Qin Shi Huang's own marital situation was very vague, and as the first emperor in Chinese history, he never made an empress. Of course, Qin Shi Huang was not unkind to women, and according to the analysis of later historians, Qin Shi Huang should have been influenced by his mother before rejecting Li Hou. However, during the reign of Qin Shi Huang, he once gave a marriage privilege to women, which was canceled by later generations because the content was too avant-garde.
What privilege? To put it simply: if the husband is unfaithful to his wife and has other feelings after marriage, the wife can kill him without being guilty. This privilege looks really shocking, I am afraid that modern people will find it difficult to accept, although Qin Shi Huang is an emperor for thousands of years, in the end he is also an ancient person, he made this rule, why is it?
The first thing to note is that Qin Shi Huang's decree is not aimed at all men in the world, but is treated differently. Without Shang Martin, I am afraid that Qin Shi Huang would not have introduced such a privilege. Originally, after Shang Martin arrived in the Qin Kingdom, he found that the marriage and family system in the Qin State had a remarkable feature: a large family lived together, and parents, uncles, brothers and sisters, wives and children did not separate the family.
What are the consequences of this? The Qin people are still aggressive, the atmosphere is open, and if there is a little scandal inside the family, they can use the knife and gun to kill for a while; if this family and that family make some scandals, the family comes to find trouble, this is not a vegetarian, anyway, a large family gets together, the strength of the people is large, and it is not a big deal to use the knife and shoot for a while - this is also one of the reasons why there are many private fights in the Qin Kingdom.
First, a large family gathered into a small tribe, first, to promote the wind of private fighting, causing a lot of social problems; second, this is not convenient to manage, taxes are levied on a household basis, so that when a large family gets together, the monarch can receive a lot less tax. In response to this situation, ShangMartin introduced a new "small family system", stipulating that fathers and sons and brothers must separate their families and set up their own portals when they reach adulthood.
This system was enshrined in the Grass Reclamation Order and enforced. If there are two males in the family, they must separate the family, so that the small family of husband and wife, male and female weaving, becomes the mainstream. But the question is, how should this family be divided? It is very simple to say, for example, an old couple has a son, and the son grows up to marry a daughter-in-law, and when he is married, he will be separated. However, at that time, men also had to look at their strength when they married.
The small family system and the joint sitting system have diluted the clan feelings of the Qin people and made them more profitable. For the son of a rich man, his parents can give him enough family property to marry, and it is quite simple to divide the family. What about the poor? To know that in ancient times, there was a clear decree that men and women of the right age must marry, otherwise they would be severely punished, and even harm their parents, Qi Henggong once ordered: "The husband is twenty and the room is twenty, and the woman is fifteen and married." ”
Quite simply, the Han Dynasty's "Public Security Policy" mentions the Marriage Model of the Qin people: "If the family is rich and strong, it will be divided, and if the family is poor, it will be redundant." "Translating, the sons of poor families grow up and do not have the strength to marry wives, so they go to other people's homes to make money. This entry is a little different from what we have now, because at that time, the status of the son-in-law was very low, which was equivalent to being a capital, serving as a cow and a horse for the woman, and also being looked down upon.
Qin Shi Huang inherited the legacy of his ancestors, during his reign continued to stabilize the small family system, it is not easy for Qin people to become parents, each small family strives to reproduce the population, produce cloth, serve the construction of Great Qin, increase labor and strong Ding is what Qin Shi Huang hopes to see, and extramarital affairs this kind of thing will seriously affect family harmony, Qin Shi Huang in response to this situation, also introduced two different punishment methods:
Ordinary men marry women into small families, and if the husband and wife have anything to do with men and women in other families, they will be subjected to snubbing, rice torture, and so on; as for the special family in which a man enters a rich family, if a man is unfaithful to his wife in marriage, the wife can deal with him like a slave. Although it was only implemented on a small scale, after the establishment of the Han Dynasty, it learned the lessons of the fall of qin and changed many systems, and this article was also cancelled because it was regarded as "unkind", and no one dared to restore it. After all, once restored, wouldn't it all be messed up?