Divorce Decision-Making in Javanese Women: A Review from Social, Cultural, and Gender Perspective

Abstract

Divorce phenomenon all across the globe has shown significant increases, which also happens in Indonesia. Based on records from the Supreme Court, there were 480.618 divorces cases in 2019, with 25% cases filed by the husbands and 75% cases filed by the wives. This study aims to identify divorce decision making process in Javanese women from cocial, cultural, and gender perspective using literature review and survey. The survey was conducted because the literature on this topic was limited. Survey was conducted by an author to 78 Javanese women aged 20-5-years have filed divirce to their husband and have children shows results that support the previous research. Criteria for Javanese women here are born from Javanese ethnic or descendants of Javanese people, have Javanese identity like a name that still uses Javanese idiom, practising Javanese obsolete cultural values, and also live in a family that still upholds this Javanese tradition. The literature reviews shows result that gender role still plays a major part, where women is a "guard" which responsible for every house chores, child bearing and obey her husband, makes women often got blamed when divorce happened and treated as incapable of taking care her husband"s dignity and her marriage life. The survey results show these women considered external factors such as children, family reputation, and social status (stigma of being a widow). A conclusion that could be taken from this literature review is that it is not easy to file a divorce for Javanese women, which eventually made them stay in their marital conflict to avoid divorce, because their Javanese culture really upholds marriage value.

Decision Making on Divorce for Javanese Women in Indonesia

“…This finding is from research conducted by Rahmalia & Sary (2018) in Medan that wives file for divorce because there is no husband's financial responsibility and burdens the wife and interference from outsiders such as in-laws, inlaws, neighbors and friends. Research in East Java shows that the cause of women filing for divorce is infidelity and all forms of domestic violence, namely physical, psychological, sexual, and economic violence (Puspitasari, 2020).…”