On The Female Moral Of The Han Dynasty

With the establishment of the feudal dynasty of Han, especially with theeconomic recovery under the influence of the measures of Huang-Lao Wu-weithought in the earlier Han dynasty, the society of the Han dynasty got comprehensivedevelopment, which provided the foundational conditions for the construction of thefemale moral from the aspects of the political, economic, ideological and culturalfactors. On this premise, Dong Zhongshu inherited widely the excellent culturaltraditions of the pre-Qin era, and put forward and discussed the theory of Yin-Yang.Based on this theory, he confirmed that husbands were superior to wives, whichbecame the core standard of the female morals later. Biography of DistinguishedWomen, writen by Liu Xiang, listed various moral models and standards for femalereference from multiple angles, and tried to reconstruct the concept of "ThreeObedience" quoted from the book of Ritual. As an official document, Memorials ofWhite Tiger Temple bound the females completely to the patriarchal society, andestablished a feudal doctrine that the husband’s would be the program for his wife. Asa woman, Ban Zhao approved the feudal female moral in her book of FemaleCommandments, and creatively interpreted the concept of "Four Virtues" in ZhouGuan. After300years of efforts, feudal society had completed the theoreticaldemonstration of "the husband will be the program for his wife", and expounded theconcrete contents of "Three Obediences and Four Virtues", established it as the femalebehavioral standards in the feudal society finally. The institutionalized achievementsbecame the specific standards for the females in the feudal society throughinternalization at last. The female moral in the feudal society, which began to buildfrom the Han dynasty, was helpful to maintain the order of the feudal rule, and toshape beautiful moral character of the Chinese traditional female. But on the otherhand, it also oppressed and bonded the female independence and personality, causedunequal relations between male and female. The unequal relations were caused byinadequate development of productive forces of human societies in essence. Weshould pay attention to the inherent contradictions between the gender equality andthe social division of labor. In the foundation of the overall social development, weshould inherit the excellent traditional morality, and accept all the excellent cultureachievements widely, and make a creative interpretation, to create the socialist femalemorality which conforms to the development trend of the times.