ploughed thefields, and growingfield crops such as peanuts. The females were the
ones who inherited assets from the parents. However, the status of the females has
been considered lower than that of the males in two aspects: First, in Buddhism, the
females are not allowed to listen to a sermon from a Buddhist monk in the front
row, to hand food directly to the monk’s hand, and to be the masters of Buddhist
ceremonies. Second, governance, males are the head of the household. Females still
do the housework.
In this period, the Vietnam War took place. The USA had seven air force bases
in Eastern Thailand (Baker and Phongpaichit 2005 : 149). From these bases, US war
planes left to bomb North Vietnam and Laos. Bangkok became the hub of the GIs
R&R (rest and recreation) tours. Bars, nightclubs, brothels, and massage parlours
mushroomed in Bangkok and around the air force bases. The number of sex
workers in Bangkok increased to up to 300,000 (Baker and Phongpaichit 2005 :
149). In the 1960s, migration of women and girls from the North into the sex
industry followed. The northern region has a distinctive culture that reinforces
prostitution, as Jeffrey explains:
In the North, where animism remained strong in spite of the predominantly Buddhist
character of the country, women acted as guardians of the spirit. Sexual relations before
marriage were viewed as an offence to the family spirits, which could be ameliorated
through an offering of gifts from the couple to the woman’s familial spirits in a phit phi
(wronging of the spirits) ceremony. Some analysts now view this particular ceremony as
one of the links between women’s sexuality and monetary value that has made prostitution
more acceptable in the North (Jeffrey 2002 :30–31).
By 1980, when the tourism industry started toflourish in Thailand, the number
of sex workers was between 500,000 and 700,000 (Jeffrey 2002 : 78). The
neoliberal impact on the economy affected lower class women significantly. The
International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) and the
General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) prescribed the forms of increasing
liberalism, privatization, and deregulation of economies in many poor countries. As
a result, small entrepreneurs were submerged by monopoly capitalists (Ghosh 2002 :
49). Women’s labour became exploited by monopoly capitalists in a way that could
be called modern-day slavery (Ghosh 2002 :50–53). Eoseewong ( 1992 :44–45)
reports when capitalism spread to the rural areas, Thais experiences the breakups of
families and communities as parents leave home to get a harvest job or cutting sugar
canes for the industry for a long while. Grandparents take care of the children.
Teachers live in the urban areas and ride on motorcycle to teach in the village. Thus,
there is no participation in the village. Headmen (phu yai ban) and head of tambon
(kamnan) or the local leaders became government officials. They are no longer part
of the locals. Worse than that, the commodification of the women’s bodies and
women trafficking occurred. Eoseewong ( 1992 : 47) states that selling daughters is a
sign of the downfall of the female status.
Beyrer ( 1998 :28–29) suggests the high value placed on female virginity and
male sexual freedom also reinforced the concept of exploitation of women from a
lower class. Sittirak ( 1996 ) argues that the process of capital accumulation, which
Thais adopted from the West in the 1950s, is similar to that adopted in the colonized
3.2 Female Status in Thai Culture from a Historical Perspective 41