In Hmong villages, a ritual is changing what divorce means for women

Gender Equality

For Hmong women cast out by divorce, a ritual offers a way back

Divorce has long left Hmong women in northern Thailand without a clan, inheritance or standing in family ceremonies. A growing movement is using an ancient ritual to change that.

By Isara Panasantikun

Published 13 March 2026
4 min read

Mae Talamai, Chiang Mai – The table held two dishes of food and four cups of rice wine. An elder stood before it and spoke words that, until recently, few in the Hmong community had ever expected to hear.

“Whether son or daughter, they are the blood of the clan,” he said. “Welcoming a daughter home is not a transgression against the spirits, but an expression of love, understanding, and the promotion of gender equality.”

Around him sat elders, young people and women in embroidered black dresses. Some wiped their eyes. Others reached for one another’s hands. When it was over, the clan members drank together, the rice wine that seals a Hmong promise made before heaven and earth.

This is the ritual welcoming home of a divorced daughter – a practice a Hmong women’s network has spent more than a decade reviving – and it is quietly gaining ground across northern Thailand as more clans choose to formally adopt it. The Yaaj Txawb, one of the largest Hmong clans in the country, recently performed it at their annual gathering in this village. Others have followed. But the practice remains contested, and its limits are debated even among supporters.

Cast out by tradition

Hmong society is organised around patrilineal clans, surname groups that trace descent through the male line and are bound by shared ritual obligations. When a woman marries, she leaves her birth clan and joins her husband’s. The ancestral spirits of a household are tended by its men; women, once married out, are no longer considered part of their father’s lineage.

The consequences of divorce or widowhood can be severe. A woman whose marriage ends has, by tradition, no clan to return to. She cannot participate in her birth family’s ceremonies, has no claim to inheritance and, in the eyes of custom, belongs nowhere.

The belief originally served a purpose, discouraging divorce in a community where family unity was bound up with survival. But as Hmong society has changed and divorce rates have risen, the tradition has left growing numbers of women without protection or standing. Some remarry for security. Others leave for the cities.

For Praphatson Saekue, who went through the welcoming ceremony herself, its significance was personal and immediate. “I feel my life has value when I am treated as a human being,” she said. “I have the will to make a living and live happily once more.”

“In the past, we never saw Hmong widows return home,” said Urai Yangcheepsujrit, a Hmong academic with the Hmong Women’s Network of Thailand. “So this holds deep emotional meaning for them. Many times we see relatives sob, tears in their eyes, embracing one another.”

The tears at such ceremonies, she added, are different from those shed at weddings. At a wedding, a daughter weeps because she is leaving. Here, she weeps because she has been taken back.

A decade of organising

The Hmong Women’s Network of Thailand has been working to revive the practice for more than a decade, drawing on evidence that welcoming-home rituals had existed in Hmong tradition long before falling out of use.

The campaign began in earnest in 2013, when network members brought the idea to Mae Sam Laep village in Mae Hong Son province. Rasamee Torsirichuchai, the network’s secretary, still recalls the reception. When she addressed the village heads – all men – and asked for their cooperation, one stood up immediately. “Don’t bring outside beliefs in,” he told her, “and don’t take inside beliefs out.”

The network pressed on. By 2017 it had begun signing memoranda of understanding with Hmong clans. “We didn’t want this to be just a women’s project,” Rasamee said. “We wanted it to be a Hmong project.” In the following years, 18 clans formally committed to accepting the practice.

Opposition has not disappeared. The network has encountered hostile pages on social media, and criticism from Hmong communities in Laos, where some accuse the women of undermining Hmong culture. Rasamee believes those actively opposed remain a small number.

The limits of a ceremony

Not everyone who supports women’s rights regards the ceremony as sufficient.

Sujarit Pankitva, subdistrict chief of Pa Klang in Pua district, Nan province, and himself Hmong, welcomes the intent behind the ritual but questions its limits. Returning a daughter to her birth home, he argues, treats the symptom rather than the cause.

“It is like escaping a tiger only to encounter a crocodile,” he said, using a proverb. A woman who has left a troubled marriage returns to a household where, by custom, all ceremonies and ritual offerings remain the preserve of men. She can live under her parents’ roof, but she cannot tend the household spirits. If her parents die, she must depend on brothers for every ritual act that governs family life.

“One day,” Sujarit said, “the woman would inevitably face resentment.” His position is that if Hmong society grants men the right to perform rituals, it should extend the same right to women.

The Hmong Women’s Network does not dispute this. For them, the ritual is a beginning, not an endpoint. Individual families often carry out their own private ceremonies without any formal programme. “Parents who love their child,” Rasamee said, “they just do it themselves.”

A broader shift

The network has also begun working with other indigenous communities in Thailand facing similar tensions between custom and contemporary life.

Hmong women returning home are not, advocates say, coming back as dependants. Many have stable careers – as teachers, nurses and health workers – and support ageing parents rather than rely on siblings. “Widowed women are not without potential,” said Jaruwan Phanomprai, a member of the women’s group. “They are a driving force in many community activities.”

For Aphinan Yangcheepsujrit, a descendant of the Yaaj Txawb clan who attended the gathering in Mae Talamai, the case was simple. “The belief that a divorced daughter will bring bad luck to the family,” he said. “It is time for that to change.”

Additional reporting by Ken G Weber

This story is part of a collaborative reporting project between HaRDstories and the Indigenous Media Network (IMN), supported by the Canada Fund for Local Initiatives.