Women Againts Cement: Environmental Activism in the Kendeng Mountain Range of Central Java Indonesia

Abstract

This article seeks to discuss the women’s environmental activism as manifested in their involvement in the contemporary anti-cement movement in the Kendeng Mountain Range of Central Java. Three major issues are dealt with here: 1) the ways in which the issues of women and the environment are linked and utilised to justify the women’s involvement in the forefront of the resistance against the cement industry, 2) key female figures who have provided leadership in raising awareness among the passive, domestic-oriented women and mobilized them into a more unifying resistance force, and 3) the forms of women’s resistance against the cement industry. Although women are not the only actors in the movement, but their partaking presents an interesting feature. Their involvement in the resistance has become an icon that provides a basis for labelling the contemporary anti-cement movement as the struggle of “Kartinis of Kendeng”, linking it with Indonesia’s national heroine of the region who has struggled for liberating women from the prison of tradition.