The feminist prince

Subhatra Bhumiprabhas

Special to the Nation

 Prince Damrong Rajanupab is remembered as the "Father of Thai History", but his lesser-known role as an early Thai feminist was recently revealed by a foreign scholar at a seminar on "The Role of Women in Village Electoral Politics: A Historical Perspective".

 Though historians mark 1932 as the year Thai women were  granted suffrage, the seminar revealed they were first given the right to vote several decades before Siam became a constitutional monarchy.

 It was Prince Damrong who instituted suffrage for Thai women under the 1897 Local Administration Act, which made Siam the first major country in the world in which women and men achieved the vote on an equal basis and without any record of controversy, says Katherine A Bowie, an American professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 The professor traced the subject of her research paper -- "Gender and Politics: The Case of Thailand" -- back to King Chulalongkorn's reign.

 "I was shocked when I learned that Thai women could vote as early as 1897," she said. "My mother is Swiss and I was in Switzerland in 1970 when my relatives were debating whether women should have suffrage. So I was aware of the wider history of women's voting rights.

 Though the 1897 Act stipulated that only men could serve as village or sub-district heads (kamnan), it also made Thailand one of the first countries in the world to grant women voting rights, she said.

 Four years before, in 1893, New Zealand granted the vote to women, but only following an extended political struggle -- and long after men could vote, the professor said.

And countering theories that the prince copied the law from the British colonial administration in Burma, the anthropologist pointed out that Burmese women at the time had no right to vote.

 Instead she suggested that Prince Damrong's palace upbringing had exposed him to hundreds of women with a wide variety of roles and abilities, so he saw no reason why females shouldn't have their say at the ballot box.

 The prince also encountered foreign females at the court, Bowie added, among them Anna Leonowens, members of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and American missionaries.

 The WCTU was a movement for women's suffrage, while Leonowens, hired to teach the princes and princess in the palace from 1862-67, was an outspoken advocate for women's suffrage in Canada.

 However, Bowie warned it would be too easy to conclude that the prince - Interior Minister at the time -- included suffrage in the 1897 Act because of these foreign influences.

 "As a Thai, he had confidence in women's abilities at every level, from the village to the court."

 In the same year as his Act, for instance, he had seen Queen Saovabha serve as Siam's first female regent while her husband, King Chulalongkorn, was away in Europe.

"I became interested in understanding more about Prince Damrong and the view of women in the court," said the anthropologist.

 Historical records show that most foreign visitors to the Kingdom at the time viewed women at court as sexual subjects, but the anthropologist offers a different perspective.

 "Rather than viewing them as a means to serve the sexual fantasies of rulers, I suggest that Thai court women were very powerful and provided important links to the village matri-lines."

 A brief consideration of the role of Queen Saovabha, other court women, and ordinary village women provides evidence of their strong political positions in a predominantly matrilineal society -- and the inner palace was in effect the hub of political education, Bowie noted.

 She did not agree with many feminist scholars who portrayed Thai women historically as "politically disadvantaged because the rules of the game are set up by men who dominate the political process"; and "suffering from low self-esteem, a lack of confidence in understanding national and global issues, and a sense of inability to communicate, lead and manage people".

 The anthropologist also disagrees with Khunying Supatra Masdit, the prominent female politician who stated that, "In our history, Thai women have not been directly involved in politics because it has been the norm that household matters are women's matters while national matters are men's matters."

 "I would like us to rethink the relation between gender and politics," said Bowie, who spent years in the 1970s and '80s researching rural development in Chiang Mai province. She returned there in 1995 and observed a kamnan election that opened her eyes to women's hitherto invisible role beyond their right to vote. 

 She found that women played an important role not only in mobilising votes for candidates, but also in their efforts to heal divisions both within and across their villages to achieve harmony.

 "The kinship system is an important factor for [any discussion on] gender and politics in a village," Bowie said. "Women tend to reject the role of community leader in favour of working calmly for the greater benefit of the community."

 However, she sees plenty of other gender issues that need further discussion in Thailand.

 "For example, women are not allowed to be ordained as bhikkhuni [female monks]," she said.