The Study On Selecting Son-in-law Of Marriage In Song Dgnasty

Marriage is an important social behavior in human society. Selecting son-in-law or daughter-in-law is a constituent element of marriage. For the female in Song Dynasty, they had no freedom to independently choose a husband; however, their father and family played very important role in the process of marital creation. Moreover, the man who had been chosen was also difficult to make decision completely defer to his own wish, they were often quite strange to the female whom they would take in marriage.Holistically speaking, marriage conclusion is the result of divergent selection. In marriage of Song dynasty, main body of this selection belonged to different estate, so they had different material requirement, intercourse scope and culture orientation. One unique phenomenon of marriage in Song dynasty is that female sometimes broke the limitations of class when choosing a husband, chose men with development potential in the next level, and this selection often be made by the elder who had abundant social experience. However, this betting choice had predictable error, which would bring many factors to disturb marital harmonious.There is a great difference between Song dynasty and former generation. In former generation, when talking about marriage, people focus on family background of the other side; while in Song dynasty, people pay more attention to personal capacity and developmental potential. With the increasingly consummate of imperial examinations system, Jinshi origin of imperial examinations are widely followed. People choose son-in-law in front of the list or before the list been posted, someone even choose from the scholars who might be successful in the further examinations. In the Song dynasty, scholars especially the one origin of imperial examinations are the first-line husband choice for all estates of society.This article takes the Husband Selection in marriage as entry point, observes this unique phenomenon in marital history, which exists in whole society, no matter the royalty or common people. People in each estate have different social status, different initiative and starting point for Husband Selection, then bring on different results:Emperor select in Confucian scholars for his princess; many of the bureaucracy class choose in front of the imperial examination list; the merchant class desire officers in order to improve social status; influenced by social ethos, populace in other social estates would also select one man as husband due to the life status, to entrust their daughter’s future life. Emperor consider more of political need when select his son-in-low; the bureaucracy place more emphasis on man’s future development, in order to help the family in future; merchant class also actively seek potential officials for the desire to become one officer; populace in other estates would choose one ideal man as son-in-law based on their economic situation and self conditions of their daughter. Some individual areas have the uxorilocal customs, even choose monk to be son-in-low.