your rubbish collected. He earns RM1,200 a month and also sells Diamond Interest.16 I don’t know how much he earns from that. Seven years ago, my husband introduced me to work as a cleaner in the city council office. I had a starting salary of RM350 a month but it has risen to RM750. I don’t like it as it is non-stop, repetitive work. After two months, I asked to be allowed to sweep the streets instead. My time is more flexible outside the office. Everyone advised me against it. They thought I was crazy to give up working in an air-conditioned office and be out in the hot sun. I start work at 7:00 a.m. and finish at 10:30 a.m. I usually go home to cook lunch for my children after that. I start again at 1:00 p.m. and end at 3:30 p.m. We usually don’t do any work at that time because it is too hot. We have to be there, so we just sign in and sit there. We are moved around and work in rotation. I sometimes have to clean the lobby and the offices of the city council building. At other times it is the public toilet in a hawker centre. I also take in sewing and can earn RM400–500 a month extra from that. During festive seasons, I can earn RM1,000 from my tailoring. I also sell Avon and earn another RM250 a month.

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My husband gives me RM350 a month for housekeeping. I spend RM300 on my monthly marketing, another RM300 for dry provisions and Sunday lunch after church. My eldest daughter gets RM60 a month pocket-money. My second son and the youngest daughter get RM5 each a week. I give them extra when we go to church. I spend about RM100 a month on personal care productsand cosmetics. I love lipsticks. I have 32 lipsticks and six in the car alone. I finished paying for my old car three years ago. I pay for the petrol and the car maintenance is high because it is old. My husband pays the bills [water, electricity and telephone]. He also pays for my eldest daughter’s Maths and English tuition. He pays the house mortgage of RM480 a month. My brother [the one who worked in the bank] used to stay here. It was squatters land but eventually the government issued the land title to my brother for RM15,000 payable in ten years. He transferred it to my husband’s name and we built this house three years ago. My husband was eligible for a government housing loan of RM60,000. I have my own house in my village. It is double-storey – brick and cement on the ground floor and wooden planks on the first floor. It cost me RM25,000 to build and I paid for it by cash. I make a day-trip to my house in the village once a week to clean it. At the same time, I bring my mother dry food provisions like sugar, Milo and biscuits. I spend about RM100 a month on such trips home. Although I want a better job, I think it is hard to find anything else as I don’t have any qualifications. This job is my major source of income. At least every month I receive a salary. If I don’t work, where do I get money? I am much happier working than when I was a housewife. When I stay at home, I feel dizzy. The time at home passes slowly. When my youngest daughter was 3, I asked my husband to find me a job. When I first started to work, my husband took me to work and back. He was always late in fetching me because our working hours were different and I had to wait for him. After a year, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I told him that I wanted to buy a car. I didn’t want to ride a motorbike because I felt exposed and unprotected. My husband said that I should buy a car only after I had learnt how to drive but I bought a car anyway. I will always remember that day in May 1994. A friend took me to the Land Transport Department and I registered myself as a learner and later sat for my written test and passed it the first time. I found a driving tutor and after every lesson, I would practise driving in my own car. When I had my driving licence, I felt free and could go out to meet my friends. That was the turning point in my life. I was very miserable when I first married. My husband was very bad to me. He didn’t love me and didn’t show any love to me. He was a drunk. He drank everyday, even on working days and didn’t come home until midnight or even 3:00 a.m. He would shout and scold me even before he entered the house. He would drag things out in the past and accuse me of all kinds of wrong-doings, even when I had not done anything bad. He knew that he had done wrong and so before I could say anything, he attacked me first. He was also a very jealous man and never allowed me out on my own. I was so unhappy that I took my two children (the youngest wasn’t born yet) to his parents’ house in his kampung. They chased me out and said to me: ‘If you can’t stay with him, just leave him.’

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I had just enough for my bus fare back to my own village. After listening to my story, my parents told me to be patient. He came to get me and started accusing me of being a bad wife. I want to cry even as I think of this now because it brings me back to those days. I didn’t know that I had rights. I didn’t realise that if we didn't do anything wrong, our husbands have no right to scold us. There was nobody to teach me, my mind was closed and I was scared. I wasn’t working and I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know anything. I was like a frog under a coconut shell (… saperti katak bawah tempurung). A working woman has more friends, her world is bigger and she is more knowledgable. Now, I’m very different. I joined the Women’s Programme17 and I attend seminars and learn a lot of new things. I have more confidence to mix with people, to approach people. I also know the law. Last time, when my husband accused me wrongly, I just kept quiet and when I’m very sad, I cry. The more I obeyed and was scared of him, the more he stepped on me. I thought about it and worked out that I must do something. We women must not be like those in the olden days. We have a right to develop ourselves whether we are educated or not. If we have a little education, we must build on it bit by bit. It doesn’t mean that when we become wives, our husbands can control us all the time. I tell you. These men – you must not always obey them. I dare to fight. I told my husband frankly that I will go to seminars, meet my friends and I don’t care if he likes it or not, agrees or disagrees or not. If I didn’t do anything wrong, I am not afraid. There are laws in our country. I have taught my daughter to stand up to her father when he accuses her. I told her not to be afraid if she is right. Just answer back but do not shout as he is still your father. She has to stand her ground and show him that she is right. I told her not to marry young. There are a lot of opportunities to improve ourselves nowadays and a lot to study. I always tell her that we must develop ourselves – don’t look back to the old stuff. Look forward. My daughter was interested to learn how to use the computer. I talked to my husband and he said that it was a waste of money. He asked if I had too much money to fling around. I said to my daughter: ‘It is useless to ask that old man’ I sent her for computer classes after school and in the school holidays. Now she is doing very well. When she obtained six distinctions in her Form 3 examination, we bought her a computer. When I saw her progressing and using the computer all the time, I became interested. So I registered myself in a school and learnt how to use Excel, Microsoft Word and Powerpoint. I can now use the computer to write letters. I joined a women’s self-help group where I live and last year, I organised a Gawai Closing Night. We had a live band and the door fee was RM1. It was highly successful and everyone wanted one again this year. I am trying something new this time. I wrote letters on my computer and took them to supermarkets and I now have five hampers in my house for the lucky draw that night. I feel that I am very lucky to be what I am, not like before. Ten years ago, I only focussed on the kids. I didn’t know how to dress, didn’t know anything about make-up. Now, I’m different. I read magazines, I go to supermarkets. I want to be a modern woman. I am learning to be brave and not stupid like last

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time. I know how to stand up for myself. My friends are not selfish and they taught me a lot of things about relationships. Ten years ago, I would not have agreed to talk to you. Now I feel ready to help others. My husband has changed these past few years. He is a bit better, more modern. Not like before. This is because I teach him and share with him what I have learnt. My husband is the homely type. He seldom reads and doesn’t want to go out. His mind is closed. After my seminars, I will tell him that I have learnt these new things. In this past year and a half, he is better to me. He said that his children are growing older and he wants to be a good example to his son. He is afraid that his son [aged 14] will disobey him. His parents are also good to me now because they are old and depend on me as I am young and strong. Agnita had come a long way since she left the village close to two decades ago. Her thirst for learning has transformed her from a dependent, abused housewife, subordinated to a jealous husband to a woman with a job, her own house and set of wheels. She knew her rights and was teaching her daughter to stand up to her father. Agnita’s notion of a modern woman was not only one who dressed well and shopped at the supermarket but also a woman who knew her legal rights. Her mobility through ownership of a car and her membership in a self-help group opened up new horizons for her. In the absence of adequate state welfare provisions, the work of non-government organisations such as the Women’s Programme run by the SFPA cannot be underestimated. Her selfesteem improved and her husband and in-laws had a new-found respect for her. Agnita’s story was one of a woman who has reinvented herself and pushed the limits of what is possible in her life.

Conclusion I have tried to convey the circumstances of the lives of these four women, their reflections as well as their aspirations. Their stories encompassed our discussions so far in this book and they are a study both of difference and commonality. The circumstances and familial background of the four women were different and yet they were united by their gender and class position. By virtue of their gender and class, they were dominated by their employers and yet they also dominated others less resourceful than themselves as in the case of Cecilia. They submitted to their husbands and yet they resisted as the story of Kylie illustrated. They found enterprising alternatives. They reinvented themselves. I have also tried to show how the women drew upon whatever resources available to them to reconstruct their lives. Although their actions were not revolutionary practices, they had a grounded materiality and were simultaneously products and sources of change.

11 Conclusion

I have pointed out earlier that the women in my study were living through transformative times, where an unprecedented expansion of job opportunities has drawn women and men from the rural hinterland to the urban centres. Even though the waves of the Asian economic crisis hit Kuala Lumpur badly, only ripples reached the shores of Sarawak. Since fieldwork in 1997, none of the women or their spouses have lost their jobs or had to return to eke out a living from the land. Although the Sarawak state government prioritises research on economic growth and rural development, no study has been conducted on the experiences of rural migrant women in the city. Meanwhile, research by local and foreign scholars was often fuelled by anxieties that cultural mores in rural villages were being lost in the face of ever engulfing market forces. Thus, anthropological work in Sarawak has often been frenzied documentation of soon to-be-lost oral traditions and the customs and practices of remote ethnic communities. It was under such a research climate at home that I embarked on my urban study of these women who were confronting dramatic changes between their mothers’ generation and theirs. I began this study out of an interest in the lives of the women I encountered in my daily life in Kuching. These were women who were paid to wait at tables, wash dishes, sweep, clean and take care of children. In other words, women who are very much taken for granted as they perform the work that other women do in their own homes. I started off asking if Bidayuh women’s engagement in paid work had changed their gender contract with men. The processes I uncovered were far more complex than I had first envisaged. In conducting this study of Bidayuh women, I was forced to confront several intellectual dilemmas. First, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, I concluded that totalising theories and ahistorical theories would be unhelpful as they tended to be deterministic and to universalise and essentialise women’s experiences of the transition from rural subsistence to urban wage work. Comparing research done in other parts of Asia with my own fieldwork only reinforces, in my mind, the enormous variation amongst women facing rapid economic and social change and the difficulties of generalising on the basis of specific women’s experiences. For instance, in comparison to the Chinese patriarchal family of Salaff’s (1995) and Kung’s (1983) research, Bidayuh women have more leeway in decision making. Single women migrants choose their own sector of employment and

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decide how much and how often to remit money to their natal households. In contrast, Taiwanese fathers in Kung’s study often decided when and where their daughters should work. Along another important dimension of generational power, parents in Hong Kong also had greater control over their daughters’ earnings. My study found that parental control was weakened by Bidayuh women’s new-found economic independence. Some urban Bidayuh daughters were even able to reject marriage. This was not an option open to Javanese factory daughters who lived with their parents, or in close physical proximity to them. Marriage was also almost universal in Java (Wolf 1992). Researchers must therefore recognise the historical and cultural specificity of their studies. A second challenge facing this study was that pre-packaged Western concepts often failed to capture the ambiguities and contradictions which I encountered in my field work. For example, the common conceptual categories of ‘household’ and ‘autonomy’ used in analysing women’s work and gender relations presented particular difficulties. The dichotomous division between productive and nonproductive work performed by women inside and outside the household has as its basis in the Western housewife ideal. Such a concept does not take into account the myriad of activities in which women in developing countries are engaged. In this study, women who lived in villages near the city were engaged in paid work, subsistence farming, market gardening, their own small businesses and non-market household work. Cecilia was a good illustration of this. The concept of households pooling resources is also highly problematic. Not only did the households in my study not pool their resources but household members paid each other for services rendered. Jacky paid her mother for childcare and her sister for breast-feeding her child. Gloria paid her father for planting pepper, while May’s mother-in-law provided child-care in exchange for financial support of her youngest son who was at university. Some of these exchanges were explicit while others were unspoken but acknowledged in different ways. The concept of households pooling resources also implies that households have a shared goal and that all household members have the same interests. However, intrahousehold conflicts and politics often threatened to pull households apart, as in the case of Jill’s household. Jill lived with her husband’s extended family where household members stood in different occupational strata. One was selfemployed, another an employer while the others were employees. Their conflicting interest in the distribution of domestic labour and running costs threatened not only to fragment the household but also Jill’s marriage. The notion of a household strategy when discussing migration and households in developing countries also requires rethinking. The migration of young women to the city is often seen as an outcome of economic imperatives by rural households for survival. In this study, women’s migration from the rural areas cannot be understood solely in terms of a household strategy to alleviate poverty. The women’s own transformative projects figured highly in their migration. Hence, to represent their migration as a household strategy for survival does not take into account the women’s own gendered motivations, which are central to this process. Another concept which needed unpacking was that of autonomy which is closely related to Western ideas of independence, individual rights and control

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over decision-making processes. In terms of my research, such an understanding of autonomy is problematic in the context of Bidayuh women. Bidayuh women’s sense of themselves as daughters, wives and mothers is embedded in networks of family and kin and it is therefore difficult to apply atomistic definitions. Control over an independent income, however meagre, is balanced by commitment to their children, husbands, parents and family. Autonomy for these Bidayuh women is not solely about achieving independence in their relationships with men but about balancing competing goals which are held in tension with each other. In other words, there is no linear progression from waged work to autonomy and emancipation because the path is contradictory and paradoxical. In assessing the cost benefits of such social transformation, it is important not to see women’s lives as solely determined by external macrostructural forces, whether in terms of economic relations in the work-place or personal family power relations. The nominal gains which working wives made in relation to the domestic division of labour show that relationships of power between women and men are not cast in concrete but are modified over time through conflict and negotiation. The stories of Ruth, Kylie, Cecilia and Agnita in Chapter 10 are precisely about challenging strictures, pushing boundaries and reinventing themselves. It is limiting to only look at how women are affected by transformative forces and relationships of power without acknowledging women’s ability to respond and modify such forces. In trying to grapple with the problems of inherited Western conceptual frameworks, I found ethnographic research most promising. In placing the women’s experiences centre stage, complexities and contradictions are not smoothed away but are restored and grounded historically and contextually. This is important because the way in which women experience macrostructural changes is by no means prescribed and predetermined. On the contrary, gender is implicated in the very process of change. Although larger societal forces such as urbanisation and expansion of employment opportunities were pull factors, an individual’s motivation for migration was shaped in very gendered ways. The men I interviewed represented their reason for migration in terms of earning money for their families, whereas women reported migrating in search of urban sophistication and a desire to become modern. Furthermore, once in the city, women and men gravitated to gendered sectors of employment. Although employers’ discriminatory hiring policies cannot be discounted, women’s construction of what constituted appropriate and safe employment for their sex, was equally important in engendering their employment sector. Although paid work in the personal services sector has many disadvantages, the women I interviewed did not feel tyrannised by their employers or by oppressive employment practices as has been documented in many studies of factory work in Asia. The great disparity of earnings in Malaysia’s heavily segmented labour market however, and the lack of meaningful state welfare support, were pivotal to women’s experiences of changing gender relations and the meanings that they gave to their participation in the labour market. Single women enjoyed economic independence through wage labour and viewed marriage as an option, and as something to be postponed or even rejected. This had not been the case of Bidayuh women in the village who gained adult status through

Conclusion

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marriage and children. However, the flip side of urban independence was greater vulnerability to sexual exploitation by men. Pre-capitalist gender relations which governed courtship in the village have been carried over into the capitalist urban sector with detrimental results for women. The geographically mobile labour-force and the anonymity of the city have taken their toll. Broken promises and single motherhood are new realities that abandoned women have to face. Their new-found freedoms will be short-lived if single motherhood results and they have to return to live with their natal households for a while. Thus a single women’s path to freedom and independence from parental control was fraught with contradictions. It is also notable that the women in my study approached the prospect of husband selection in a very pragmatic fashion in contrast to most of the historical literature on the first wave of young migrant women in the city. Shorter (1975) writing about nineteenth century Europe and Lee (1998) on twentieth century China, both found that young women migrants released from parental control for the first time found youthful fulfilment in exploring romantic love in the city. The women in my study, however, wanted husbands with a steady job and income that would hopefully enable them to leave their lowly paid work. This many had done, but yet another layer of vulnerability is revealed – that of marriage itself. For married women, the new forms of marriage and family herald a new dependency on men. Although the gender contract was renegotiated, the majority of the women interviewed, whether single or married, pointed out that the new forms of marriage were less happy than those of their village mothers. A six-day working week and the shift work required in this sector of employment meant that couples spent little time together. Although many women have more years of schooling than their husbands, the segmented labour market also led to women earning less than half their husbands’ monthly pay. Without a welfare safety net their anxieties over – and vulnerability in – marriage was a direct consequence of their entry into the urban capitalist labour market, and equally, a significant factor in women becoming entrenched as wage workers. With the arrival of children, their dependency was compounded. In the absence of kin in the city and state supported child-care services, a new form of Bidayuh family based on a male breadwinner and a dependent housewife emerged. Given the vulnerability of working wives, the anxiety of dependent housewives over their marriages was even more acute. The majority of the women I interviewed confronted this new dependence on men with much ambivalence. Divorce and abandonment would mean renewed dependence on their natal village households as they returned to take stock of their situation. So, the women walked a tight-rope between both worlds, depending on the outcome of their relationships with men. In acknowledgment of the vulnerability, ambiguity and contradictions in their lives, these women decided that their daughters’ lives would be different to their own. Consequently, they were teaching their daughters the value of education and good jobs instead of relying on marrying salaried men. In this way, they hoped that their daughters would carve a different world for themselves – one which was as different from their own as theirs were to their village mothers.

Notes

1 Introduction 1 For more details on studies of Malaysian factory women, see Ong, Aihwa (1987), Hing Ai Yun and Rokiah Talib (eds) (1986), Fatimah Daud (1985), Pearson, R. and Elson, D. (1984), Nash, J. and Fernandez, P.M. (eds) (1983). 2 The most recent study of such work encountered was one by Rollins (1997) who examined how African–American domestic workers coped with the maternalistic treatment of their white employers. 3 Colonial Report (Geddes 1954), rural development and the Bidayuh (Grijpstra 1976), Bidayuh village land use system (Gerrits 1994), impact of roads on Bidayuh villages (Windle 1997). 4 The word ‘life-course’ is used instead of ‘life-cycle/life-stage’ as the latter implied multiple turns or inevitable biological stages (Katz and Monk 1993). 5 This is the latest addition to her ethnographic work more than two decades earlier in the 1970s. 2 A methodological discussion 1 The terms ‘Third World’ and ‘First World’ are highly charged because they take the dominance of Europe and America as their reference point. It has been argued that these categories are shifting and ever changing especially after the fragmentation of the Soviet Union. These categories have also been criticised as ahistorical, divisive and homogenising. For want of better terms, I therefore use ‘Third World,’ ‘First World’ with reservation and in full knowledge of their controversial nature. 2 For a more detailed discussion of this, refer to Bell et al. (1993: 5) and di Leonardo (1991: 6). 3 ‘Ethnography-as-text’ label was given by di Leonardo (1991: 22). 4 Abu Lughod borrowed the term ‘halfie’ from Narayan and is taken to mean ‘people whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage’ (Abu Lughod 1991: 137). 5 ‘Towkay’ is a Chinese term which means boss/employer/business proprietor. 6 This aspect of the ethnographic process brings to mind what Albert Wendt, an internationally renowned Samoan novelist and poet said of the Freeman-Mead controversy. He pointed out that the furore was merely ‘an occasion for professional anthropologist to continue “earning their comfortable livings and enhancing their reputations by using us” (p 69)…’ (Gordon 1993: 115).

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3 Doing fieldwork at home 1 A word borrowed from Glucksmann (1994: 157). 2 Single women working as waitresses in coffee-shops are normally given free lodgings by their employers above the coffee-shops or in the vicinity. 3 The Sarawak Women for Women Society (SWWS) runs a crisis phoneline for women and has established a drop-in centre targetting young single female migrants from the rural areas. 4 Women who drop-in just to buy contraceptives do not necessarily want to see the doctor. 5 Literally means ‘son of the soil’ or the indigenous people. 6 Fiona Harris, a doctoral candidate in Scotland is researching the role of Bidayuh women in village religious practices. 4 The socio-economic context of change 1 Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Bidayuh of the different regions were fragmented. In order to foster a common sense of identity and solidarity, the Dayak Bidayuh National Association (DBNA) was formed in 1955 by a group of educated Bidayuh. What was described as ‘Bidayuh nationalism’ (Tan 1994) was inspired by the formation of the Malay National Union and the Sarawak Dayak Association (SDA) which together spearheaded the anti-cession campaign when Sarawak became a British Colony in 1946. SDA members were mainly Kuching Ibans who were also civil servants. The Bidayuh realised that they needed their own association in order to promote a unified common ethnic identity to ensure a share of the country’s resources and the DBNA was born. Tan argues that urbanisation brings together people who are both ethnically similar and diverse and thus heightens ethnic consciousness. ‘Both political centralisation and growing urbanism set the stage for as well as shape both political and ethnic consciousness, and in the process contribute to the construction and reconstruction of ethnicity.’ (Tan 1994: 7) The construction and reconstruction of ethnicity mentioned by Tan was imperative as they did not have a written language and there was no specific Bidayuh culture in the national school curriculum. Thus the DBNA with its women’s wing standardised the Bidayuh costume to be worn in dances for dignitaries and official functions, promoted handicraft making and taught traditional Bidayuh dances. In 1988, DBNA organised a symbolic journey up Mt Bratak where it is said, the first Bidayuh settlement in Sarawak was established. Over 1,000 participants climbed the mountain and laid a memorial stone. In addition, DBNA hosted the state-wide harvest festival (gawai) celebrations in 1990. Thus, ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’ are revived. 2 They are collectively known as the Orang Ulu (which literally translates as ‘people of the hinterland’). Source: Yearbook of Statistics, Sarawak 1997. 3 The similiarities in the dialects varies from 60–80% and Minos argues that it is this lack of a common comprehensible language which is divisive for the Bidayuh (Minos 1994: 10). 4 In Brooke and British colonial discourses, the non-muslim indigenous people like the Iban and the Bidayuh were known as Dayaks. The Iban were called the Sea Dayak and the Bidayuh were the Land Dayak because they mainly resided inland and in the hills, in order to better protect themselves from incursions by other tribes namely the Malay and Iban. In this instance, it is not known whether the girls were Iban or Bidayuh.

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Notes

5 The Malays lost commercial hegemony to the Chinese because of the latter’s trading networks which operated largely on a credit system. Goods were given on credit and because of indebtedness to the patron, the trader is assured of future trade. The Chinese could operate on low profit margins because of the existence of such patrons who could supply goods on credit. This patron–client relationship characterised the entire line of trade from upriver Chinese agents to the Kuching shop-owners and in turn, to the Chinese export firms in Singapore. In addition, the Chinese could rely on their clan and dialect associations for assistance. 6 James Brooke, followed by Charles Brooke and then, Vyner Brooke ruled Sarawak from 1841–1946. 7 Birds’ nest is a Chinese delicacy which is an export of Sarawak. 8 The data quoted here came mainly from the 1991 Population and Housing Census and the 1995 Migration Survey. 9 In the village where Gerrits conducted fieldwork, he reported that women migrants were mainly in the 15–24 years age bracket (1994: 100). 10 The five include Komag, Zycon Corporation, Toko Electronics, Taiyo Yuden and First Silicon. 11 Morrison arrived in Sarawak at the end of 1947 and left in early 1967 (Morrison 1988: 35). 12 There have been no recent studies. 13 Primary schools in Malaysia consist of Primary 1 to 6 year groups and secondary schools start from Form 1 and go up to Form 6. Sixth Form is matriculation/preuniversity and is a two-year programme consisting of Lower and Upper 6. Passing the public examinations at third and fifth forms were pre-requisites for admission to the next level. However, the Form 3 public examination has recently been replaced and continuation to the Fourth Form is now automatic. 14 Migrant population consists of many types – rural to rural migrants, rural to urban migrants, urban to urban migrants, urban to rural migrants, migrants leaving the country. 5 To market, to market: rural–urban migration and becoming modern 1 It must be remembered that in this study, only six women started wage work after marriage. The rest of the women (88 per cent) migrated as single women to work in the city, although for some, their marital status has changed. This is in contrast to Sharma’s study of Shimla, North India where the majority of the women in her study experienced migration as wives. In Shimla, when single women migrated, they did so for studies or training and less frequently for wage work (Sharma 1986: 44). 2 Waiting work in Sarawak is not a part-time job mainly done by students but is fulltime, ‘proper’ work. 3 Cynthia could not get a clerical job, but a year after the interview she was accepted into a state institution for tertiary education specially set up to train indigenous people for management (Institut Teknologi Mara). 4 This has been discussed previously in Chapter 4. 5 A mini-market is a self-service grocery shop arranged in the style of a supermarket except that it occupies only one or two shop-lots in a row of shop houses. 6 Secondary schools are usually located in bazaars and towns which are far from the villages. The students are provided with free food and lodging. 7 Her job is more akin to that of the head waitress.

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8 She explains that she wants to learn to use the computer, improve her English and apply for a job in an office. 9 Most secondary schools are boarding schools in smaller towns and depending on the distance from their homes and their parents’ ability to pay commuting cost; the students often return to their villages on weekends, fortnightly, at the end of the month or at the end of the school term. 10 There are often street celebrations in the city for the numerous festivals of the different ethnic groups in addition to those organised by the city council. 11 She means schizophrenics who are sometimes to be seen sleeping on the pavements. 12 Her room faces a small car-park, beyond which is one of the major fly-overs in the city. 13 There is a Sarawak Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Authority (SALCRA) oilpalm estate in her village. 14 As described in the previous chapter, a family farm usually consists of a plot of land for the subsistence cultivation of padi and secondary cash crops in the form of vegetables which are grown on the periphery of the padi field. Other cash crops include cocoa and pepper although vegetables have replaced rubber in popularity. Livestock like chicken, ducks and pigs are reared mainly for their own consumption. Family farms are mostly small-holdings of less than three hectares is size (Gerrits 1994: 211). 15 Refer to Jessica’s narrative. She said, ‘We can follow fashion and act clever. In the village, we are left behind time.’ 16 In large patriarchal Chinese families, female babies are often given up for adoption. It is not unusual in Sarawak to meet Chinese women brought up by Malay, Bidayuh and other ethnic groups. 17 An office worker who does the photocopying, mailing of parcels and letters, paying utility bills and any other general tasks required. In Sarawak, the term ‘office boy’ is used because it is normally men with access to a motorcycle driving license that are employed as such. 18 Her village is less than 25 kilometres from the city of Kuching. 19 These include television sets, radio cassette recorders, glasses, crockery, rice cookers and branded goods such as Pyrex, Tupperware and Arcopal. 20 In Salaff’s study, women working in the service sector remitted more than 75 per cent of their wages to their families (1995: 176). 6 Overqualified and underpaid: wage work in the personal services sector 1 Beer promoters are employed by beer companies to promote their brand of beer to customers who patronise coffee-shops, discotheques and karaoke lounges. 2 Sungei Apong is one of the squatter settlements in Kuching. 3 Fatimah Daud reported that in 1978, factory women in Peninsular Malaysia suffered the stigma of being promiscuous (1985: 113). However, throughout my interviews with the women in this study, I did not hear any mention of the perceived moral laxity of factory women apart from Julia. There was far greater concern amongst the women about young female migrants being taken advantage off by men but this worry was for all women and not workers in a particular sector of employment. 4 Many women from Sarawak are recruited to work in the rapidly industrialising state of Johor in West Malaysia. There was at one time much concern among the indigenous women’s organisations in Sarawak that many women were lured into prostitution there. A prominent Iban woman leader spoke on radio advising parents to be cautious about allowing their daughters to cross the South China Sea.

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5 Sarawakians travelling to Peninsular Malaysia are required to use their identity card in lieu of a travel document. 6 All identity cards were recently changed to a new computerised, laminated form. 7 Elaine’s father sits on the village committee of the ruling political party and is often at the receiving end of ‘rewards’ especially near the time of local and general elections. 8 As mentioned earlier, freedom to mix with others often meant learning from other races how they live and work, given that they feel that they are backward in the village. 9 By law, employers have to give birthing mothers 60 days paid maternity leave. 10 Recent amendments to the labour law concerning maternity leave has increased the mandatory maternity leave to 60 days. 11 Tailoring and hairdressing skills would offer her the opportunity to start her own business and therefore greater control over her work. 7 Sex and salaries: single women migrants in the city 1 A version of this chapter has been published in the Asian Studies Review, Vol. 25, No. 3, September 2001, p. 361–76. 2 In present day Sarawak, an entire spectrum of economic systems exist. They range from the semi-nomadic Penans who are in the main hunters and gatherers and nominal subsistence farmers in the interior jungles to the corporate power brokers in the capital city of Kuching. 3 It has been documented that only in the 1890s in England, did single working women living at home, keep some of their own money (Scott and Tilly 1982: 57). The major difference, in this instance, is of course the fact that the single women migrants in my study do not live with their parents. 4 The issue of autonomy and contributions of migrant working daughters to their natal households in the village has been dealt with in Chapter 5 and will not be elaborated. 5 Geddes lived in Mentu Tapuh from July 1949 until January 1951 (Geddes 1954: 6). 6 This has been discussed in Chapter 5. 7 The narratives of the women in Chapter 5 about meeting different people is indicative of their desire to do this. 8 There is no meaningful welfare assistance for single mothers. They can receive a small sum of between RM60–250 a month from the welfare department plus assistance in expenditure on the education of her children but these are hardly enough for survival. 9 In Malaysia, only government servants draw a pension. 10 Their employers are personal friends and they were not interviewed as I was afraid that it would be difficult for them to articulate any difficulties that they encountered in their employment with my friends. 8 Marriage, money and men: working mothers and their households 1 It was likely that Sue’s son-in-law earned a reasonable salary as a government officer and given that there were very few job opportunities at a border-post, preferred his wife to stay at home. 2 The Employees’ Provident Fund. Employers contribute 12 per cent of the workers’ monthly wages while employees contribute 11 per cent of their monthly wages to the fund. Withdrawals can be made for purchase of a house, hospitalisation/medicalisation, retirement and migration to another country. Although it is mandatory for all employers

Notes

3

4 5 6 7 8

9 10

11

12

13 14 15

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to make EPF contributions, many employers do not. In addition, some workers prefer not to have any deductions made to their already very low wages. However, in a situation of minimal welfare provisions, many view a job with EPF payments as a premium and a job with EPF is frequently associated with permanency although in reality, it is not. It is a Chinese custom for a post-natal mother to hire a confinement woman who would do all the domestic chores for the mother and feed and clean the new-born for a period of 30 days after birth. It is the best paying of all domestic work. Salaff used the term ‘dependency ratio’ to describe the household dynamics of the Chinese families that she studied (1990: 116). Apart from the youngest one, the four older children were all at school. He sold both Revel and Amway products. The emphasis is mine. The husbands’ monthly wages were very rough, conservative estimations based on the women’s accounts. When a question mark is inserted, wives were vague about their husbands’ earnings and it was merely guess work on my part based on whatever information they disclosed. We meet Kylie again in Chapter 9. In 1999, a total of 3,433 single mothers have been registered by the Women’s Bureau of the Ministry of Social Development in Sarawak. Single mothers here include widows, divorcees, abandoned women and single women who adopted children. As the registration exercise was uneven in different parts of the state, it was believed that many more single mothers remain unregistered. This is particularly so for stigmatised abandoned unwedded mothers who would be reluctant to come forward to register themselves. In this conversation, the men ‘go out in front’ means having affairs/flings with other women openly. On the other hand, ‘go out behind’ for the women means to have affairs with men covertly or secretly. In addition, the front door is most often used by men and the back door leading to the kitchen is most used by women. In other words, it implies ‘you go your way and I’ll go mine’. Government primary and secondary schools are free but classes are large with 45–55 pupils per class with only one class teacher. As a result, commercial tuition schools are doing very good business as parents send their children for tuition in various school subjects. In this study, only eight (33 per cent) of the 24 working mothers interviewed had preschool aged children. Jean was diagnosed with cervical cancer and passed away in 2000. Washing machines are luxuries that few urban households of these women could afford let alone rural households in the villages. In most instances, the entire household’s laundry was hand-washed by women.

9 The hand that rocks the cradle leaves wage work: Bidayuh housewives 1 Materials in this chapter were originally published in the Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 57, No. 2, Summer 2001, pp. 151–66. 2 Sandy came from the same village as Alison. In fact, Alison’s found her last job through Sandy. Both were domestic workers and their employers were good friends. Sandy subsequently married her employer’s neighbour. 3 A government unit trust fund for indigenous people.

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4 Jenny’s mother died when she was 4 years old. Two years later, her father remarried and her step-mother had another four children. 5 An example was Jacky who paid her mother RM200 a month for child-care and her sister RM100 a month for breast-feeding her child. Similarly, Gloria’s husband paid her father to plant pepper for him. 6 Marina’s husband supported his younger brother in university while his mother provided him with free child-care. 7 Army wives had their allowances paid directly to their bank account on their husbands’ payday. The amount was deducted directly from their husbands’ monthly salary. 8 Female managed systems include women managing their own wages, as with the working mothers in this study, and women managing the common household fund. 9 Only five working mothers (none of the housewives) lived in their own houses in the city. The majority lived in rent-free housing in slums and villages and in free accommodation provided by their husbands’ employers. However, two working mothers and two housewives paid housing rentals. None of the single mothers had to pay house rent. One housewife sublet the first floor shophouse that she and her family were living in to two others, in order to reduce her own rent. 10 Motorbikes were usually bought new while cars were acquired old. Ten husbands of working mothers had a motorbike each while one husband and a working mother had a car each. None of the single mothers and housewives owned any vehicles. 11 This includes bus fares, pocket money, private tuition fees, books, school uniforms, shoes, schoolbags and occasional payments to schools. 12 Local Malaysian lotteries. 13 Geraldine’s husband was not interviewed. It was therefore hard to establish the power dynamics in the household and to verify information such as this. 10 Holding their own: four women and their stories 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15

Cecilia and Agnita used a mixture of English and Malay during the interviews. It is a common local belief that drinking to excess is a racial attribute of Indians. A shack would be a more accurate description of what I saw. Son of Ruth’s older sister. The one she is currently staying with. ‘Running away’ (lari) is a literal translation for quitting a job without giving notice. The Housing and Development Commission of Sarawak (HDC) builds low-cost housing in the state but the price of over RM30,000 per unit is still beyond the reach of the hard-core poor like Ruth. Federal Agricultural Marketing Authority. ‘Bills’ means water, electricity and telephone. To preserve confidentiality, the name of the headquarters has been omitted. The government relocates squatters by offering them alternative land on the outskirts of the city. Kylie’s house is in such a resettlement area. There is no proper drainage system in such areas. This sister worked in a noodle factory. Glutinous rice and coconut milk cooked inside bamboo. Chinese glutinous rice and meat dumplings wrapped in special leaves and boiled. Private insurance schemes of this nature are fairly common. They merely help to defray some of the cost of tertiary education. Their prime virtue is that they are enforced savings.

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16 A direct sales company like Amway. 17 The women’s programme is run by the SFPA in six squatter areas of Kuching. This program organises seminars on women’s health, entrepreneurial skills, self-development and leadership skills. They also hold talks on domestic violence and marital problems. The SFPA also runs a literacy program for women in these squatter areas.

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Index

Abu-Lughod 18, 20–4, 26, 132 Adkins 70 Alcoff 20, 24 anthropology: androcentric bias 11, 12, 18; feminist 12, 14; in Sarawak 2, 148; of women 12 Anzaldua 19 Appadurai 26 Asia 7, 47, 148, 150: studies in 4 Australia 24, 126, 127, 130 autonomy 4, 10, 47, 65, 66, 68, 74, 79, 88, 93, 94, 97, 98, 110, 111, 113, 129, 133, 149 Bangladesh 7, 65, 111, 127: purdah 7 Batang Ai 38 Behar 17, 18, 20, 22 Bell 22 Bidayuh: dialects 35; ethnic group 34, 35, 41, 45, 70, 115; inheritance practices 92; men 7, 24, 35, 42; population 1, 21, 34; slaves 14, 35; women 1, 2, 8, 10, 14, 17, 33, 34, 39, 43, 77, 122, 148, 150; work ethic 54, 116 Borneo 35, 36 Britain 11, 13, 14, 24, 70, 88, 128 Brooke: Charles 14, 35, 59; James 36; rule 14, 34, 35, 36 Bugo 44 Bujra 13 Cahoone 49 Caplan 13 Chan 45 Cheng 2

child-care: facilities 99 lack of 68, 113, 116; private 8, 28, 66, 76, 78, 104, 119, 123; state views 99 China 151. See Shenzhen: factory daughters 4, 66, 96, 97 Chinese: ethnic group 35, 36, 55, 61, 70, 100, 108, 141; in laws 29, 101; patriarchal family 5, 148; population 1, 21, 34 Christianity 36, 43: Christianisation 42; non-Christian Bidayuh 42 Clifford 17 Colclough 46 Cramb 38, 39, 43, 45, 66, 67 decision-making 5, 13, 14, 47, 49, 67, 96, 127, 128, 148, 150 Dempsey 123, 126–8, 130 Derrida 15 descent groups 37, 38 di Leonardo 12, 14, 15 divorce 42, 92, 94, 97, 107, 108, 117, 131, 151 Dixon 45 domestic: chores 133, 143; division of labour 78, 98, 116, 123–5, 131, 149, 150; responsibilities 3–5, 8, 9, 41, 70, 77, 78, 102, 105, 107; service 9, 14, 70, 79, 89; worker 1, 28, 35, 62, 63, 69, 70, 73, 74, 87, 93, 96, 99, 101, 103, 111, 117, 119, 120, 122, 141 Drebra 78 Elson 4, 13

174

Index

employment: and life-course 3; conditions of 4, 56, 58, 60, 61, 67, 69, 71–6, 79, 101, 103, 104, 135, 141, 144, 150; formal v informal 1; gendered employment 70; histories 27, 100, 101, 103, 104, 119–22, 135, 139, 141, 144; market 121; opportunities 45, 52, 54, 151; trajectories 3, 73, 98; wage disparity 106 Engels 3 essentialism 24 Europe 87, 88, 92, 127, 151 factory: conditions in 5; electronic 4, 5, 44, 55, 73; garment 4, 7, 72, 111 family: bourgeois ideal 115, 116, 137; erosion of ties 88; extended 92, 99, 125, 127, 142, 149; new family; forms 3, 88, 115, 120, 131, 151; nuclear 92, 125, 126; patriarchal relations 128; pressures 51, 62; strategies 8, 66; structures 5, 10, 109 Felski 50 feminism 11, 14, 16, 19, 24 feminist: anthropology 11, 14, 17, 41; epistemology 18; ethnography 11, 15, 17–23; Marxist 12, 13; research 2, 3, 6, 11, 12, 17, 127; standpoint theory 19 Fernandez 4 Fernea 12 First World 4, 11, 20 Foucault 16 Frader 2 France 88 Frank 13 Fraser 16 Geddes 34, 43, 77, 78, 79, 90, 91, 92, 93 gender: contract 98, 116, 131, 148, 151; division of labour 7, 41, 76, 77, 78, 87, 123; relations 6, 9, 12, 13, 17, 25, 34, 98, 127, 143, 149, 150, 151; studies of 3, 10, 11 Gerrits 37, 38, 40, 43, 48, 66, 77, 92 Gerunsin Lembat 42 Giddens 132, 134 Glucksmann 22 Gomes 49

Gordon 18, 22 Grijpstra 38 halfies 20, 23 Hanson 3 Haraway 19 Harding 19 Hartsock 15, 16, 19 Hetler 8 Hirsh 18 Hochschild 123, 127 Holland 30 Hong Kong 4: factory daughters 5, 48, 66, 68, 93, 97, 100 households: concepts of 6, 7, 92; finances 9, 32, 67, 98, 113, 116, 127; male heads of 13, 37, 38, 78, 127; natal 9, 32, 47, 66, 68, 118; organisation 3, 6, 7; strategies 9, 10, 149; survival 50, 102, 111, 114 housekeeping: money 120, 127, 128, 139; money 128; skills 70 housewives 3, 28, 29, 30, 46, 63, 64, 66, 68, 92, 98, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 126, 128, 129, 131, 151 Iban: ethnic group 70, 94, 144; population 1, 21; study of 13 income-generating activities 1, 8, 36, 40, 76, 142, 143 India 4, 111 indigenous 1, 14, 21, 33–5, 70 Indonesia 4, 5, 74, 93, 96, 99, 116. See Java, Kalimantan Internal Migration Study 64 Iroquois 14 Ishak Shari 43, 46, 64 Japanese Occupation 35 Java 8, 9, 63, 65, 68, 96, 100, 111, 127, 149. See Indonesia Kalimantan 35 Keller 18 Kibria 7, 65, 111, 127, 128

Index

175

Kuching: as study site 21, 27; population 1, 34; state capital 1, 17, 32, 35, 43, 44 Kung 5, 63, 148

Moore 6, 18 Moraga 19 Morrison 45 Murray 65, 74, 116, 127

Lamphere 3, 12, 14 land: native customary rights 38; tenure 36, 38, 93 Lazreg 20 lban: population 34 Leacock 12 Lee C.W. 4, 5, 63, 65, 73, 96, 97, 151 life-course 3, 10, 28, 32, 64, 68, 80, 98, 100, 105, 110 Lim 5, 93 Lockard 35

Narayan 17, 26 Nash 4 Native Customary Rights (NCR) 37, 39. See land, native customary rights networks: informal 99; social 7, 63, 65, 67 Nicholson 16

MacKinnon 18 Malay: ethnic group 14, 34, 36, 61, 65, 70; population 1, 34; research on 2 Malaysia 1, 4, 8, 11, 34, 43, 44, 65, 111, 150 Mani 20, 26 Marchand 15, 31 Marcus 17 marriage: courtship behaviour 89, 90, 93, 94, 151; customary laws 90; decisions about 87, 89; for money 96; household concept 6; insecurities about 108, 109, 115, 151; marital conflicts 68, 131, 145, 149; market 95; monogamous 4; partner selection 89, 95–7, 130, 151; promise of 94; remaining single 97, 149; romantic love 89, 96; traditional practices 37, 89, 91 Marxism 6, 12, 14–6, 24 Mascia-Lees 15 McLellan 65 Mexico: research in 10 migration: decisions about 7, 62; motivation for 2, 5, 7, 10, 41, 47, 48, 50, 51, 59, 63, 65, 67, 87, 149, 150; rural urban 34; rural–urban 7, 10, 44 Migration Survey 30, 46 Minos 35 modernity 15, 49, 50, 52, 54: to become modern 150 Mohanty 20

Olson 18, 23 Ortner 14, 132 padi: harvesting 8; padi cult 13, 42; shifting cultivation 40, 52 Pahl 128, 129 parental control 5, 66, 73, 89, 93, 94, 149, 151 Parpart 15 Pearson 4, 13 personal services 1, 2, 27–9, 31–3, 45, 46, 67–71, 73, 87, 89, 150 Pfau-Effinger 98 Philippines 9, 63, 99 plantations: cash-cropping 13; schemes 39, 121 positionality 19, 20, 23, 24, 30, 133 postmodernism 16, 24 Pratt 3, 17 Probert 123 Purisinsit 52 Puthucheary 45 Pyle 110 Ramazanoglu 30 Reece 36 Reiter 12 remittances: daughter’s remittance 5, 9, 66; dependence on 5, 66; from migrants 8, 32, 65, 92 research participants 17, 21, 23, 24, 26, 31, 48, 132 Rosaldo 12, 21, 26 Rose 2 rural agrarian economy 4, 8, 25, 34, 92

176

Index

Sacks 12 Salaff 5, 48, 66, 93, 97, 100, 111, 148 Sarawak See Brooke: population 1; Sarawak Family Planning; Association (SFPA) 29, 61; Sarawak Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Authority (SALCRA) 39, 58, 121; Sarawak Land Development Board (SLDB) 39; state of 1, 17, 21, 34, 44, 47, 85, 148; urbanisation 43; Yearbook of Statistics 44, 45 Schenk-Sandbergen 47 schooling 9, 14, 35, 40, 41, 46, 48, 57, 58, 60, 62, 63, 71, 74, 75, 80, 101, 103–5, 111, 112, 118–21, 129, 130, 151 Scott 2, 87–9, 127 Seccombe 2, 88, 92 Selby 10 sex: adultery 90, 109; premarital 89, 90, 93; sexual harassment at work 70, 71; sexual liaisons 94; sexualisation of women’s work 70; sexuality 70, 89, 93, 94, 96, 151 Sharma 4, 6, 31, 111 Shenzhen 4, 5, 9, 63, 65, 66. See China Shopes 23 Shorter 89, 151 Singapore 4: factory daughters 5, 93, 97, 100; married working women 111; working mothers 111 Singh 127, 128, 130 South Korea 4 Spivak 20 squatters 138, 145 Stacey 18, 21, 23 status 12, 13, 93, 107, 113, 150 Stichter 9 Stivens 2, 6, 8, 10, 50, 66, 67, 91, 94, 111 Strathern 21, 26 Szanton 8 Taiwan 4: factory daughters 5, 63, 97, 100 Tan 65 Thailand 4: factory daughters 52; research in 8

Third World 4, 9, 11, 13, 15, 20, 132 Tilly 2, 87, 88, 89, 127 trade unions 4 Trager 9, 47, 63 U.S.A. 3, 12, 14, 18, 123 urban: versus rural 6, 118, 148 Vogler 128, 129 Wallerstein 13 Ward 110 West, the: housewife ideal 105, 149; male worldview 12; modernity in 49; pre-packaged concepts 149, 150; studies in 11; Western philosophies 14; Western scholars 15, 24; women’s employment 110; ‘workerist’ models 2 West, the studies in 4 Weston 26 Whitelegg 2 Windle 43, 66, 67 Wolf 5, 6, 9, 63, 65, 93, 96, 100, 111, 149 women: factory daughters See China, Hong Kong, Taiwan; as spirit mediums 42; category of 3; earning capacity 107; factory daughters 5; married women 3, 9, 64, 79, 87; of colour 19; single mothers 3, 28, 63, 89, 107; single women 3, 9, 29, 51, 53, 58, 66, 68, 69, 72, 79, 87, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 114, 150; working mothers 3, 28, 29, 30, 46, 63, 64, 66, 68, 92, 95, 98, 99, 100, 104, 105, 111, 113–16, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132, 140 work: on shift 70, 72, 109, 110, 151; wage work 1–3, 7, 10, 34, 48, 51, 61, 63, 67, 76, 93, 107, 116, 123, 133, 148 Yap 45 Young 13

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