Women in the Song Dynasty of China, 960-1279 CE

The size, complexity, and wealth of China’s Song dynasty had a lot in common with the Byzantine Empire, which you already know about. In fact, 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 with many thousands of miles between them, there were plenty of differences, too, as we’ll notice in this examination of women’s lives in Song China.

During the Song dynasty, farmers produced an enormous amount of food, creating a population boom that stimulated domestic and foreign trade, including maritime trade. Innovative new techniques for producing iron, paper, and gunpowder, as well as a monopoly on silk production, made city-based merchant classes a lot more significant than they had been. Looking at the whole 300 years, it was generally a time of peace and prosperity... until the Mongols took it down in the thirteenth century. It happens.

We’ve seen mostly male rulers across several eras use religion to bolster their claims to political power. Now we’ll look at how this 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, found in the I Ching (meaning “Book of Changes” and written around 800 BCE) discussed Yin as the female; negative, casting shade, cold, passive and symbolized by the moon. Meanwhile the Yang were men; positive, warm, strong, active and symbolized by the sun. About three centuries later, the early Confucianists picked up the idea that men and women had specific roles and behaviors, including the notion that women were always lesser than men in any relationship. Confucianism did emphasize that women were to be honored 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. She cared for him, her children, and her husband’s family. If you were a mother-in-law, however, you did get to boss around your daughter-in-law, who lived in your house and was essentially your servant.

Confucianism can be called a philosophy or a belief system, but it’s not really a religion because it doesn’t have temples or ceremonies. Buddhism, however, has temples and ceremonies in which Song women could participate, and there were also convents—houses for religious life, learning and work for women. Women who took a vow to Buddhism were called nuns. (The male equivalents were monks who lived in monasteries.) Religious Buddhist women could join a convent and live among other women who were 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. As in Christianity, convents became the only places a woman could lead a life that didn’t revolve around having children. She could have respectable social status as an unmarried woman, receive an education, live under female leadership, and control her own life in many ways.

Social structures

As in European cultures around the same time, women in China were legally the property of their nearest male relative, and women’s social status was linked to their father or their 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—such as nobility and aristocrats—lived on big rural estates and had some access to education, through private tutors. Their principal jobs 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 musical, and became teachers to their own small children.

Religious traditions about women

One problem these elite women could face was that their husband could legally bring home a concubine, who was basically a second wife. It could really complicate fam ily life, since proper noble women were expected to treat their husband’s concubine and their children politely. Concubines, or qie, had an in-between role. They were like wives in that they were expected to bear children for their male partners, but they also had a lower status somewhat like household maids or domestic workers.

Some upper class families subjected their daughters to foot binding, a years-long process of tightly binding a girl’s feet to keep them small, a process that also mutilated them. Confused? The idea was that this would ensure a better marriage—and family alliances—for the family. Still confused? Well it’s not like other cultures haven’t created similar tortures for women to meet a particular standard of beauty, but here’s the deal in Song China. 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 not part of Confucianism, but its association with status and obedience lined up conveniently with new ideas emerging in the Song dynasty known as Neo-Confucianism. This newer thinking re-emphasized that everyone, including women, had to protect the good reputation of their family. And a foot-bound woman was certainly 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 that their daughter would need to do physical labor of some sort.

Historians know a lot more about elite women than we know about peasant women. Peasant families were farmers and made up the majority of the Song population (80%), as was true in most places in the world. These women’s stories went largely undocumented at the time. Few if any of these 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 the children. Since standing and walking were part of the job, these women were not foot-bound.

One might expect merchants, who often made good money, to earn middle class status, but Confucian philosophy firmly considered them lower-class people. 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 a lot of 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 midwives who delivered babies, Buddhist nuns, 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 some kind of literacy, either writing receipts or in figuring out bills, and perhaps knowing foreign languages to deal with international merchants.