At the heart of the Neo-Confucian, or ‘Learning of the Way’, movement in Song China (960-1279) lay a profound contradiction. This is its vision of a perfectly ordered society, which required the dismantling of economic rights that women already possessed. Through the attempts to construct an ideal female subject devoid of economic agency, it inadvertently exposed its own fundamental instabilities. This movement sought to re-establish rigid patrilineal structures centred on the “descent-line system” (tsung-fa). But what this shows, unintentionally, is the resilient legal and customary rights exercised by Song women.
The philosophical drive behind the Neo-Confucian movement, spearheaded by figures like Chu Hsi (1130–1200), was the promotion of a radical form of patrilineality.1 The core tenet was that “ancestral property must not be divided but must be put in charge of one person”, that being the male lineage head.2 Within this framework, a woman’s possession of personal assets was perceived as a direct threat. It was seen to “undermine the authority of the household head” and, crucially, “siphon assets away from the patriline.”2 The ideal woman was thus conceptualised as an “economic void,” whose economic self-interests must be overlooked.
However, this idealised construction was immediately destabilised by the established legal and social practices. Contrary to the Neo-Confucian ideal, T’ang and Sung law maintained that a wife’s property was “conceptually distinct from that of her husband,” and she retained the right to remove these assets from the marriage in cases of divorce or widowhood.3 Another key practice was the right of a daughter with no brothers to inherit her parents’ estate, a direct transfer of property that Neo-Confucians like Chu Hsi explicitly condemned as “inappropriate”. 4 This reveals that the Neo-Confucian movement had to actively reshape the reality of women’s activity before replacing it with a passive, patrilineal focus.
But lacking the immediate power to alter statute law, the movement turned to moral and social pressure. A primary tool was the strategic use of funerary inscriptions to disseminate models of exemplary behaviour. Chu Hsi and his contemporaries consistently lauded women who performed acts of economic self-sacrifice, such as selling their dowry jewellery to support their husbands’ families or to fund a funeral.5 This pervasive praise, however, proved to be a double-edged sword. By celebrating dowry donation as an “a rare virtue worthy of attention,” the movement tacitly admitted that it was not the normative practice.6 The ideal woman could only be validated through the conspicuous, public surrender of the autonomy she already legally possessed. This created a paradox where the ideology’s need for constant performance of sacrifice served only to highlight the persistence of the autonomy it sought to negate.
The movement’s most aggressive efforts are evident in the judicial rulings of figures such as Huang Kan (1152–1221), a staunch disciple of Chu Hsi. Huang explicitly set out to overturn precedent, asserting in his judgments that a wife’s dowry land automatically “became land of the husband’s family” and reducing women to mere “conduits for inheritance”.7 Yet, even this militant approach encountered the hard limits of established law. In his own verdicts, Huang Kan was forced to concede that a childless widow could legally reclaim her property, acknowledging that the principle of women’s separate ownership was still “plainly in forcea”.8 The gap between ideological ambition and legal reality remained, even in its most ardent enforcers.
Lastly, while the ideology stressed female submission, its vision of the scholarly male, freed from worldly burdens, necessitated the delegation of domestic management to women. Thinkers like Chen Te-hsiu thus instructed women to use “obedience and submission to establish the foundation”, but to apply “strength and intelligence (kang and ming)” in daily action.9 This created an untenable female subject who was subordinate in theory yet dominant in household governance.
In conclusion, the Neo-Confucian endeavour to construct the “economic void” woman was an inherently unstable project. Its reliance on performative sacrifice, its struggles against resilient legal frameworks, and its own internally contradictory demands reveal an ideology constantly at war with its social context. The historical record of this struggle, preserved in the very inscriptions and legal texts meant to enforce the ideal, ultimately serves as a powerful testament to the economic autonomy it could never fully erase.