Women's Remarriage, Chastity, And Their Social Position In Song Dynasty

During the first 50 years of Song Dynasty in China, it was quite common for widows to get remarried, which resulted from different reasons. The thoughts on chastity began to spread from the mid-Song Dynasty because of the rising of Neo-Confucianism, and the concept on chastity became more exact than before. There was no evidence to show why the number of remarried women decreased. However, it was obvious that those theories had made the widows feel even worse when they got married again. What's more, we should not conclude that women's social position during The Song Dynasty declined rapidly, because these theories had not exerted their full influence on people's thought. They only demonstrated the reduction of women's social position in the Song Dynasty. Therefore, we may get this conclusion: women's social position is in a contraction or transition period during the Song Dynasty.