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further education, and pass up careers. Educated women often stayed out of the workforce to avoid giving the impression that their husbands could not support them. Most Indonesian women worked for little money: In village industries and farming, they made about half the income of men. Yet their income was crucial to the survival of poor households—especially the one in five households on Java that were headed by women because of divorce, desertion, and the departure of men looking for work. Government programs, however, addressed women as homemakers, not breadwinners. Women were required to attend family-planning and nutrition programs, but they were rarely chosen for projects that might help them make money. As a result, young women were leaving the countryside for the cities—where they were ending up as servants, factory workers, or prostitutes. All three of those jobs involved economic and sexual exploitation, Ann said. Ford was working with grassroots organizations that focused on women, she said, but the government viewed organizing as subversive. “While Indonesia has many women’s organizations, it cannot be said to have a real women’s ‘movement,’” Ann wrote. “In comparison with a country like India, for example, the capacity of Indonesian women to articulate their problems, organize themselves and use political or other channels to improve their condition is still minimal.”

As Ann had noticed several years earlier in her dissertation fieldwork, development was not necessarily benefiting poor women. In 1982, she helped persuade Ford to award a $33,000 grant to a legal-aid organization, the Institute of Consultation and Legal Aid for Women and Families, to hold a seminar and workshop on the effects of industrialization on female labor. In preparation, a team formed by three other organizations studied women workers in fifteen factories on Java, looking at the division of labor by gender, differences in treatment, legal literacy of women workers, and enforcement of labor laws regarding women. The team leaders and their assistants were young well-trained female social scientists, one of whom later started her own organization focused on women workers. Their report quickly became “our best reference on the condition of women workers in the formal sector in Indonesia,” Ann wrote afterward.

Ann was a feminist, by all accounts, but not inclined toward fiery pronouncements. As Sidney Jones described her, she could more legitimately be called a feminist than could anyone previously assigned to the Jakarta office. She had strong convictions on the rights of women. “But she wasn’t at all in your face or belligerently ideological,” Jones said. Two of Ann’s close friends in Jakarta in the early 1980s were more immediately identified as feminists: Georgia McCauley, whose husband worked for Ford, was a former president of the Honolulu chapter of the National Organization for Women, and Julia Suryakusuma, the flamboyant daughter of an Indonesian diplomat and wife of a film director, would later quote a friend’s description of her as a “feminist and femme fatale.” According to James Fox, an anthropologist based in Australia and working in Indonesia, who was friendly with both of them, “Ann was never out there in the same way that Julia was, but they were close.” As Fox saw it, some feminists were earnest and literal, and could constantly be teased. You could not do that with Ann, he said, because she would just play along. Her feminism was tempered, he said, by the fact that her overriding commitment was to the poor, regardless of gender. Occasionally, Ann would make jokes about feminists, said Pete Vayda, a close friend of Ann’s who was working as a consultant for Ford. Which is not to say she would necessarily overlook a remark she considered demeaning.

“Have a good weekend, honey,” said one Australian consultant.

“Don’t call me honey,” Ann growled in response.

“Okay, sport,” the consultant countered cheerily.

On another occasion, Ann challenged a table full of Indonesian activists, all men, with whom she was dining, because