Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia are generally thought to have had more autonomy than their counterparts in Mughal India and Qing China.

Let's begin at the marketplace. One repeated cliche in foreign descriptions of Early Modern Southeast Asia is that women are the businesspeople. Here are some illustrative examples:

In Cambodia it is the women who take charge of trade... [Zhou Daguan, 1297 Customs of Cambodia]

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It is the women [of Maluku, in eastern Indonesia] who negotiate, do business, buy and sell... [António Galvão, 1544 History of the Moluccas]

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It is common for [Thai] women to engage in buying and selling in the markets and even to undertake physical labor, and they do not wear veils or cover themselves with modesty... They successfully earn their daily bread with no assistance from the men... [Ibn Moḥammad Ebrāhim, 1685 Ship of Solayman]

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[In South Sulawesi, Indonesia] there are also large Public Market Places where they keep Markets twice in four and twenty hours... None are to be seen but Women... [Nicolas Gervaise, 1688 Historical Description of the Kingdom of Makassar]

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The concerns of each [Javanese] family are managed by women, hence parents consider it of importance to have daughters born... when a son is born they are less pleased... [Wang Dahai, 1791 Anecdotes about the Sea Islands]

Initially, this might seem yet another exoticizing trope. Gervaise claims that "none are to be seen but Women" in the marketplaces of South Sulawesi, yet the richest merchants of the area were all men. Indeed, the greatest merchants of Southeast Asia were consistently male.

But to look at the very top strata of merchants alone is to fall into another trap. While the great merchants were men, it is true that local village markets, far more important to the vast majority of the population than the transactions of the richest merchants, were women-dominated. This is reflected in indigenous sources as well. Look at this vivid description of a marketplace in the Lao epic Phra Lak Phra Ram and note how the vendors are consistently female:

"Dear aunt [female vendor], I have nothing with which to buy from you. I regret so much. I hope to get [these objects free] crying and begging from you."

Having spoken thus, they went past. From there they reached the female vendors who were buying and selling all sorts of gold objects – curved spittoons, bowls... pitchers were spread along both sides of the road.

When they saw the young men and women drawing close, they began to cry their wares...

"Dear ones! Come and buy gold copper alloy. Keep it to admire. Come and buy copper to be shaped into objects of areca tray. I shall sell these wondrous objects according to the rule. You should come to bargain." Smilingly all the people – the young men and women – went past.

From there they reached the female vendors who were buying and selling various kinds of edibles. There were innumerable sweet delicious rice cakes...

The importance of women traders was such that it could transcend not only gender roles but social prejudices as well. The Kalang sub-ethnicity of Java was traditionally looked down upon as the descendants of slaves. But an eighteenth-century Javanese story tells of one Kalang women – and a divorcee at that – whose moneylending enterprises have netted her so much money that she now "has the power of galvanizing many people... for it is the blessing of the rich that everything they wish comes about and they do not lack workers."

No wonder that so many foreign merchants in Southeast Asia believed that having a diligent and intelligent "native" wife was crucial to commercial success. As the Chinese Buddhist monk Dashan says in his Overseas Journal after a trip to Vietnam,

The women were very good at trade, so the [Chinese] traders who came here all tended to marry a local woman to help them with their trading.

And not just Chinese. One woman referred to in Dutch sources as "Soet Pegu" served as the sexual partner of three consecutive seventeenth-century Dutch factors in Thailand, a status which she used to build up an enviable middleman position in Dutch-Thai trade.

Trading was far from the sole profession open to women. Most Southeast Asian societies still accepted patriarchal gender norms on professions and behavior to some degree, and these were reinforced by all four of the religious traditions that Early Modern Southeast Asia belonged to: Theravada Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity. Yet these norms seem to have been much freer then than now. Burmese administrative documents mention taxes being levied on female porters and salt workers. Eighteenth-century Thai mural paintings depict women driving elephants, though elephant driver is a male-only profession in modern Thailand. Even agriculture was often women-dominated, with Dutch colonial officials in early nineteenth-century Java estimating that women labored twice the amount men did in rice production.

The importance of women in local Southeast Asian society is also reflected in marriage patterns. In the majority of Southeast Asia, commoner marriage patterns were matrilocal, meaning the husband lived with the wife's family. Some Southeast Asian societies, notably the Minangkabau of Indonesia, practiced matrilineality (a practice where descent traces down the female line; Westerners are patrilineal and take the father's surname). Most Southeast Asian societies paid bride prices (groom gives the gift) rather than dowries (bride gives the gift), and one Dutchman remarks on how "even a common man [on what is now the partly Indonesian island of Timor] is considered rich when he has many daughters because on their marriage he receives valuable payments of gold and buffalo."

It's only natural, then, that inheritance patterns wouldn't be as male-favored as in East Asia. Early Modern Vietnam has the best-documented landholding records in Southeast Asia, and here's an example not uncommon there. In 1818, when one elderly couple in a southern Vietnamese village felt they would die soon, they divided up their lands into five equal portions for their two sons and three daughters. The elder son received the fields that supported the ancestral rites, but had the couple had no sons, these lands and the accompanying responsibility to sacrifice to the ancestors would probably have gone to the eldest daughter. By around 1800, a full quarter of the landholders around the Vietnamese city of Hanoi were women.

This was certainly not the usual case in Early Modern China. After the late fourteenth century, Chinese law held that nephews took precedence in inheritance over daughters. For Chinese daughters, the "likelihood of inheriting property... was very remote."

Sexual customs were also fairly free, especially in comparison to the East Asian cult of chastity that reviled widow remarriage and looked terribly on female premarital sex. In this post, I discuss how Indonesian and Filipino penis implements were justified by being especially pleasurable for women. The Thai oral epic Khun Chang Khun Phaen has widows openly bragging to young women about their skills in bed:

You’ve never made love so what do you know? You young girls have got as much inner rhythm as a Lao corpse. Just because you’re breathing, who’s going to love you? When it comes to the tricks, watch out for us widows. A young chap like this is a pushover. Just tug his string and he’ll tremble.

At the top of society, Archipelagic Southeast Asia was perhaps the only Islamic area in the world to have an established tradition of female rulers. I discuss the most famous Indonesian queen regnant, Taj al-Alam of Aceh, in this post. Some Indonesian 'ulama (Islamic scholars) argued that women judges should be appointed, and at least one Indonesian sultan had a woman admiral. Many Indonesian rulers also maintained thousands of female bodyguards who fully participated in court culture. One fascinating source on eighteenth-century Java is a court diary by an unknown writer whose only remark about herself is this opening sentence:

Attention: the writer is a lady scribe and soldier.

Now, the big question is: why? Historian Barbara Andaya suggests the importance of Southeast Asia's low population densities, which "enhanced the value of all individuals, regardless of sex." Personally, I wonder if it doesn't have to do with the fact that Theravada, Confucian, Islamic, or Christian religious orthodoxy was generally less established in Southeast Asia than Confucian notion of decorum were in China or the Hindu model of social order was in North India. Consider the contrast between what's been quoted about Thai women above and a more elite, Theravada orthodoxy-influenced view of women from the same place and time:

[A good woman has four tasks:] One, looking after her husband with kindness; two, sharing hardship and happiness equally; three, paying respect and obeisance to her husband; and four, giving her body willingly for his use.

Just as one Malay Islamic text (the Hikayat Sultan Ibrahim bin Adham) admonishes:

We women believers should be devoted to our husbands, in the hope that we shall obtain the mercy of [God] the Exalted in the hereafter.

And indeed, Indonesian areas where religious life followed Middle Eastern practices more closely tended to have more restrictive gender roles. In the kingdom of Aceh, the "Verandah of Mecca," women rarely harvested the rice, while for their southern neighbors (both the animist Bataks and the Muslim but matrilineal Minangkabau), the rice harvest was mainly a woman's job.