Detail from a 1941 cover of Pahésan, depicting a stylized image of a Javanese serimpi court dancer. Image: courtesy Kirsten Kamphuis

Pahésan Magazine and the Modern Girl in Colonial Indonesia

May 15, 2024

Kirsten Kamphuis published the article “A Mirror for the Modern Girl: Work and Marriage in an Indonesian Magazine for Young Women, c.1937–1941” in the Winter 2022 issue of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. In this piece, Digital Childhoods editor Hannah Stamler chats with Dr. Kamphuis about girls’ publishing and conceptions of modern girlhood in colonial Indonesia.

Your article centers on the Indonesian girls’ magazine Pahésan (“Mirror”). To start, we’d love to have a brief overview of the publication. When and where was it published? Who were its editors and readers?

Pahésan was published in Solo in Central Java from 1937 to 1941. At the time, the island of Java was the heartland of the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. The magazine was started by a group of friends in their late teens and early twenties centered around the sisters Utari and Utami Ramelan. The Ramelan sisters came from the Javanese nobility, the priyayi; and like many priyayi men, their father was a colonial administrator. The friend group also included Erna Djajadiningrat, a schoolteacher who came from a prominent noble family.

In the magazine, the girls wrote about their own interests (student life, jobs, friends, music and film), as well as more politically engaged topics, such as social work. The magazine was almost completely written in Dutch, with the exception of occasional poems or short pieces in Javanese and Malay. The editors were exceptionally well educated for their time: the Ramelan sisters, for instance, graduated from only one of three secondary schools for Indonesian students in the archipelago. Dutch, at this time, was the language of the educated, urban young elite. As far as I know, the magazine was spread throughout Java, and its readers were educated girls and young women from different ethnic backgrounds who lived in the booming Javanese cities.

As you note, the magazine was billed as a publication for modern Indonesian girls. In the Pahésan universe, what did it mean to be “modern”? And what does the Pahésan version of modernity teach us about the global circulation of the modern girl archetype?

Being modern in Pahésan was defined by a certain social status: being Dutch-educated, often from a priyayi background. Because of this, it also meant having the ability to consume: Pahésan’s readers could afford to buy their own magazines, belong to tennis clubs, and go out to the cinema. For young women, doing salaried work was also part of being modern. In previous generations, priyayi women did not work outside the home and married during their teens. This was the first cohort of girls that experienced a phase of relative freedom between school and marriage and many worked in offices, as nurses, or even as journalists.

At the same time, the modernity advertised in the magazine had a nationalist flavor. The editors stressed that all ethnic groups of the archipelago were united as “Indonesians,” a relatively new term at the time, and that it was the responsibility of young women to contribute to the development of the Indonesian nation. Educated girls were, for instance, encouraged to follow in the footsteps of the early twentieth-century social activist Raden Ajeng Kartini and teach poor villagers how to read. Pahésan authors explicitly distanced themselves from what they saw as the morally reprehensible aspects of stereotypical modern girls of the West, such as sexual promiscuity. I think this shows us that the archetype of the Modern Girl was not adopted everywhere to the same degree: girls and young women in Indonesia took from it what they needed and dismissed other aspects. Girls around the globe instrumentalized the idea of the Modern Girl according to their needs.

Utari and Utami Ramelan in 1936, shortly before their high school graduation. Image: © Tan Thiam Kwie (Karnadji Kristanto), private collection, courtesy of Didi Kwartanada

Reading your piece, I was struck not only by the fluidity of modernity as a category but also by that of girlhood. Please tell us more about how Pahésan writers envisioned their audience: What qualities or preoccupations marked someone a “girl” versus a “woman”?

Girls, as defined by the magazine editors, were certainly “young.” In this context, girlhood extended from about the age of sixteen, when educated girls would finish high school, to their mid-twenties at most. Girlhood ended at marriage, and if you were not married by age 25, you would not be a girl anymore but a so-called spinster! Womanhood, by contrast, was marked by married status and the end of a professional career: As in the Netherlands at the time, women in government service were fired as soon as they got married, and those working in other sectors were expected to quit their jobs. Girlhood in Pahésan was also defined by a certain playfulness, a time of dreams for the future and fun, before “grown-up” life as a mother and wife would start. In this context, it is interesting that the editors changed the subtitle of Pahésan from “voices from the world of Indonesian girls” to “the voice of the Indonesian young woman” in 1939. Perhaps they found that the word “girls” implied too much frivolity, after all.

In your opinion, what is the most important legacy of the magazine to postcolonial Indonesian culture, politics, and society?

In Indonesia today, the colonial era is usually, and often rightly, portrayed as a dark period of repression and economic exploitation. There is much attention given to so-called pahlawan nasional, the “national heroes” of the anti-colonial struggle. I think that Pahésan is important in showing that there was a whole class of Indonesians that used the colonial system to their advantage, leveraging it to acquire jobs or education. The magazine can teach us to look at the colonial period in a more nuanced way.

We’d love to know more about your research process. Can you share how you came upon Pahésan? Where did you discover this fascinating publication and what made you pick it up and start reading it?

I first came across the magazine in the National Library of Indonesia in Jakarta, in 2016. I was working on my PhD project about girls’ education in the Dutch East Indies, and so I searched for the Dutch word for girl, meisje, in the catalog. That’s how I ended up discovering Pahésan. It was rare for me to find sources written by girls themselves, so I was very enthusiastic about the magazine. It was also very fun to read! In Jakarta they only had the magazine on microfilm, but I later found a few hard copies at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

What were the benefits and challenges of using Pahésan as a source base? You note in the piece, for instance, that many of the articles were written under pen names, which made it hard to identify individual writers.

In the end, the use of pen names presented less of a challenge than I had initially thought. Once I found out that Utami Ramelan had published her memoirs, I was able to get a good image of the social circle from which the magazine emerged. And some pen names were actually revealing because they showed me what popular culture was in fashion at the time. For example, one writer chose the name “Sweet Adeline” after an American film. Selecting which articles to use for my research was a bigger challenge. I liked the source so much that I wanted to include the entire contents of the magazine, but that was of course impossible, and made it harder to build a cohesive argument.

The main benefit of using Pahésan was that it gave me insight into the worlds of a group that otherwise left little trace in historical source material about the Dutch East Indies. Even though the readership of Pahésan was relatively privileged, teenage girls’ writing is not often preserved in archives and it is hard to come by personal collections. So in that sense, it feels like a really singular source and one I was lucky to come across.

Did your piece change significantly from first draft to final version? If so, in what ways?

It did. The reviewer comments really helped me to improve the piece. In the first version, I was using the words “traditional” and “modern” without much further discussion. One of the reviewers pointed out that I needed to think harder about what these concepts actually meant. This helped a lot in refining the argument.

Do you have plans to continue expanding your research in the article? If not, are you working on another research project you’d like to share with us?

My interest in print cultures has certainly remained! I am currently working on a postdoctoral project about women’s activism in Indonesia between the 1920s and 1960s, and women’s magazines are an important source of information. I am not currently planning to come back to Pahésan, but I do think the magazine has a lot of potential for further research, so who knows!

To end on a personal note, we’d like to ask you about a few of your favorite things…

1) Favorite way of managing notes and/or citations?

I use Zotero, in large part because it was available for free at my doctoral institute. I think it usually works well. I also use several notebooks and my agenda for handwritten notes.

2) Best book in the history of childhood and youth you’ve read in the past year (does not have to be something that was also published in the last year)?

I loved Defining Girlhood in India. A Transnational History of Sexual Maturity Laws by Aswini Tambe (University of Illinois Press, 2019). I was impressed by how Tambe combines approaches from legal history, the history of psychology, and visual history. It has a chapter that analyzes the covers of an Indian women’s magazine from the 1930s to the 1980s to trace the emergence of the figure of the adolescent girl. The images are very striking.

3) Best piece of advice you remember receiving as a child?

My parents never pushed me and my brother in a certain direction when it came to school or, later, choosing a profession. Their main advice was “Do whatever makes you happy”, and I am still grateful for that attitude. Doing research and writing still gives me a lot of joy, and I am not sure if I would have chosen to go the academic route without that encouragement.

4) And in keeping with your piece’s focus on youth publishing, did you have a favorite teen magazine?

Yes, I had a subscription to the Dutch teenage girls’ magazine Fancy! It was definitely not as socially ambitious as Pahésan (it was basically all about celebrities, boys and fashion). But it did have a section where a sexologist and, for some reason, a radio DJ answered questions about sex. Some of my friends’ parents cut out that section before their daughters were allowed to read their copies.


Kirsten Kamphuis is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Münster, where she is working on a project about Indonesian women’s activism in the twentieth century. Her first book project, Voices from the Colonial Classroom: Girls’ Education in Colonial Indonesia, c. 1880-1940 is under contract with Leiden University Press. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at West University of Timișoara. 

The author would like to thank Pak Didi Kwartanada for giving permission to use a photograph taken by his father.


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