Women and property in Sung Dynasty China (960-1279): Neo-Confucianism and social change in Chien-chou, Fukien

This study uses court cases and funerary inscriptions to examine women's property rights in the Sung dynasty and changes in those rights towards the end of the dynasty. It concentrates on the prefecture of Chien-chou in northern Fukien province, where a new social movement called Neo-Confucianism was centered.; Despite Confucian rhetoric that emphasized the patrilineal male line and succession to ancestral sacrifices, from earliest times on parents regularly transmitted a portion of their property to their daughters. Women enjoyed strong customary rights to dowry, which for the elite usually included land, and could sometimes inherit considerable wealth over and above dowry. Women's inheritance rights were strengthened and codified into law in the Sung, even as the state limited transmission of property in general.; Within marriage women maintained separate ownership of their personal assets, including land and other property purchased after their marriage. Sung law especially protected women in joint family households; but even after family division, when husband and wife set up an independent family unit, the wife's property was clearly demarcated from that of her husband. This gave Sung women considerable economic independence and the freedom to remarry with their personal property at any time in their life in case of widowhood or divorce.; Neo-Confucians opposed both inheritance by women and the possession of personal property within marriage. They praised wives for donating their personal wealth to their husband's family, and Neo-Confucian judges in the late Sung tried consciously to change laws and customs so that women would no longer take property out of their marriages. In the Yuan dynasty following the Sung these efforts succeeded and the law was changed, forcing widows to leave their property behind if they remarried.; While Neo-Confucians opposed women's rights to private property, they nevertheless granted wives a major role in managing the financial resources of the household. Changes in women's property rights at the end of the Sung were part of their social vision, which called for widow chastity and a strong female head of household.