A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [112]
During Ann’s tenure in the Jakarta office, Ford had backed the first women’s studies center in the country, a fledgling research center at the University of Indonesia. Ann had successfully made the case for an early affirmative-action program for Indonesian women—a scholarship program aimed at getting more women trained in the social sciences and working in the upper levels of university faculties and the civil service. Smaller grants had gone to translating into Indonesian, for use in universities, a key text by Ester Boserup, a Dutch economist, on the role of women in development; paying for fellowships for female graduate students doing dissertations on women in home industries; supporting a conference to familiarize the leaders of grassroots organizations with women’s issues; and sending top staff members from the women’s cooperative in Malang to India to learn from the women’s cooperatives and trade unions there. The Bogor project, which continued for some years afterward, had laid the groundwork for a network of Indonesian researchers experienced in the study of village women. It had generated what Ann called, in a 1983 report, “a great deal of useful and surprising data, which forces us to change some of our basic perceptions about Indonesian women.” Java was atypical, as it turned out. Rural women on Java worked long hours, often in multiple occupations, though their hourly earnings were low. Elsewhere, women worked few hours, and needed money but had few opportunities to make it because they lived in places with few roads, means of transportation, or markets. Under such circumstances, development planning needed to be decentralized—tailored to each province, even each village. Pujiwati Sajogyo, who went on to serve for a time as a consultant to the Indonesian government’s Ministry for the Role of Women, helped shift the government’s focus away from simply the health and domestic roles of women to include women’s need for income and paying work.
In the end, Ford did not renew Ann’s contract. She had been in the Jakarta office for nearly four years, which, several Ford people told me, was becoming the standard tenure after which program officers moved to another country or moved on. Kessinger was interested in trying someone new in Ann’s job. Ford was increasingly a grant-making organization, not an operating foundation. No longer were several hundred Ford staff members scattered all over, say, India, teaching in management schools, serving in government ministries, working in agricultural research. Program officers sat behind desks, conceived areas of activity, designed grants, wrote memos justifying what they wanted to do. To Kessinger, Ann seemed less comfortable in the office than she was in the field. Some people were good at one thing, some at the other, he believed. Few were good at both. “I felt that from an institutional point of view, she’d probably given us what she could give us,” he said.
Kessinger also believed that Ann should complete the work needed to get her Ph.D. Not infrequently, graduate students drifted away from writing their dissertations because they needed money and found paying work, he knew from his years as a professor. When he had started graduate school, the average time from enrollment to a Ph.D. in history was nine years—in large part because students married and needed to support their families. Ann was lucky in that she had found work that not only paid well but that she loved. But that kind of good fortune made it even harder for people to go back and finish. Those who never did, Kessinger was convinced, went on to regret it. Your Ph.D. was your union card. “Get a union ticket,” Ben Finney, the University of Hawai‘i anthropologist, advised his students. “Become a qualified anthropologist. Then