‘Womenandchildren’?

More than a decade after my initial fieldwork in a Javanese kampung neighbourhood in the city of Yogyakarta, I sat on the deep tiled porch of my old neighbour's house with another neighbour, Ibu Sita.Footnote ¹ I had known her for many years. She had long been an active kader (cadre) in the national housewives association known as PKK.Footnote ² As she lounged in the late afternoon heat, stretching her long legs out to seek the coolness of the tiles, I asked her about all the new programs appearing for early childhood education (Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini) or PAUD as it was called locally. I wondered whether one of these government-mandated programs for children before formal school age would be started in this lower-class neighbourhood. She replied that they were negotiating with the government about that at the moment. She meant that the local unit of PKK was negotiating about whether they would open a PAUD program and how often it would be run, which was frankly an astonishing turn.

In earlier fieldwork, I had observed how local women were organised to deliver community welfare under Suharto's New Order (1967–98) authoritarian and modernising regime (Newberry Reference Newberry2006, Reference Newberry2007). Negotiation had not been not part of that process. Rather, women's labour was assumed to be volunteered based on a state-sponsored model of domesticity and community organisation (N. Sullivan Reference Sullivan1994). But, Bu Sita's description of negotiation was given in 2006, nearly a decade after the end of Suharto's regime and the beginning of a new era of democratic reform or Reformasi. Indonesia had decentralised towards regional autonomy in a political reorganisation that followed on the heels of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, neoliberal reform of the economy, and democratisation initiatives. Even so, the structure for offering these public early childhood programs was the same one used by Suharto for national development, suggesting a resemblance between authoritarian development and neoliberal decentralisation described further below.Footnote ³

How then to explain the stability and continuity in the use of women's ‘volunteered’ labour in their own communities to provide social welfare, now in aid of programs for the young child? Certainly, this continuity was susceptible to analysis as a form of governmentality as local women took up the management of the welfare of the local population, thereby rendering the problem as a technical rather than a political one (Li Reference Li2007; Mitchell Reference Mitchell2002). Such forms of embodied self-rule have been subject to prolonged scholarly scrutiny in recent years, and they accord nicely with the Foucaultian analysis of modernity as rule distributed through the self-management of the population itself (see Burchell et al. Reference Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991; Foucault Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller P1991; Lemke Reference Lemke2001; Miller and Rose Reference Miller and Rose2008; Rose Reference Rose1993). Suharto's New Order excelled at such forms of governmentality, and PKK, the national housewives association, is a particularly apt example. And yet, as children became a focus for development in Indonesia and women's volunteered community welfare labour was called upon once again, this analysis begins to seem inadequate.

Instead, an older scholarship on the domestic community, its role in social reproduction, and its shaping by global accumulation seems remarkably powerful again, even as it dovetails with more recent work on care and networks of global care labour (Lee Reference Lee2012; Razavi Reference Razavi2011; Truong Reference Truong1996; Yeates 2005).Footnote ⁴ Ultimately, the care labour required for early childhood programming, which has been taken to follow from the naturalised link between women's socially appropriate care work and childrearing, provokes instead questions about the awkward relationship between children and women in development. That is to say, recent developmental regimes seem to promote the empowerment of children as against women, highlighting again the presumed unity of womenandchildren, following Enloe (Reference Enloe1990). Here, by foregrounding social reproduction, this awkward relationship becomes a productive way to consider the limits of governmentality and to reconsider the value of the domestic community to understand globalisation, neoliberalisation, and the reorganisation of development and social welfare in the early twenty-first century.

The Domestic Community: Now and Then

A re-consideration of womenandchildren in 2013 is more than a return to hoary old problems of theory in gender analysis. It represents a moment to reassess and perhaps reclaim analyses of gender, state, and power that have been lost or marginalised in recent decades (Mies Reference Mies1987; Molyneux Reference Molyneux1979). The case of early childhood education, care and development in Indonesia argues for a fuller and more effective exploration of the role of the domestic community in supplying reproductive or care labour in order to understand how the roll-out of such programs affects the lives of women, children, and families. Taking up this approach to understanding local community in the most recent phases of globalisation illuminates not only the complexities of children as against women in current international development regimes, it calls our attention to the powerful structuring effects of reproduction and the relevance of community in mediating the making of individual subjects.

My early research on Java centred on the role of community in national development as made evident in PKK (Newberry Reference Newberry2006, Reference Newberry2007), a government program that was quasi-public (Kasza Reference Kasza1995). The Suharto regime had harnessed the labour of local women for the development of their own communities. Neighbourhood women were organised by locality, in a nested and ascending structure that matched male-dominated civil administration (J. Sullivan Reference Sullivan1992; N. Sullivan Reference Sullivan1994). Understood to be based on the natural work of women within their homes and communities, PKK organised activities to lower the birth rate; improve the health and development of children under five; spread government messages about health, nutrition and hygiene along with other directives; and mobilise the unpaid labour of the community to deal with local problems from crime to street improvement.

My analysis of how women were stationed as unpaid community welfare workers considered the effects not only of the nationalist and independence era but also the colonial era in the shaping of ideas of appropriate domesticity and women's moral role in a valorised private domestic space (Gouda Reference Gouda1995; Stoler Reference Stoler and Sears2002; Suryakusuma Reference Suryakusuma and Sears1996; Wieringa Reference Wieringa1993). Subsequently, Suharto's modernising regime explicitly used women understood as housewives or ibu rumah tangga to deliver local community development, thereby extending the private domestic sphere as women's proper arena for action to the community understood as an extended household (Fox-Genovese Reference Fox-Genovese1991). Yet, this vision of community self-organisation for mutual support also drew on a long history of the instrumental use of the community on Java (Boomgaard Reference Boomgaard1991; Breman Reference Breman1980, Reference Breman1988; Kemp Reference Kemp1988; Li Reference Li2007; Rigg Reference Rigg1994; J. Sullivan Reference Sullivan1994) that demonstrated how the idea of community can be used to organise localities for the state's needs, particularly labour.

Based on this longer view of the role of the community in state-ordered development, the work of PKK during the Suharto era appears to be more than the constraint of women's roles and action, although it certainly was this. The use of the community as a government rationality also served to support and reproduce a large army of cheap and surplus labour. That is to say, the work of women in communities, underwritten by the ideology, policies and programs of PKK, also supported under-employed and unemployed youth and males in lower-class communities (Newberry Reference Newberry2007, Reference Newberry2008). It is clear that women's informal labour has long kept Javanese households afloat (see Tickmayer and Kusujiarti Reference Tickmayer and Kusujiarti2012 for a recent review). The need for this cheap and precarious labour has only persisted as Indonesia continues to exploit its comparative advantage as a labour-surplus economy (Hadiz Reference Hadiz2002).

Before turning to care labour as the most recent manifestation of this issue, it is worthwhile to consider briefly the argument regarding the domestic community and its role in the social reproduction of labour. Originally, I had looked to Claude Meillassoux's 1975 (Reference Meillassoux1981) analysis of how African communities provided for the reproduction of migrant labour to France, thus subsidising the French economy which relied on its long-distance articulation with the rural community form. As a consequence, cheap labour was provided and subsidised in the ‘modern’ core while the ‘traditional’ community form was simultaneously reproduced. Meillassoux's work was an early analysis of the role of global articulation in shaping the reproduction of local labour and part of the articulation of modes of production debate from the 1970s and 80s. Later, Mamdani (Reference Mamdani1996) analysed the use of the community, understood as having traditional social relations, as a feature of postcolonial development. Here, I argue that these approaches to understanding how community as a traditional social form was used to endorse and conscript women's domestic labour for nationalist development are relevant again.

A second component of this argument about domestic community draws on Karl Polanyi's (Reference Polanyi1944) forms of economic integration, especially the often overlooked form known as householding. Rhoda Halperin (Reference Halperin1990) elaborated Polanyi's argument to suggest that household-based production can be understood as mediating between a capitalist market economy and an informal non-capitalised sector. The work of Polanyi and Halperin supports an analysis of household-based production as subsidising labour that is informal and precarious; that is to say, readily available and easily re-absorbed when released. Polanyi and Halperin focused on the household as the site for this mediation. In my own work, I have followed Meillassoux and the feminist scholarship on women's work in community (Fox-Genovese Reference Fox-Genovese1991; hooks Reference hooks1990) to consider how urban lower class communities serve as this point of mediation. Crucially it is women's work that links household to community. The positioning of Indonesian women's work within the household but extended to the community through their informal sector and care labour illustrates how householding as a form of economic integration produces and stabilises the domestic community.

There are great benefits to the Indonesian state and economy in stationing women within communities to deliver not only low-cost development support, but also and significantly to support and sustain a large number of workers whose wages as a result were quite low. It should be also noted here that it is the stability of the community understood as a community that produces the flexibility of the labour. That is, it was the local ideology of community self-help supported and enhanced through nationalist development that helped produce the stability of this social form. And in turn, this stability underwrites the precarity of flexible labour.

In the following sections, the emergence of early childhood education, care and development programs in Indonesia is briefly described before a consideration of what it reflects in terms of shifts in international development regimes, with specific attention to how women and social welfare are conceptualised. Then, the strength of an analysis that combines new approaches to care labour with debates on social reproduction is examined to suggest the need for something beyond governmentality to make sense of the current awkward – but productive – relationship between women and children.

Early Childhood Education, Care and Development in Indonesia

Beginning since the turn of this century, there has been tremendous growth in programming aimed at early childhood in Indonesia (Hasan et al. Reference Hasan, Hyson and Chang2013; Naudeau et al. Reference Naudeau, Kataoka, Valerio, Neuman and Elder2011). In 2004 fieldwork, it was clear that there had been an explosion in programs in Yogya aimed at the young child.Footnote ⁵ This rise in interest was the result of several mutually reinforcing changes at the global, regional, national, and provincial levels. Globally, early childhood education had become a priority for intergovernmentals, at least since the UNESCO Dakar Framework for Education on Education for All in 2000. Attention to early childhood education was also framed by the increased attention to the rights and needs of children since the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the rising global attention to issues such as child soldiers, child labour, and child sex trafficking (Scheper-Hughes and Sargent Reference Scheper-Hughes and Sargent1998; Stephens Reference Stephens1995). This millennial concern with the welfare of children mirrors a similar attention to the needs of children a century earlier in the developed North Atlantic, a period that produced many of the institutional arrangements for child welfare, from schools and juvenile courts to international child-saving organisations such as Save the Children (Cravens, Reference Cravens and Wollons1993; Horn, Reference Horn and Wollons1993; Wollons Reference Wollons1993).

The renaissance in Western concern with children has been taken up in Asia amid shifts related to changing developmental regimes and political economic arrangements. In Indonesia, the push for early childhood education initiatives intensified after the transition to democratisation at the end of Suharto's 32 year rule, a transition itself promoted by the 1997 Asian financial crisis and a deep neoliberalisation of the economy.

At the same time, shrinking family size in Java seems to correspond to an increased interest in child enrichment (Hull Reference Hull2003). Accompanying this long-term demographic shift, a growing middle class has emerged with interests not only in educational achievement but in the kinds of Western, English-language programming that would make their children global citizens. There has been significant growth in private preschools and day-care centres attendant on both middle class desires in particular and the desire for democratisation in post-Suharto Indonesia more generally. In Yogyakarta, many of these private programs, known locally as ‘playgroups’, were quite expensive, located outside of neighbourhoods, and devoted to early educational achievement. These programs often drew on established models of children's early education as child-centred and play-based, illustrating the continuing influence of Froebel and Montessori.Footnote ⁶

Another source of energy in offering early childhood programs came from the local and national NGO sector, where educational and democracy activists opened a range of pre-schools that also emphasised approaches that were child-centred and play-based. These programs were often offered on a sliding scale to accommodate more than the middle class, although these programs too seemed geared to challenge the national models of education based on standardised curricula and rote memorisation.

The national interest and growth in early childhood programs was accelerated by a form of disaster capitalism when, not two years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Sumatra, Central Java suffered the effects of a massive earthquake. In both cases, the rapid networking of aid through global and local non-governmentals illustrated new networked forms of development that move in and around decentralised state structures (Antlov Reference Antlov2003, Aspinall and Fealy Reference Edward and Fealy2003; Schulte-Nordholt and van Klinken Reference Schulte Nordholt and van Klinken2007).Footnote ⁷ The effects of these changes were evident in programs in the Yogyakarta region that included arts and education programs aimed at children in the aftermath of the earthquake. In interviews, local educators and activists acknowledged the role of the earthquake in quickening the acceptance of early childhood programs generally.

All of these sets of changes were evident as well in the public roll-out of PAUD programs for lower income communities in Yogya as a result of a World Bank push for programing aimed at the young children, 0-8 years of age (Evans et al. Reference Evans, Meyers and Ilfeld2000; World Bank 2006), which has been variously called early childhood care and development (ECCD) or early childhood care and education (ECCE or ECE). The use of the terms care and development in addition to education describes the comprehensive, integrated approach to child development advocated in these initiatives. As the Consultative Group on ECCD describes it:

Like the other early childhood programs that had appeared as a result of middle class desire, democratic activism and trauma relief, public PAUD programs were designed around the idea that these programs should be berpusat anak or ‘child-centred’ and play-based to stimulate development and educate the young child. As described in the teacher guidelines from the National Education Department's 2006 Manual for the Application of the Beyond Centers and Circle Time Approach Footnote ⁸ :

A particular image of the child as an empowered and self-directed learner, in other words, a liberal subject, is captured in the descriptions of early childhood coming, not only from the World Bank and provincial and national education materials, but also from local activists and educators in the programs of private pre-schools. This new empowered, young child represents, in a sense, the hopes of a new era in democratising, post-Suharto Indonesia. And yet, the empowered child is inextricably linked to another figure: the PKK ibu. While the PAUD public programs for low income communities, like other programs, were responsive to global and national changes, it was PAUD programs that were to be offered through the labour of the neighbourhood women involved in PKK.

Before turning to the effects of this programming for local women working in their communities, recent shifts in international development regimes are described along three dimensions: the social investment state, empowerment approaches, and regulatory communities.

Shifting International Development Regimes

In the following brief summary, changes in development regimes are used to chart shifts toward the social investment state and non-governmental governance, the empowerment of women and children, and the use of the regulatory community – all of these effects of realignments in global political economy. Despite the refiguring of modes of development and the accompanying ideologies, what remains consistent in the case of Indonesia is the role of women understood as wives and mothers working within their communities as the central pivots for reproductive and care labour.

Here, I draw strongly on the work of Shahra Razavi, especially her 2007 work on gender and development for the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development (and see Razavi Reference Razavi2011). The idea of the social investment state, as Razavi describes, was a reaction to the high neoliberalism of the 1980s and the move toward the Third Way. This “post-neoliberal” social investment according to Razavi is “centred on productive (or active) social welfare, which is understood to mean investments in human capital and in lifelong learning (especially in the capabilities and opportunities of children) and in employability programs” (Reference Razavi2007: 29). In fact, early childhood programs in Indonesia illustrate this mixed attention to brain development and care of the infant with attention to learning, particularly informal learning beyond the classroom, including parent education. The emphasis on third way approaches is likewise evident in the rise of non-governmental forms of government as state rule is redistributed through networking with private and non-profit groups in the delivery of local aid; a phenomenon that was quite clear in the aftermath of the earthquake. From Save the Children and Plan, to local Indonesian NGOs, the mobilisation for flexible and direct aid was an excellent example of neoliberalism's lean state and privatisation approaches (Leitner and Sheppard Reference Leitner and Sheppard2002; Peck and Tickell Reference Peck and Adam2002; Swyngedouw Reference Swyngedouw2005). These non-governmental governance measures, many begun during disasters, took root in the era of decentralisation as local needs were dealt with by non-profits because governments had much less money and capacity.

Another significant and synergistic effect derived from empowerment approaches in development. It was the 1995 Beijing Conference that signalled a shift in approaches to gender and development (Razavi and Miller Reference Razavi and Miller1995). Empowerment approaches have been influenced by the work of Amartya Sen (Reference Sen1999) on positive freedom and the need to empower women as a motor for social change (Koggel Reference Koggel2007). As with attention to child rights, this turn of the century approach dovetailed with a wave of democratisation in the global south (Leve Reference Leve2001; Nagar and Saraswati Reference Richa and Raju2003). In this context, empowerment approaches looked to provide poor women with the means to improve and empower themselves through programs such as microcredit.

The programs of the national housewives association, PKK, were begun under earlier developmental regimes. The earliest seeds for this program may lie with nationalist women's organising, but PKK along with the justifiably famous integrated health post or Posyandu were fully realised during the 1970s under Suharto's New Order.Footnote ⁹ These programs were government-organised but in the guise of grassroots development (Kasza Reference Kasza1995; Schulte-Nordholt Reference Schulte-Nordholt and van Ufford P1987). As such they made significant use of the rhetoric of community and community self-help. These modes of governmentality provided for cheap distribution of resources and ready modes of dispersion for nationalist development rhetoric and practice. PKK and the Posyandu health post specifically relied on the labour of local women figured as housewives to organise, deliver, and monitor local development. As such they were congruent with the shifts to Women in Development (WID) approaches begun in the 1970s as a response to earlier critiques of international development as top-down and focused on male participants (Razavi and Miller Reference Razavi and Miller1995). Indonesia's female-centred approaches to community were likewise conducive to later Gender and Development Approaches (GAD), and then to empowerment approaches as the key role that women play in successful grassroots development was acknowledged (Razavi and Miller Reference Razavi and Miller1995).

Recent approaches to the empowerment of women are keyed to viewing them as acting subjects capable of improving their own lives given the appropriate resources, and which posits them as liberal subjects rather than as passive victims. Yet some scholars, such as Aradhana Sharma (Reference Sharma2006; see also Nagar and Raju Reference Richa and Raju2003; Leve Reference Leve2001), note the curious dovetailing of women's empowerment, democratisation, and NGO-isation with the relieving of state responsibility for development, as this work is off-loaded to an unregulated, non-profit sector (see Peck et al. Reference Peck, Theodore and Brenner2010; Peck and Tickell Reference Peck and Adam2002; Leitner and Sheppared Reference Leitner and Sheppard2002; Swyngedouw Reference Swyngedouw2005). Empowerment, like the social investment state, tends to reinforce what was already the case in Indonesia: unpaid, local women working now to empower themselves redistribute aid along with modes of governance into the lives of their neighbours reproducing communities and surplus labour. In the case at hand, empowerment approaches to women, which mesh easily with Indonesia's long use of women's ‘volunteered’ community welfare labour, seem to have recently been displaced as the empowerment of children has taken centre stage.

The final dimension considered here appears as a logical outgrowth of the social investment state re-signified now as community-based development, and again, remarkably easy to integrate with longstanding practices of development in Indonesia. Arun Agrawal (Reference Agrawal, Feldman and Ticktin2010) describes the creation of regulatory communities, and the consequent formation of environmental subjects, in community-based forestry management in one area of India. His case illustrates how decentralisation has led to the governmentalisation of localities. Closer to the Javanese case, Tania Li (Reference Li2007) has described the Kecamatan (subdistrict) Development Program (KDP) in Sulawesi as a neoliberal approach to empowering communities and increasing social capital. As she notes, “from the analytics of government, the concept of social capital enabled them to constitute community as terrain of technical intervention” (Li Reference Li2007: 243). This “strategy of government through community” (Li Reference Li2007: 243) required villagers to “subscribe to a very detailed set of rules that obliged them to form committees, hold consultations, and interact with each other in new ways” (Li Reference Li2007: 248).

Agrawal (Reference Agrawal, Feldman and Ticktin2010: 193) notes the implicit goals in the use of regulatory communities as “underpinned by hopes for greater equality, justice, an inclusion” and with the potential to “create the space for advancing these claims”. The progressive goals are clear. As he goes on to say: “the new network of environmental relations are more economical and effective, denser and more widespread, more autonomous and yet, in a sense more enveloping” (Agrawal Reference Agrawal, Feldman and Ticktin2010: 205). Here, the progressive goals of using community meets neoliberal, networked governmentality and active agents of their own development. Agrawal's description of the advantages of producing regulatory communities brings us full circle to the community as figured in modernising, authoritarian New Order Indonesia (and even before). Such communities rely on the “intimate knowledge about each member” in a “patchy system of monitoring and enforcement” that both binds the community and produces division (Agrawal Reference Agrawal, Feldman and Ticktin2010: 204). All of these descriptions would serve equally well to describe the work of PKK at the time of my first fieldwork in the early 1990s.

These recent shifts in international development regimes are evident in the current focus on the need to invest and build social capacity through the care and education of children as development is construed to include health, education, and developmental success. Unlike earlier top-down models of aid, states pursue a third way in investing in human capital. Empowerment approaches to development, women's and now children's, amplify and extend this model which seeks to put the power to develop in the hands of the local, perhaps especially women. These approaches find happy coincidence with decentralisation that has emphasised the role of non-governmental governance in the redistribution of policies and programming beyond the state in the most recent wave of democratisation. Regulatory communities like forest councils in India and subdistrict development in Sulawesi are a logical manifestation of this grassroots control for local empowerment which seemingly dissolves the boundary between state and community even as it forms new subjects of self-government.

What continues to be so striking is that much of this is a perfectly fitting description of the housewives of PKK produced by the mid-twentieth century bureaucratic authoritarian and modernising regime and seemingly needed again now in the twenty-first century of flexible, democratic, and decentralised Indonesia for the needs of early childhood.

Precarity: From Householding to Care Labour

The growing global attention to early childhood has corresponded to a shift from a focus on women's rights and the needs for access to child care to a focus on the needs of the child alone (Dobrowolsky and Jenson Reference Dobrowolsky and Jenson2004; Molyneux Reference Molyneux2006). For example, in Canada, “there has been a displacement of claims making in the name of women, and a strengthening of claims for children, especially poor children” (Dobrowolsky and Jenson Reference Dobrowolsky and Jenson2004: 155). Moreover, those who seek to advocate on behalf of women “find themselves increasingly excluded or find themselves compelled to use the language of children's needs” (Dobrowolsky and Jenson Reference Dobrowolsky and Jenson2004: 155). The shift toward emphasising responsibility or co-responsibility and parental volunteered labour for childhood programs signals a shift away from the needs and rights of women themselves. And, in tandem with the growth in calls for child-centred research in academia (James et al. Reference James, Jenks and Prout1998; Scheper-Hughes and Sargent Reference Scheper-Hughes and Sargent1998; Stephens Reference Stephens1995), there is an emphasis on redefining child care issues as “being overwhelmingly about children” (Dobrowolsky and Jenson Reference Dobrowolsky and Jenson2004: 166). Dobrowolsky and Jenson note as well how this move aligns with calls for community participation and private/public partnerships, a process illustrated in this case by the emergence of PAUD programs in Indonesia.

In Indonesia, the trajectory of early childhood programs has produced a paradox as the child is figured as an individual to be empowered as against women whose community care labour is required to provide the capabilities for that empowerment. As Molyneux (Reference Molyneux2006) notes for Peru, this has meant a kind of doubling down on women's invisible care labour: “Women are incorporated into programme design (i.e. are visible) but in a way that depends upon the gender divide for its success” (Molyneux Reference Molyneux2006: 438). As she describes, “while much is said about the ‘individuation of the social’ in regards to neo-liberal policies, this does not apply to the women in these programmes who are per contra bound ever more securely to the family” (Molyneux Reference Molyneux2006: 439). She goes on to note that many of these community-based programs actually rely on women's income-generating activities and the reciprocal exchanges that are essential to household survival, a reminder of the significance of householding as a strategy in these cases.

These dynamics were evident in the Indonesian case too. As PAUD programs were begun across the city and in the special district of Yogyakarta, it became clear that there was a ready vehicle for the delivery of these programs in a low cost, community-based approach: let them be offered through the offices of PKK. This was not the only modality, but PKK and its structure provided a ready infrastructure for program delivery in poor communities. As suggested earlier, the stationing of local women as concerned mothers, housewives, and volunteer social welfare workers derived from the ideology of domestic labour valorised by Suharto's modernising, authoritarian and bureaucratic New Order. These programs now were extended as a part of deepening neoliberalisation (Peck et al. Reference Peck, Theodore and Brenner2010) to provide again a structure for local cooperation that served to reproduce the community form itself.

In the early 2000s, the community form as development modality in Indonesia is inflected with the international development regimes described above. That is to say, it is explicitly meant to provide for social investment, empower women and now children, and decentralise power to regulatory communities. Yet, what remains as true now as it was in the 1990s, is that PKK and community-based social welfare works in and through everyday cultures of community. A longer quote from Agrawal is instructive here:

Agrawal's analysis is like that of many working from a Foucaultian governmentality perspective that sees the dispersion of self-regulation as related to particular knowledge practices and forms of subjectivity. I find myself in agreement with much of this work, but as I returned to thinking about the domestic community and the gendered dimensions of social reproduction, the missing elements of this analysis became more evident. That this analysis worked for the high modernist developmentalism of the New Order but also for the networked and flexible adaptations to neoliberal globalisation more than a half century later should give us pause. The world has clearly changed; why does PKK continue to work as it does? One might argue that this is the genius of modern governmentality and the adaptability of its forms of self-regulation, but capital's need for reproduction is consistently overlooked by this approach. Attention to regulatory communities neglects older work on the domestic community which provides a compelling explanation for the continuity in this phenomenon and its gendered dimensions. In other words, it helps to explain how the empowerment of the child as individual agent requires the tethering of women more tightly to the social form that is the community.

Whatever the celebratory discourse currently is on community and women's work within it, what is just as evident is that this work underwrites the reproduction of cheap, flexible labour (see Warouw Reference Warouw2006). The domestic community on Java has been harnessed by state after state, with the expectation that poorly remunerated female labour, understood as the naturalised work of the proper woman, would serve as the motor force. By framing this issue as one of labour rather than governmentality, our perspective shifts. And the role of precarity, particularly as regards care labour, comes to the fore. As Razavi (Reference Razavi2011) notes, the issue of this unpaid care is an old one, and it remains a question as to how to count it and account for it whether in national policy or economic assessments of its value to national – and international economies.

Perhaps paradoxically, this care labour, which I originally analysed as householding, has been the stability that underwrites and produces precarity (Arnold and Bongiovi Reference Arnold and Bongiovi2013). While the benefits of precarity include the low cost wages that are produced when labour is informal, highly flexible, and in some cases, extra-legal, its organisation seems to depend on a process of rooting, institutionalising, and deepening women's community-based care labour, which is not divorced from their own work in the precarious informal sector. As Molyneux (Reference Molyneux2006) describes, Peruvian women's informal sector work is precarious and just as needed as their volunteered community care labour.

The argument made here is that the social reproductive labour, both informal sector work and care labour, of women in communities produces the flexibility of precarious labour (Newberry Reference Newberry2008). That is to say, it is the very rootedness of this community labour promoted and lived as a historical and cultural legacy by many Javanese that is the basis for precarious, cheap labour. Recent work revisiting domestic labour sheds light on the importance of reproducing the domestic community itself (Bakker and Gill Reference Bakker, Stephen, Bakker and Gill2003; Lee Reference Lee2012; Truong Reference Truong1996). For Truong, this includes “systemic reproduction, i.e. the maintenance of particular structures that enable a given social system to be re-created and sustained” (Truong Reference Truong1996: 32). For, Bakker and Gill, it includes “the reproduction of provision and caring needs that may be wholly privatized within families, or socialized or, indeed, provided through a combination of the two” (Bakker and Gill Reference Bakker, Stephen, Bakker and Gill2003: 32). Lee describes it as “the reproduction of the institutional arrangements of provisioning and caring needs” (Lee Reference Lee2012: 181). This recent scholarly return to domestic labour extends and amplifies the earlier work of householding and the domestic community. And significantly, it provides an analytical frame for understanding the paradox of women against children. While development regimes over time have reflected increasing attention to women's rights and how development can empower them, the unquestioned use of their community-based reproductive labour has produced contradictions that are now obvious in the shift to early childhood programming. As some have noted, child rights have become a way for women to make claims themselves, claims that may in fact come at a cost to women and their positions (Dobrowolsky and Jenson Reference Dobrowolsky and Jenson2004; Molyneux Reference Molyneux2006). Evidence from ethnographic research on the work of women in delivering PAUD programs in and around Yogykarta, Central Java, demonstrates this paradox in action.

Professionalising Care Labour in Yogyakarta

As noted above, the provincial and national governments have used PKK as a way to deliver early childhood programs. As a result, an interesting space has been produced by and for the women who staff these programs, one that could lead to becoming professionals rather than just volunteers. Interview data showed that some local PAUD programs were begun with a frankly entrepreneurial spirit by young women who hoped to start a successful business. The provincial government has offered opportunities for child care workers to gain professional experience. Although they are not considered professional teachers, there are new professional associations and new processes of certification developing in tandem with the growing field of early childhood education. It is also the case that the reorganisation of local governance has opened up some space for women to become local leaders (Tickmayer and Kusujiarti Reference Tickmayer and Kusujiarti2012).

Yet, in other cases encountered, local kindergarten teachers have been asked to run programs in their neighbourhoods in their spare time because of their experience and their formal teaching positions. In these instances, their felt need to comply was often based on a logic of community cooperation and contribution. These women commented on the extra burden in addition to their regular jobs, even as they noted that they could not deny community requests for this care labour. In other words, whatever the new spaces for professionalisation, they are still predicated on community-based delivery of care labour by women.

One example of the contradictions posed for local women by new early childhood programs draws on the work of an Indonesian activist and educator, Sri Marpinjun, with whom I have had the pleasure to work. Marpinjun's own role is an interesting one. She is now working for the national offices of PLAN Indonesia but she began as an activist (and anthropologist) in a Yogyakarta NGO. Her own career is an example of developing a professional career in the field of early childhood. With funding from the World Bank, AUSAID, and PLAN, her NGO started both a lab preschool and the ECCD-RC (Early Childhood Care and Development Research Centre). In a 2012 conference paper presentation, Marpinjun described research she has done on female, non-civil servant preschool teachers and their opposition to wage cuts in Bantul, just south of Yogyakarta. As she noted, “nearly in every village there are services of early childhood education (PAUD), which take the form of pre-schools. PAUD takes care of children aged four to six years old or before they go to elementary school” (Marpinjun Reference Marpinjun2012: 5). In the Bantul regency, there are a total of 534 pre-schools serving a population of 806,000 people.

Marpinjun noted the fuzzy status of public and private here. A public centre must comply with government regulations, and yet many of these centres, although run by PKK, fall in the grey area defined by the quasi-public character of this organisation. That is to say, the workers are not considered civil servants, but rather the volunteer housewives described above. The decision by some of these workers to challenge pay cuts proposed for those who were doing this work for little or no money in the first place is analysed by Marpinjun, drawing on Wee and Shaheed (Reference Wee and Shaheen2008), as depending on the life trajectories of specific women. Whether a woman chose to be involved or not derived from her early life experiences and her willingness to challenge gender norms. While in sympathy with this approach, I choose to focus here instead on why there existed a need for activism on pay for care work. That is to say, the forces that position early childhood programs as a logical extension of women's general care labour are again at play when that labour is extended without sufficient remuneration. Still, the very need to roll out these programs opened a possibility for challenging this norm.

In interviews conducted for my own research, the very mixed character of PAUD programming was evident. In some cases, PAUD programs were taken up by local PKK sections without much fuss. In my old neighbourhood and others, women just added the PAUD programming to the suite of activities they were already delivering for no pay. This was not necessarily easy or trivial, because many of these lower class women were actively involved in earning money through multiple forms of informal and formal sector work. In many instances, as was the case in my old neighbourhood, a local school teacher (retired, in this case) was asked to provide the programming.

Other examples identified included programs begun in response to government dollars or a specific local interest in these new early childhood programs. And although in one case, a male local leader explicitly avoided the structure of PKK, in all examples, the promotion and delivery of these programs drew on a local culture of women's work in aid of community. Agrawal's analysis of the Indian forestry councils is again apt here. As he notes, people's responses to new forms of regulatory strategies are not “exhausted by the continuum between resistance and conformity. Instead, it is important to recognize how these strategies and their effects on flows of power shape subjects and their ways of thinking about what they do” (Agrawal Reference Agrawal, Feldman and Ticktin2010:108). As he goes on to say, it is clear that “to achieve the consent of humans to their government, it is necessary to work through their desires and beliefs” (Agrawal Reference Agrawal, Feldman and Ticktin2010:109). This approach to governmentality is useful inasmuch as it illustrates, again, the redistribution of governance through local community forms which may produce new subjects. It also highlights how this redistribution of governance responds to and produces desires for early childhood programs based on new middle class mobility and a desire for local control in an age of democratic decentralisation. And to be clear, some women were actively and successfully seeking professional status and advancement through their work in early childhood programs.

Yet, this analysis of governmentality is incomplete because it fails to acknowledge or resolve the underlying contradiction of the domestic community: housewives and mothers are required because of their critical role in the reproduction of the community itself and the precarious labour it supports. Only by taking seriously how care labour is reproduced can we understand the durability of women's position despite the flexibility of the labour they reproduce. And even further, women's attempts to use this labour as a road to professionalisation must always and necessarily negotiate this unstated and awkward relationship.

Another Awkward Relationship

The progressive potential for early childhood programming in places like Indonesia seems to pivot on the continuing unacknowledged care labour of women and the reproduction of precarious labour. We might see this as producing an awkward relationship between the needs of children and those of women or as producing a tension between children's rights and women's rights. Goldstein notes in another context: “the separation of education feminism and early childhood education feels artificial, awkward” (Reference Goldstein, Hauser and Jipson1998: 51). This awkwardness appears to stem from the presumption of womenandchildren as a unity that is contradicted as older forms of women's labour – predicated at some points on their own empowerment, is now called upon to support the empowerment of the child, sometimes at their expense. The contradiction for women lies in their continued conscription to the sphere of unpaid community labour and the restriction of their professional opportunities as a result.

If we take a page from Strathern (Reference Strathern1987) on the awkward relationship between feminism and anthropology, we might instead consider the phenomenon of early childhood programming and the contradictions it poses as good to think with. That is, rather than accepting the needs of women and children as congruent, early childhood programs in Yogya show that a focus on children cuts across other social dimensions. I agree with Molyneux's recent assessment that “the social relations of production…remain unproblematized, with the work performed simply naturalized” (Reference Molyneux2006: 438). By reframing the argument about care labour in terms of the domestic community, the Foucaultian focus on the production of the liberal individual subject, whether child or women, is revealed to be incomplete. The empowered child does not, cannot, stand alone. The needs and rights of women and children are simultaneously coincident and divergent but most importantly they must be understood as they are constituted within the larger relational nexus that is the community, not just as a mode of governmentality but also as the structure for producing cheap and precarious labour.

Looking at how PKK has produced the housewifeization of women (Mies 1998) but also how the structure of these programs has provided the possibility for empowerment claims and for claims to professional advancement suggests it is not women as against children nor womenandchildren, it is the needs for cheap reproduction that sets limits on these women's – and children's! – lives. Governance and the education and care of the young child bring the unresolved question of reproduction and the domestic community to the fore again, and this time we must not neglect their significance for understanding globalisation, neoliberalisation, and the reorganisation of development and social welfare in the early twenty-first century.