An Alternative Family: An Elite Christian Girls’ School on Java in a Context of Social Change, c. 1907-1939

Author(s)

  • Kirsten Kamphuis Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10870

Abstract

The Koningin Wilhelmina School was a prestigious Dutch-language Protestant school for the daughters of the Javanese nobility in Yogyakarta. Opened in 1907 through the efforts of a group of elite Protestant women in the Netherlands, supporters of the Dutch Reformed mission saw the school as a tool to reform the spiritual and moral lives of young Javanese girls. At the same time, the school presented local parents with an opportunity to anchor their daughters more firmly in the Javanese colonial elite. This article investigates how the Dutch teachers at the school tried to provide their Javanese students with a surrogate Christian family to create distance from their milieu of origin. An analysis of letters by Koningin Wilhelmina School graduates shows how this particular effort to partly remove children from their own culture opened the door for highly diverse life trajectories.

De Koningin Wilhelmina School was een prestigieuze school voor de dochters van de Javaanse adel in Yogyakarta, met Nederlands als voertaal. De onderwijsinstelling, die in 1907 geopend was met hulp van een groep vrouwen uit de Nederlandse protestante elite, werd door de gereformeerde missie gezien als een instrument om het spirituele en morele karakter van Javaanse meisjes te hervormen. Tegelijkertijd gaf de school ouders uit de hogere Javaanse klasse de mogelijkheid om hun dochters deel uit te laten maken van de Nederlandstalige koloniale elite. In dit artikel wordt onderzocht hoe Nederlandse leraressen op deze school hun leerlingen van een alternatieve christelijke familie probeerden te voorzien, om zo afstand te creëren tussen de kinderen en hun oorspronkelijke milieu. Een analyse van brieven van oud-studenten van de Koningin Wilhelmina School laat zien hoe deze poging om kinderen deels van hun eigen cultuur te vervreemden uiteindelijk voor deze alumni mogelijkheden creëerde voor zeer uiteenlopende levenskeuzes.

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Author Biography

  • Kirsten Kamphuis, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität

    Kirsten Kamphuis is a historian of late-colonial Indonesia. She obtained her ResMA in Global and Colonial History from Leiden University in 2015. In October 2019, she defended her doctoral thesis Indigenous Girls and Education in a Changing Colonial Society: The Dutch East Indies, c. 1880-1942 at the European University Institute in Florence. The thesis proposes a re-evaluation of the concept of ‘civilising missions’ through the study of girls’ schools in four regions of colonial Indonesia. Since November 2019, Kirsten has been employed as a junior researcher at the Cluster of Excellence, Religion and Politics at Münster University. She is currently developing a new research project on women’s work, religion and public life in the context of the decolonising Indonesian State. Her wider research interests include the history of childhood and youth, transnational histories of education, and theoretical approaches to gender and sexuality. E-mail: kirsten.kamphuis@uni-muenster.de.

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Published

2020-11-12

How to Cite

An Alternative Family: An Elite Christian Girls’ School on Java in a Context of Social Change, c. 1907-1939. (2020). BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review, 135(3-4), 133-157. https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10870