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Not just fryers of bananas and sweet potatoes: Literate and literary women in the nineteenth-century Malay world

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2009

Mulaika Hijjas
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Abstract

I argue that women's literacy was more common than is usually supposed and that women engaged extensively with written literature, both as readers and writers. I also discuss the role of traditional Islamic education in transmitting literacy among girls. The article is based on the examination of a group of narrative poems written by women at the court of Penyengat.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 153 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2010

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References

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67 Iskandar, Catalogue, pp. 417, 53, 418

68 The owner of the manuscript has the non-gender-specific name Encik Sulung, ‘cucu kepada Encik Ribut orang Tanjung Pinang’. Leiden University Library Klinkert 32, Hikayat Syah Firman, final page. See van der Putten, His word is the truth, p. 226.

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99 Tucker, Women in nineteenth-century Egypt, p. 124.

100 Puisi-puisi Raja Ali Haji, p. 433. This verse is marginalia on the earliest surviving manuscript, dated to 1914, and so may relate to a slightly later era. However, the manuscript did belong to a Penyengat woman, Raja Halimah Abdullah. Refer to Abu Hassan Sham, pp. 145–6, 363. A lebai running a school for female students is also the subject of an extremely ribald syair by Haji, Raja Ali, in Kitab pengetahuan bahasa, ed. Shaghir Abdullah, Hj. Wan Mohd. (Kuala Lumpur: Khazanah Fathaniyah, 1997), pp. 305–8Google Scholar.

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109 Ibid., p. 52.