A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [97]
What Ann saw in India left a deep impression. For years afterward, she would point to the organizations she had seen on that trip as examples of what might be possible elsewhere. Occasionally, she would use Ford grant money to send Indonesian activists to India to see for themselves. The size of the women’s organizations in India astonished her. “She thought to herself, ‘Why can’t we do more than these itsy-bitsy NGOs? Why can’t we take this to scale?’” said Richard Holloway, her friend from Semarang. Back in Jakarta, Ann wrote to Viji Srinivasan, a Ford colleague in New Delhi who had traveled with her and Germain: “The India trip certainly set my mind moving in some new directions. Could Indonesian women in the informal sector be organized a la the Working Women’s Forum? (But where will we ever find a new Jaya Arunachalam?) Could a SEWA-like cooperative bank for women be organized in the Indonesian context?”
Anyone interested in the condition of poor women in Indonesia faced a shortage of data. Only a handful of Indonesian researchers were interested in women’s issues, William Carmichael, Ford’s vice president in charge of its developing-country programs, would write several years later in a Ford report; and most of those scholars had studied urban middle-class women. The exception was Pujiwati Sajogyo, a sociologist at the Center for Rural Sociological Studies at the Bogor Agricultural Institute. Married to one of the country’s top experts on rural development and poverty alleviation, she had studied rural women in West Java in the late 1970s. The Sajogyos were “two of the more original and interesting researchers working on issues that the government thought were sensitive,” Kessinger told me. Pujiwati Sajogyo’s research, funded by Ford, was among the first to shed light on work patterns by gender in rural households and villages. In 1980, Ford gave the agricultural institute another $200,000 to develop detailed data on rural women outside Java and to increase the country’s capacity to carry out that sort of research. Under the grant, young researchers from the provinces were to be trained and sent out to study the lives of village women. A project specialist from Ford would help analyze data from village studies and run workshops in field research for graduate students and junior faculty. The aim was to build a national network of researchers on issues involving women, increase the supply of data, and make it available to program designers and policy makers. During her first two years at Ford, Ann was the project specialist assisting Sajogyo.
Twice a week, Ann would be driven south from Jakarta to Bogor, the hill town where generations of colonials, including Thomas Stamford Raffles, the British lieutenant governor of Java during the brief British occupation of parts of the Dutch East Indies, had repaired in the early nineteenth century to escape the swelter of summer. The university lay alongside a wide boulevard, facing the Bogor Botanical Gardens, conceived a century and a half earlier by a Dutch botanist with the help of assistants from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. With fifteen thousand species of trees and plants, the Bogor gardens surrounded the Indonesian president’s summer palace. “I might mention that I’m in Bogor every Tuesday and Thursday at Pujiwati’s office,” Ann wrote in 1981 to Carol Colfer, an American anthropologist working in Indonesia, who had sent a letter proposing that she and Ann meet. “I see from your itinerary you will also be in Bogor on Tuesday, March 17. We could have a picnic in the garden.”
That summer, Ann flew with Sajogyo to Sumatra, where they spent a week visiting universities, giving presentations on women and development, explaining field research methodologies, and interviewing candidates for the training workshop they planned to hold in Bogor a month later. Finding the right researchers was not simple. At the University of