PKK, a family welfare movement

Some of the women in the village are members of a government programme for women in rural areas called Pembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga (PKK), which was established in 1967. It is a family welfare movement with main focus on gender equality through community participation.

The members of this organization are from Wangkung and other sub-villages in the area. The women’s position in PKK is not determined by election or ability but by their husband’s rank. In that way the leader of the organization is not necessarily the most competent, but it is the wife of the most senior
bureaucrat. In Wangkung it is therefore the wife of the Kepala Desa.

Function
The way the hierarchy is arranged could cause some difficulties since the
woman with the most powerful husband is in the helm. But as we see it, as long as there is no power struggle between the women, they accept that the system is as it is. It may seem a bit strange since it is a women’s equality movement, but there is not equality in the movement itself.

According to one of the members, the movement has improved the problems with inequality between genders and made women more aware of their strengths and opportunities to take part in the community. But there are also problems related to this, it is not seen upon as positive if you have a wife who speaks up too loudly and too often. The women’s place has always been and should be in the shadow of her husband.

Interview with a member of PKK
We spoke with a woman in Wangkung, who is a member of this organization, representing her dusun (sub-village). Gender equality is not spread in Indonesia, and you have to start in the small. One important thing is to get the man to do more housework.

One current project within this programme is teaching the Kepela Desa’s wife about equality and health and activities to strengthen the household economies, like letting the woman work. Maybe a woman can even become Kepala Desa one day. They have a funding system where they lend money to men and women.

The organization is quite new, and she does not know exactly how it is going to be, but they plan to help women with pregnancy problems. They do not get money from the state to accomplish their goals, and she is working as a volunteer. But she gets education to accomplish the programme. She means the equality between genders has become better over the last years.

Our respondent was firstly a Muslim and then she converted to Catholicism. She holds the opinion that women’s positions in Islam and Catholicism are almost the same; you just have to cower up a bit more when you are a Muslim.

She also became political active when her husband became a candidate for the election to become a Kepela Desa. She also claims that it is very difficult to go against the priest, the Kepala Desa, or the Tua Golo. In the current political system in Indonesia, it is still possible to buy most powerful positions.

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