African history enriches the comparative study of sexualities, demonstrating a breadth of practices, inflected by location, era, and historical contingency. Despite pervasive stereotypes, earlier sexualities were often varied and expansive. Examples challenge conventional academic categories, revealing the intersections between aspects personal and societal, romantic and transactional, and even sacred and sensual. Some African cultures endorsed varied pre-marital sexual explorations among adolescents and many emphasized initiations that shaped youths into gendered adults. Marriages and children often represented sources of power for families, elders, and elites, including older women. African cultures often defined gender according to role and status, not biology, such as the widely occurring instances of female husbands who married women in recent times. Both marriages and lovers factored into African politics, providing important means of alliance-building. Yet, interests in sexual partners extended beyond these concerns and included instances of same-sex partnerships along with practices aimed at mutual pleasure. Sexuality also mattered to many Africans’ cosmologies about well-being, healing, and power. Some healers gained power through sexual acts, and others through abstinence.

Despite the long-established fact that Thai women in old Siam were among those few enjoying the privilege of living in a matrilineal and matrilocal society, Thai laws rarely reflected such characteristics in their texts. Indeed, from the earliest record of Thai history, there were hardly any formal legal rules recognizing the rights of women. Thus, students of Thai family law learn how women gradually strengthened their place among men until today, from having no place to being equal to their male compatriots. All of this exists against the backdrop of a country with a relatively satisfactory track record of women’s rights. This book chapter questions whether the original strong status of women in the past has anything to do with contemporary family law in Thailand by exploring the old family laws and pointing out certain features in the laws which might explain the discrepancies between the legal text and women’s societal status. Moreover, historical analysis may also explain why there is still some unequal treatment of men and women in the contemporary family law system, even when the Constitution directly protects gender equality.