How Southeast Asia lost its lead in gender equality.

What is it about?

I believe I have shown in earlier work, notably 'Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce', that Early Modern Southeast Asia represented an unusually balanced gender patter in which women retained as much autonomy as men through their many economic roles. This article seeks to explain the undermining of this pattern by a model of modernity from Europe that was accepted by many Southeast Asian men in the early part of the 20th Century. Europe itself in thid period represented a relatively unbalanced pattern in which men had many exclusive rights over the property and wealth of women, while a puritanical ethose restricted tha activities of men. The colonial version of this modernity was unusually extreme in excluding European women almost entirely from decision-making roles in the colonies. Nevertheless the Southeast Asian model of female autonomy has contributed more than Western feminism to combating this type of colonial chauvinism.

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Why is it important?

Over the last century Asian women have often been characterised as unusually subservient to their men, and in need of 'liberation' from modern ideas of gender equality. While there may be some truth in this picture for South and West Asia, the reverse is true in Southeast Asia.