Raden Ajeng Kartini is hailed as Indonesia's first feminist. April 21, the day of her birth, is celebrated as "Hari Ibu Kartini" (Kartini Day). She is seen as the symbol of Indonesian women's emancipation.
Kartini was born on 21 April 1879, in a village called Mayong in the town of Jepara, North Central Java to an aristocrat family. She is the daughter of Raden Mas Adipati Aryo Sosroningrat, the Regent of Jepara. She went to a primary school, along with her brothers, for the children of Dutch planters and administrators. Other girls from aristocratic families did not receive the same formal education she obtained. But under the old Javanese tradition of pingit, she was kept in seclusion at home until marriage upon reaching the age of twelve years.
Seclusion from twelve years of age until marriage did not stop Kartini from aspiring for further education. During her period of seclusion she wrote letters to many friends abroad, read magazines and books, and rebelled against the strong tradition of gender discrimination. Her father gave her books on Javanese culture to "balance her western education and subscribed to a Literary Box, a box of magazines, children's books, modern novels and foreign news, which was changed every week by a local library." In 1892, when she was twelve years old, Kartini made friends with the wife of the new Dutch officer appointed as Assistant Resident of Jepara, Mevrouw Ovink-Soer. Mevrouw was "highly cultured, had published a number of magazine articles," and later wrote a book entitled Women's Life in a (Javanese) Village. She was also a fervent socialist and fervent feminist. One account says that the Dutch people who supported her desire to be educated and to search for new kind of education for herself were proponents of the then new colonial policy called "Ethical Policy" that emphasized
increased education of the Indonesians, fuller participation by them in their own local government as civil servants, efforts to raise the peasants' standard of living through agricultural improvements and the promotion of indigenous handicrafts.
Her father, a Javanese official serving the Dutch colonial government as a local administrative head on the north coast of Java, introduced her and her sisters to the reality of life for the people whom he governed, to the world beyond the then Dutch East Indies, besides exploring the intricacies of their own rich cultural heritage. He took his daughters to meet the villagers during times of crisis and celebration.
She obtained a scholarship to study in Holland, a desire she worked to achieve for quite some time, but family pressure led her to ultimately reject it. She did not want marry but she consented to be the fourth wife of the Regent of Rembang, Raden Adipati Joyodiningrat, a man twenty-five years her senior. She died on 17 September 1904 after giving birth to a child a year after her marriage. She passed away at the young age of twenty-five. Prior to her death, Kartini founded a school for young girls.
http://www.hurights.or.jp/archives/focus/section2/2009/06/raden-ajeng-kartini-indonesias-feminist-educator.html
