HERS: Understanding the Reason Behind a Woman’s Choice not to Get Married

This creative project is a screenplay. The screenplay is about a woman who struggles to defy the idea of getting married. In the New Order, President Soeharto led Indonesia using Javanese culture. Until today, there is a belief that women in Indonesia are obliged to get married because of the culture. In Javanese culture, there is a value called 3M (macak, masak, manak). The value created a definition of a true woman. A true woman has to be able to look pretty and cook. In order to fulfil the third value, a woman has to get married and have a family. This value burdens some modern Indonesian women, especially those who have careers. Through this screenplay, I want to encourage women that being married is a matter of choice and not an obligation. Keywords: Indonesian women, Javanese value, Javanese culture, marriage, single woman.

Religion, Reform, and Antislavery

This chapter considers, through a biracial lens, some essential complexities of antebellum women’s reform. The emphasis is on antislavery and a socioreligious ethos based on the intersectionality of spiritual egalitarianism, civil liberty, and the jeremiad tradition. Black women’s double burden, slavery and race, automatically channeled them as reformers into more expansive visions than whites, already jeopardizing their privileged True Woman status. For disparate reasons, convergence of abolition and equal rights was not a calling that white reform women embraced monolithically. As “doers of the word,” some upheld apostolic tenets of Christian unity. Others chose what eventually became republican individualism and a “segregated sisterhood.” Nonetheless, women of both races were mainsprings in the ultimate success of antebellum reform, the training ground for future struggles for equal rights.