The Research Of Woman's Marriage Life Based On 4802 Epitaphs In The Complete Works Of Song

Since the 1960s, researchers have paid more and more attention to the study on the history of women with a new upsurge of social history emphasizing the role of individuals and the development of European and American women movement. However, the academic world's systemic study related to women in the Song dynasty on daily life such as marriage, marital duration, years of life, reproductive age and child sex ratio is still quite inadequate. This thesis studies the blank spots on these. It uses 4802 men and women epitaphs from the Complete Works of Song, extracting various data about marriage life to illustrate the minor history changes in the lives of women in the Song dynasty and the underlying causes.The main body of this thesis is divided into 5 chapters, and 3 parts.Chapter 1 is part 1. It observes the values in mate selection, social marriage circle, geographical marriage circle and the age at the first marriage between men and women in the Song dynasty. The coexistence spouse staggered values in the Song society not only reflect the economic and the cultural development, but also the inevitable development trend of the structure in ancient Chinese marriage. The marriage phenomenon in the Song dynasty reflects the boundaries in mate selection process, and the influence of family background. Through the study of marriage examples of two families in south and north, this part tries to further analyse the interaction between family background and the marital choice. Taking 553 pairs of couples in the Song dynasty for example, statistics show that it's a close distance marriage feature. Compared the statistics of 418 women's first marriage age with other historical periods, it shows the late marriage tendency during the Song dynasty.Chapter 2,chapter 3 and chapter 4 constitute part 2. This part researches on the couples'daily life, interpersonal relationships, years of life and fertility in daily life. It focuses on the realities when women have went into the husband's family after the marriage.Chapter 2 uses data about husband and wife's age difference, marital duration, the husband-wife relationship model in epitaphs, trying to measure the stability of marriage and the main couples'marriage relationship models at that time. Besides, it presents the information about concubine in epitaphs objectively and restores the concubine's life in families. And it comprehensive studies the relationship between husband, wife and concubine. Chapter 3 discusses the daily interpersonal life of married women in the Song dynasty, including the relationship with their husband's relatives, the relationship with their own family members and social interaction relationship. Chapter 4 studies the actual situation of women's married life from two aspects: years of life and fertility.Chapter 5 is part 3. It describs the divorce and the concept of chastity in the Song dynasty. Although the Southern Song dynasty is the formation of Neo-Confucianism, it didn't immediately develop to nationwide ruling will. Therefore, the impact on women's real life was limited. Through the analysis of women's widowhood and remarriage life, we can see that the phenomenon of women's remarriage is widespread, but the choice of remarriage is different from the full equality and freedom.The ending discusses the richness of women's marriage life data in the epitaphs during the Song dynasty and the extension of the study.Appendix contains the tables of geographical marriage circle, men and women's first marriage age and the marital duration during the Song dynasty.