ABSTRACT
Southeast Asia consists of eleven countries, namely Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Indonesia, and Timor Leste. The sixteenth century is also important historiographically because the increase in written sources, both indigenous and European, greatly expands the opportunities for documenting the female experience in Southeast Asian societies. During the sixteenth century the circumnavigation of the globe and regular voyages across the Pacific linked Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, initiating the far-reaching changes that mark the "first globalization" of world history. Although there are marked differences in language, religion, economies and political cultures, it has long been argued that gender relations in this region have traditionally been relatively favorable to women. Women were inevitably caught up in the complexity of the religious interaction. Perhaps paradoxically, global reaction to the rise of extremist Islam and the subjugation of women have led many observers to see more liberal attitudes toward gender as markers of "modernity and progress".
