Female Epitaph And The Life Of Women In The Late Ming Dynasty

This paper aims to study the female epitaph's great significance to the historical research of female life in the late Ming dynasty.The introduction part serves as an overview of this significance,while it also involves two other small problems:the phenomenon of "yu mu" and the style of title as "Mou ji pei mou". This section also shows the basic situation of the writing of epitaph in this period in tabular form.The rest of this paper is divided into three chapters as following:Paragon of widows, Businessman's wives, and Talented women.The first chapter describes the cultural background where those paragons emerged,their different encounters in different kinds of recognitions, their motivation, widows'life, and how did the significance of their virginity be sublimated by the scholars.The second chapter focuses on business women. that is a new group. This part means to study their connection with tradition and how they transcended them, the former refers to the relationship between those business women and their merits and virtues as an adherent of Confucianism,while the latter mainly concerns the typical spirit and capability of action on business.Chapter three describes the ecology of women's education, their outstanding ability and insight, and their knowledge applied nowhere.Although they are broke down into three separated chapters, I do not intend to divide these women into three types that are independent with each other. Also,this paper does not want the so-called "three groups" to be only a mechanical composition of their morals,behaviours and capabilities.They should complement,explain,while sometimes overthrow each other, In short, the unity they composed is supposed to be the best performance of the overall tension of women's life,such as what kind of space and restrictions did that time give to women, or from each individual's own point of view, how did women behave appropriately or inappropriately to that time.As to the type of article writting, I strive to make those remote stories and relevant discourses seem to be more or less tolerable and endurable.