New voices from Southeast Asian women: A review essay

Abstract

Historians may have come late to the study of women and gender in Southeast Asia, but when these three books are placed along a historiographical spectrum one can only be impressed at how far the field has moved in approach and methodology. Exploiting previously untapped sources that emanate from very different sites — a Dutch East India Company courtroom, the women's quarters of a Malay palace, the privacy of a Javanese home — the authors open up new avenues by which to explore the complexity of Southeast Asia's gender history. Though the contexts are very different, the movement through time (Wives,slaves and concubinesis set in the late eighteenth century,Victorious wivesin the nineteenth, andRealizing the dreamin the twentieth) provides an opportunity to gauge shifts in representations of ‘femaleness’, attitudes towards gender roles, and women's responses to change.