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By Root 928 0

North Sumatra in Medan, all eleven candidates were unsuitable: Either they were from unrelated fields, such as art, or they had no experience in villages and had never done research on rural women. In Padang, the capital of West Sumatra, the university rector preferred hiring men as instructors because, he said, women went off on pregnancy leave or balked at leaving their husbands. Traveling alone in South Sumatra, Ann found that the cultural complexity of the region presented additional research challenges. There were four distinct ecological zones and fourteen indigenous ethnic groups, each with its own dialect or, in some cases, language. There were also migrants from elsewhere in Indonesia, some relocated by the government from densely populated parts of the country. The experiences of women varied widely from one ethnic group to the next; one, for example, kept teenage girls in purdah. “With all this complexity, the difficulty of selecting truly representative sample villages is enormous,” Ann wrote in a report on the progress of the project.

By late September, Ann and Sajogyo had enlisted eighteen researchers from eight universities in seven provinces to meet in Bogor for the workshop in preparation for heading out into the field. Twelve were women. Ann and the Sajogyos taught seminars on a dozen topics, from theories of social structure to the role of women in small industries and petty trade. Well-known Indonesian social scientists gave guest lectures. The government’s junior minister for women’s affairs spoke on the connection between policy-making and research. The young researchers were to collect data on three subjects: time and labor allocation, income and expenditures, and decision-making. Each also chose a special area of interest. They would be working in Sumatra, Sulawesi, East Java, and Nusa Tenggara Timur, a group of islands in eastern Indonesia. They would be studying a half-dozen ethnic groups—from Bataks to transmigrant Javanese—in villages that made handicrafts, farmed fish, harvested forest products, and grew such things as rice, coconuts, coffee, rubber, and cloves.

Ann went into the field, too. Bill Collier, whom she had known since the early 1960s at the University of Hawai‘i and who had known both of her husbands, was working on a separate study in tidal-swamp areas of South Sumatra. His team was studying agricultural systems and the condition of several ethnic groups, including indigenous Malays, Buginese migrants, and Javanese transmigrants. Ann joined the group, moving from village to village on a grid of rivers and canals, traveling by night in wooden boats in crocodile-infested waters. The group slept on the floors of village leaders’ houses, built on stilts. Because the Buginese distrusted the Javanese, Collier told me, the Javanese members of the research team would insist that he and Ann step out of the boats first in every Buginese village. In one area where Ann was hoping to conduct interviews, the local leader was said to have a long arrest record for robbery and a murder, committed ostensibly with the help of his wife. He had returned from prison, and everyone in the villages deferred to him: “If you wanted to go anywhere, you had to tell him first,” Collier said. The man assigned his wife and alleged co-conspirator as Ann’s escort—to convince the Buginese to talk. Through flooded rice fields and swarms of mosquitoes, Ann and her escort crossed from one canal to the next on foot. “Ann ended up up to her chest in water and mud,” Collier remembered. “She loved it. She could create a rapport with these people very easily, because she was sympathetic and she liked them. They realized that she was there trying to find out things to help.”

Indonesia was “a country of ‘smiling’ or gentle oppression” when it came to women, Ann would write in a Ford memo the following spring. Extreme forms of anti-female behavior, such as infanticide or nutritional discrimination, were nonexistent or rare, but there was a “social reward system” that led middle- and upper-class women to marry early, forgo