This chapter examines two competing ideals about appropriate conduct for women: the lady of the court and the bourgeois woman. Interaction between courtly and bourgeois ideals of femininity had been taking place for centuries. Until the early twentieth century, courtly ideals of femininity continued to hold sway at the upper level of Thai society, although they were tempered by the rising influence of a bourgeois view of the world due to economic transformation. The declining social position of the aristocracy in the early decades of the twentieth century, culminating in the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932, dealt a blow to courtly conceptions of behaviour for women while helping to elevate the bourgeois housewife as the new ideal of exemplary feminine conduct. The chapter also highlights the very influential role that many elite women played in the twentieth century in writing about manners, including in the new literary genre of novels of manners. The chapter examines the works of numerous well-known women writers on manners.

This chapter examines debates about manners and civility in the first half of the twentieth century. Tensions between aristocrats and Western-educated civil and military government officials culminated in the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932. This period saw an outpouring of works about politeness and manners targeting the bureaucratic elite and the emerging middle class. Thai statesmen devoted a remarkable amount of attention to what they perceived to be the problem of manners and morals. Leading political figures on all sides of politics wrote about the subject. The model of ideal conduct that the absolute monarchy had developed for bureaucrats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a hybrid between the palace courtier and the English gentleman, began to be challenged by new and more diverse conceptualizations of social relations, pushed by supporters of a more progressive political order. Yet the new rules for how to behave were resisted by supporters of the old aristocratic order. Some of them attempted to salvage what was left of the old courtly ways in books and novels and their own etiquette manuals.

This chapter argues that since the October 1973 student-led demonstrations which overthrew the military regime, the consensus surrounding the ideal of the gentleperson (phu di) has broken down. The political instability of the period since 1973, with repeated coups, bloody crackdowns, wild swings from relatively liberal, open government to reactionary conservative military regimes, and the frequent ripping up of constitutions and drafting of new ones, reflected the entry of the middle class and the rural and urban lower classes onto the political scene and the challenge they posed to the political domination of the military, bureaucracy, and the monarchy. Just as there was no consensus over how the country was to be governed, in the period following October 1973 there was great contention over appropriate conduct. Changes in government were typically followed by official moral and behavioural campaigns. The long-reigning King Bhumibol came to represent the ideal of the gentleperson. His death in 2016 symbolized the passing of a particular kind of civility.