Chapter 7 China 289nomic realities; gender is as susceptible to reconstruction as other domains of
culture. The nature of the ideal female, and thus the life experience of actual
Chinese women, began to change during the Song dynasty, producing a pattern
in late imperial times a good deal more extreme than in earlier periods.
As we have already seen, various changes in state policy nurtured an ever
more defined patrilineal and patriarchal thrust in Chinese society. The spread
of surnames aided the remembering of kinship bonds through males, with a
corresponding weakening of bonds through female lines. Neo-Confucian revi-
talization of ancestor worship spread patrilineality more broadly through elite
classes and even among commoners, ritually reinforcing ever larger patrilineal
descent groups. Confucian values supported by state regulation vested owner-
ship of land in fathers and sons. This Confucian world was a “world authored
by men,” in C. Fred Blake’s phrase (Blake 1994); everything that strengthened
it rendered women correspondingly “other” and outside the structure.
For example, patrilineality often renders women nameless and identity-less.
There is no pool of personal names (like Bella, Jacob, Michael,.. .). Instead
everyone gets a surname (Cheng, Li, Wang, etc.) plus one or two characters as
an individual name, which are generally poetic, descriptive, or even political:
Blue Sky, Lotus Blossom, East [is] Red. In a study of naming customs in rural
Hong Kong New Territories, Rubie Watson (1986) found that men gained a
variety of names over a lifetime; a diviner may recommend adding wood, fire,
or another element to the name of a sickly child to strengthen him. A man takes
a marriage name in a ceremony on the first day of wedding rites. He may earn a
nickname from the community that interacts with him; at middle age, if he is
successful, he may acquire other names, called “courtesy” (hao) names, and a
great man receives additional honorific names at death. These names convey a
man’s many public identities and achievements; they are recorded on his tablets
and in lineage genealogies and so remembered by posterity.
But for women, identity was different. A woman was given a name at the
age of one month, which ceased to be used when she married. At marriage, as
her husband received his marriage name, she learned all the kinship terms in her
husband’s family and henceforth was called by his kinship terms. Her name may
never have been written down, not on birth certificates or legal documents or in
genealogies or ancestral tablets; it often was not clear what characters would be
used if her name were to be written down. In old age she was known as ah po
(“old woman”); when she died only her father’s surname was written on her
tablet (“Family of Lim”). Not even a name survived as testimony of her exis-
tence as a person. While these practices were in flux, as seen in Watson’s study,
they certainly were carried well into the Communist era and the recent past.
The decline in the status of women during the Song received further impe-
tus after the conquest of China by the Mongols. The same reforms that brought
social conservatism and a new preoccupation with Confucian rituals focused
moral concern on women. A new cult of women’s purity urged widows not to
remarry, exhorted women not to read novels, watch dramas, or go out in pub-