The size, complexity, and wealth of China’s Song dynasty were similar to the Byzantine Empire, which you already know about. The Song was one of the heirs of the classical Han dynasty in East Asia, just as Western European medieval states were heirs of the classical Roman Empire. But there were plenty of differences, too.

The Song dynasty was an era of growth and prosperity. Farmers produced an enormous amount of food, which allowed the population to grow larger and led to an increase in domestic and foreign trade. New methods of producing iron, paper, and gunpowder, as well as a monopoly on silk production, made city-based merchant classes more important. Overall, the Song dynasty was a time of peace. In the thirteenth century, however, the dynasty came to an end when the Mongols invaded and toppled the Song.

As mentioned above, the Song dynasty was largely an era of peace and prosperity. We’ll look at how the intersection of the Confucian belief system and government laws shaped women’s lives in China during the Song dynasty.

Belief systems

Chinese ideas about the differences between men and women go back even further than Confucianism. The ancient concepts of Yin and Yang are found in the I Ching, or “Book of Changes,” which was written around 800 BCE. Yin and Yang are two opposing, but also mutually supporting, principles or forces. Yin is associated with the female, and is seen as negative, casting shade, cold and passive. Yang is the male force or principle, seen as positive, warm, strong and active. Yin is symbolized by the moon, while Yang is symbolized by the sun. About three centuries after the I Ching was written, the early Confucianists took up the idea that men and women had specific roles and behaviors, and also asserted that women were always lesser than men in any relationship. Confucianism honored women as mothers and mothers-in-law within their families. Still, it was clear that a woman’s place was in the man’s household. She obeyed her father until it was time to obey her husband. Mother-in-laws, however, held power over their son’s wives and essentially treated their daughters-in-law as servants.

Confucianism can be called a philosophy or a belief system, but it’s not a religion because it doesn’t have temples or ceremonies. Buddhism, however, had temples and ceremonies in which Song women could participate. There were also Buddhist convents—houses set aside for women who wanted to pursue a life of religious learning and work. Women who took a vow to devote their lives to Buddhism were called nuns. (The men who did the same were called monks and lived in monasteries.) Religious Buddhist women could join a convent and live among other women studying Buddhism. Families could also send their daughters to a convent to avoid having to pay a high dowry to a potential husband’s family. Convents became a place for a woman to lead a life outside of marriage and having children. Women were allowed to have a respectable social status despite being unmarried, an education, life under female leadership, and control over their own lives.

Social structures

As in European cultures around the same time, a woman’s social status was linked to her father or her husband. Unlike European women, Chinese women in the Song dynasty were entitled to part of their father’s estate when he died, especially if there was no brother or son. Elite women lived on big rural estates and had some access to education through private tutors. Their principal responsibilities were to run a household of servants and family members and to have many children, preferably sons. Daughters of Confucian scholar bureaucrats were also considered upper class. They were often literate and taught their own children.

One problem these elite women could face was that their husband could legally bring home a concubine, or qie, who was basically a second wife. Proper noble women were expected to treat their husband’s concubine and their children politely. Concubines were expected to bear children for their male partners, but their status was lower than that of a wife. They were treated like a household maid or domestic worker.

Some upper-class families forced their daughters to go through foot binding. This was a years-long process of tightly binding a girl’s feet to keep them small, a process that also mutilated the feet. The idea was that this would ensure a better marriage— and family alliances—for the family. A foot-bound woman could not work in a store or a field and often needed the help of servants to walk, so her husband could brag, “I’m so prosperous that my wife doesn’t have to walk.” Foot binding was associated with new ideas emerging in the Song dynasty known as Neo-Confucianism. This thinking re-emphasized that everyone had to protect the reputation of their family, and a foot-bound woman was an example of a young elite woman following her families’ orders. Non- Chinese ethnic groups within the Song dynasty did not foot-bind their daughters, nor did any family who knew their daughter would need to do physical labor of some sort.

Historians know more about elite women than we know about peasant women. Peasant families were farmers and made up the majority of the population (80%), as was true in most places in the world. Peasant women’s stories went largely undocumented at the time. Few peasants were literate, so they didn’t write about themselves. Elite men who could write already thought women were inferior, so they were not going to waste their time, paper and ink writing about poor rural farming women. Basically, we assume that like all other farming women in the world, peasant women worked alongside the men, and also were responsible for taking care of the house and children. Since standing and walking were part of the job, these women were not foot-bound.

Confucian philosophy firmly considered merchants to be lower-class people, despite their good wealth. The logic here is that “doing business”—without actually producing anything useful—made you a cheater. Merchants simply bought stuff for one price and sold it for more. Under Confucianism, that’s cheating.

Nonetheless, businessmen, traders, and merchants thrived during the prosperous Song dynasty. The economy was booming, so there were many women whose families were involved in trade and businesses of all kinds. Along with helping with their fathers’ or husbands’ businesses, these women had other employment opportunities. They could be Buddhist nuns, midwives who delivered babies, innkeepers, or work in silk production. A father with a store would certainly bring his wife and daughters to work. All of this often required women to develop some kind of literacy, in order to be able to write receipts and bills. Women who worked in trade and business were also sometimes required to know foreign languages to deal with international merchants.