Female Roles in Pre-colonial Southeast Asia

What is it about?

Broadly speaking, pre-modern Southeast Asia exhibited a more balanced pattern of gender relations than other known societies before the modern era, and markedly distinct from its neighbours in China and India. The economic base of this balance was the division of labour, whereby planting and harvesting, textile and ceramic production, and above all marketing, were predominately in female hands, whereas ploughing , metalwork, housebuilding, war-making and statecraft were predominately male. Only in royal courts were women wholly dependent on men. Even as rulers and diplomats women played an unusually prominent role in the early modern period. The economic balance appears to have underwritten an unusually strong female bargaining position in sexual politics, whereby women frequently initiated divorce, without dishonour.

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Why is it important?

Southeast Asian should be better understood as a critical case in the comparative literature on gender relations.