5.5: Han Marriage and Family
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Jia Yi (c. 200 – 169 BC) vividly described Shang Yang’s reforms in Qin as a Confucian nightmare: they divided brothers and undermined filial affection to such a degree that
If someone lent his father a rake, hoe, staff, or broom, then he put on airs of great generosity. If a mother took a gourd dipper, bowl, dustpan, or broom, her children immediately scolded her. Wives suckled infants when their fathers-inlaw were present, and if wife and mother-in-law did not get along, they snarled and glared at one another.14
People loved their young children, while despising their parents. But Qin was gone, and Jia Yi’s point was to lament that Han continued to value the nuclear family, maintaining Legalist policy.
Most people, in Han times and thereafter, lived in families of roughly five people at any one time.15 Han from 186 BC permitted adult sons to live together, but it encouraged family division. Han policies forced women to marry by increasing their labor taxes fivefold between the ages of 15 and 30 if they did not. The family centered on the conjugal pair (sometimes called “one husband, one wife,” sometimes “a farmer and a weaver”), because the hard work of both partners was needed to feed, clothe, and house a family and pay taxes. The husband-wife bond was understood as so important to the household economy that Han law allowed either husband or wife to initiate divorce. Han women frequently did divorce husbands who were poor or sick or had mean parents. After divorce or if one spouse died, remarriage was the usual practice, to assure that everyone had a working partner.
Work roles were gendered to some extent. Each commoner household produced grain and cloth. On family farms, everyone pitched in for planting or harvest. Moreover, each 23- year-old man spent a year in military training, retrained each autumn, and could be called up for the next 30 years of his life. Men’s labor service could be far from home (women did their labor service in the local area), so wives had to do farming tasks when husbands were away. But weaving involved highly-specialized knowledge, and apparently in the Han period men absolutely did not work with textiles; they were excluded from a high-status, remunerative field of labor. Since gender mattered to people in other areas of life, daughters may naturally have emulated their mothers, learning their work, while sons learned work from their fathers. Over time the different kinds of work became badges of gender identity, so women who could do so proudly stuck to textile and household work, passing “men’s work” off to servants and junior family members of both sexes. Even wives who also farmed could mark themselves as virtuous women by producing cloth, and agricultural rituals had roles for women, including empresses. But both men and women worked as servants, as other kinds of artisans (in imperial workshops most lacquer objects were made by women), as merchants large and small, and as healers, both doctors and shamans.
Normally, a wife moved to her husband’s home and land, although there was some uxorilocal marriage (uxor means “wife”). A person’s surname or family name was that of his or her father, but surnames were not permanent, and people might change to the mother’s surname until about AD 200 or so. Wives kept their own surname (so we speak of Empress Lü, the wife of Liu Bang, and of Ban Zhao, who married into the Cao family.) When a wife died, inscribed over her coffin were her natal (birth-family) surname and her order of birth among her sisters, not her place in her husband’s family. Connections were social resources, and part of the function of marriage, perhaps especially among wealthier commoners, was precisely to ally families. We might call this an ambilineal system: social being was determined by both the father’s and mother’s kin. And people cared most about their immediate family, the five or six people they lived with.
In Han practice and law, husband and wife also shared rights to property, in different forms. The wife often managed the household budget, which remained true throughout the imperial period. Even if the husband managed the budget during his lifetime, the wife’s right to do so when he was incompetent or dead was legally and social recognized. That right did not pass to the son while his mother was still alive; of course, he was supposed to have moved out and started his own establishment, but she was still his senior. Women owned land and could contest a man’s claim to land ownership in a lawsuit in court. Both men and women paid poll tax, which assumes that each had an income. When a family married a daughter out, she took with her a dowry, both as kind of retirement insurance for her parents (she would assist them as they aged) and to show her status as a beloved child and representative of her natal family. The wife’s dowry remained her property, both in law and in custom – this too was true throughout most of the imperial period. If she died the dowry went to her children, not to her husband’s other children. A widow could inherit her deceased husband’s property in her own name, as did one fabulously wealthy female owner of cinnabar mines. If a son died before his mother, she could also dispose of his property, even granting it to her children by other husbands. An excavated tomb-contract from AD 5 records: Zhu Ling’s mother had married three times and had six children, and when her final husband died, she changed her will several times, in the end settling his estate and hers on all of her children – even on one convicted of a crime.16
From the fiscal point of view, laws that gave both husbands and wives rights and responsibilities were aimed at preserving a tax-base of small, productive, easy-to-control households. From the economic point of view, each household needed to grow grain and vegetables and raise chickens and pigs, and to raise hemp or ramie or silkworms to make cloth, not to speak of cooking, cleaning, and caring for the young and the old. A strong husband-wife partnership was the key to a healthy family economy and state fisc.
This partnership had cultural implications. First, loyalty and property rested with the nuclear family. When one man funded his son and his nephew equally, the son’s wife complained that this was not the norm: “Each one has his own family! How can we continue on like this?” Second, matrilineal kin were just as close – or just as distant – as patrilineal kin. For instance, Dowager Empress Wang (70 BC – AD 13) had two full brothers, and six half-brothers by the same father. She made her two brothers marquises and gave them the income produced by about 8,000 households; she gave her half-brothers lower titles and less than half the income, showing that she – like most Han people – valued her mother’s line. She had another halfbrother by her mother, by a different father, and she wangled him lucrative government posts; again, she was thinking about her mother’s descent line. The Han History reports that her various relatives “took advantage of their opportunities and were extravagant, competing with one another in their equipages and horses, music and women, idleness and gadding about.” Another half-brother had unfortunately died before the Empress’s handouts. His son, Wang Mang, was totally ignored by his luckier wealthy cousins. They offered no help: they did not see the patrilineal clan connection as meaning that they should support him.17 Ultimately, it was his connection with his maternal aunt, although it was emotionally distant, that gave him a stepping stone to power – we will see below with what result.