ABSTRACT
Historians agree that, in terms of gender relations, pre-colonial societies in Southeast Asia were egalitarian as indicated by the relatively high levels of female autonomy and the high status of women. Female autonomy in particular, along with overall gender equality in general, has been attributed to the cognatic, specifically bilateral, kinship system that had long prevailed across most parts of the region and that is now seen as one of the region’s defining cultural characteristics.1 This cultural trait was unaffected by the region’s socalled Indianization. Symbolic expressions of gender differences as encoded on the body had also been minimal,2 in a setting that emphasized human sameness and complementarity of the sexes. Because of women’s high status in the region, as Barbara Andaya argues, “gender considerations can, at the very least, provide the historian with ‘a useful category’ for historical analysis.”3
