| Women have played important and vital role in the development and progress of human history.However,under the traditional gender order,women’s voices not only were suppressed but covered,women also became the appendant of men.The rising and development of women movement forces a complete rethink of traditional gender order and the position of women in family and marriage in modern times.Due to the limited research perspective and method,previous studies have paid attention to elite women chiefly,but have neglected the societal status and married life of women who came from the lower class of society.Based on Nanbu County archives,this article will discuss the married life and the position of women in the 19th century in the area by taking dowry as its cutting point.There was an outstanding feature of married life that marriage was strongly associated with dowry in Nanbu County.In normal circumstances,dowry meant money when contracting a form of marriage,but clothing,jewelry,foods and other valuables were also regarded as dowry.By careful examination of historical information,we can find that the amount of dowry was more in breach marriage than first marriage.In bride trafficking cases,the amount of dowry most was 0 to 20 strings of cash,and the mean of dowry was higher than before after the reign of Guang Xu.In widow remarry cases,the amount of dowry had been growing over time.Overall,the average number of dowry was not high because of Nanbu County’s economic level.Above all several marriage patterns were liable to cause conflicts around dowry.Dowry was a kind of financial compensation which groom’s family give to bride’s family,it had the legitimacy because was vested sexual distinction connotation,and being a part of gender order.As a result,when there were contradictions between kinsfolk,people often disguised the purpose of blackmail by borrowing dowry’s item.They considered bride trafficking as a kind of marriage.Women’s independence and voice were the further diminishing,and they become a vassal of the male.In Nanbu County archives,many confessions can not accurately express women’s voice because these confessions were bowdlerized by scribes.Women’s discourse space was further reduced.However,not all women were silent and unresisting under the fetter of gender order.The government always promoted and advocated the concept of chastity and women conducts,but the ethics had limited effect.On the one hand,buyers and the sellers didn’t care women’s chastity in sale of marriage,and money was more appealing than ethics for them.On the other hand,when facing domestic violence,some women preferred escaping to keeping silence,and some women choose to turn to litigation to redress wrongs done to them.This reflects women’s sense of autonomy.In a word,women had limited independence and discourse space because they were subject to traditional moral values and gender order in Nanbu County since 19th century.In most instances,despite dowry relating to women but the disputes on the ownership of dowry were essentially contradictions between groom’s family and bride’s family,women had been mistress of their own destiny impossibly.Even in Late Qing,when west feminism and the institution of marriage beginning influencing China,reformers began to call for liberating the woman,but women’s social position had not taken place in substance in Nanbu County.The standard notion of family and marriage need to take a long time to change. |
