Women's biographies in the Wei-shu : a study of the moral attitudes and social background found in Women's biographies in the dynastic history of the Northern Wei

Abstract

The contrasting life-styles of the Chinese imperial bureaucratic state resting on a basis of sedentary agriculture, and the nomadism of the northern steppes where changing political alignments rested more directly on personal loyalties, entered an uneasy period of symbiosis in the fourth and fifth centuries AD when the nomads conquered northern China. With the establishment of the Northern Wei state and Northern Wei dynastic line at the end of the fourth century, the inflexibility of the Chinese system of succession and the role it allotted to women and distaff relatives in regency governments posed a serious threat to the powers T'o-pa tradition vested in the emperor's brothers and paternal uncles. To avoid political subversion through the manipulation of the succession system, the Northern Wei leadership in the fifth century enforced a strict distinction between the role of empress in the system and that of mother of the heir-apparent. No one woman could be both empress and mother of the heir-apparent. In addition, heir-apparents-to-be were taken away from their natural mothers and given to women of slave status. The natural mother was often forced to commit suicide. Moreover, the formal appointment of a son as heir-apparent was often delayed until the child had shown a degree of maturity and competence outside the harem situation. Empresses were rarely appointed in the fifth century. Those women who were given this rank came from families of slave status without influential friends at court. For the T'o-pa elite, the empress' main value was her function as a symbol of the successful subjugation and integration of alien peoples into the Northern Wei empire. Thus despite the relatively free day-to-day life-style enjoyed by Chinese and T'o-pa women during the Northern Wei period, women at court were severely restricted in their quest for political power or security in the harem. Only the Empress-dowagers Wen-ming and Ling managed to overcome these obstacles and achieve a high degree of influence in the government of their day. Both the Chinese and T'o-pa aristocracies had serious reservations about the advisability of racial intermarriage during the Northern Wei period. In the early days of the dynasty, the Chinese managed to use the T'o-pa need for administrative expertise to infiltrate the upper echelons of central government without marrying into the T'o-pa royal house. At the same time, they managed to bargain some of their own expertise for continuing economic independence in their own localities. Eventually, their refusal to relinquish this autonomy, coupled with their successful infiltration of non-Chinese political and military privileges at the central level of government, resulted in a flair-up of racial hatred which brought to dynasty to an end. The tensions engendered by T ’o-pa and Hsien-pi attempts to wrest regional economic control from the’great families of the Chinese aristocracy produced a backlash among the Chinese against intermarriage and the trend towards cultural synthesis which had been deliberately fostered by certain T fo-pa and Hsien-pi rulers in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. The Chinese reacted to this threat by stressing those values in their own culture which would strengthen clan and family solidarity. In their search for ways to bolster confidence in their own cultural traditions, they turned to the values of filial piety, sexual chastity, widow-fidelity and the subordination of women within the family system. These values were re-emphasized at the central level of politics in the seventh century by the rulers of the united Chinese empire in an effort to contain the inroads made into Chinese culture by previous centuries of nomadic invasions. Thus models of ideal behaviour for the Chinese woman during the sixth and seventh centuries in north China became increasingly restrictive despite the outward appearance of relative freedom and liberty in their day-to-day life-style. Show more