Wen | Zhao Libo
Whether ancient or modern, marital divorce is a heavy topic, no matter who is right or wrong, each other will eventually pay a heavy price. Therefore, divorce was a fairly prudent thing in ancient times, and almost every dynasty used a variety of methods to check and maintain normal social ethical values.
Legal Q&A
In 1975, in the Qin Twilight Bamboo Jane in Yunmeng County, Hubei Province, a "Legal Answer" was excavated, which let people know for the first time that in the Qin Dynasty, if the husband and wife broke down, the man could choose to divorce his wife, and it was obvious that the woman was on the passive side. But there are also certain restrictions, "abandoning the wife without writing, the second class" is that once a man chooses to divorce his wife, he must report to the government, otherwise he will be fined two sets of leather armor, although this punishment is not a big deal, but from two thousand years ago, you can see the shadow of "Chinese-style divorce".
During the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, the ceremonial law gradually faded out of the stage of history, and in the warring states, they were involved in marriage, and they were engraved in the Dingzhong to maintain the seriousness of marriage. It is recorded in the "Left Biography" that when a woman is returned home by her husband, she rides the horse back to her mother's house when she is married, and the man returns his wife's horse when he divorces, indicating that the relationship between husband and wife is completely over, so this situation is called "anti-horse". In the Han Dynasty, the comprehensive constraints of etiquette were further formed, coupled with the increasingly mature provisions, which made very strict guidelines for women's norms, such as the rendering of works such as "Biography of a Spirited Woman" and Ban Zhao's "Female Commandment" undoubtedly became a textbook for publicizing women's three from four virtues.
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In fact, in the Confucian way of moderation, men do not want men to divorce their wives, they hope that the family is happy, so as to achieve the purpose of "father and son, brother harmony, husband and wife, and the fatness of the family", in today's words, "home and everything is prosperous".
When Qin Shi Huang traveled around the country, he did not forget to leave some teachings for the local people, often carving large characters on the stones when he left, for example, in Shaoxing, he left the "Huiji Stone Carving", which recorded that "if you have a son and do not marry, double the death is not chaste", that is, to warn the women who have sons to remarry to double the death penalty to punish her for infidelity. At the same time, he made demands on men, such as messing with the style of work, "killing without guilt", so it can be seen that the "Great Qin Law" is full of qin shi huang's personal color, because he grew up from this unfortunate ethics.
In the Han Dynasty, there were seven most direct and tough reasons for a man to divorce his wife, the so-called "seven outs.". For example, in the Eastern Han Dynasty, there was a man named Bao Yong, who was very filial to his stepmother, but because his wife scolded the dog in front of his mother, Bao Yong sent her back to his mother's house and completely rested. In addition, there are wives who fail to wash their mother's feet in time and are also divorced, so in the Han Dynasty marriage is to serve filial piety, and the in-laws are always the strongest and winners.
In addition to seven out, there is also a "three not to go", which is counted as protecting a woman's certain marital rights and interests. At that time, the sister of Emperor Guangwu of the Eastern Han Dynasty had a crush on the chancellor Song Hong, and since Song already had a wife at this time, the princess still hoped that her brother would personally come forward and use the high-ranking official Houlu as a condition for his divorce. Unexpectedly, this Song Hong turned out to be Chen Shimei, who was not a scumbag, and also uttered a famous saying through the ages: "The poor and the lowly friends must not be forgotten, and the wife of the chaff does not go to the church." It has become a classic phrase of a good man who is warm and warm.
In the Jin Dynasty, the word "divorce" gradually came into being, according to the "Book of Jin", there was a person named Wu QiuJian who committed a crime to be executed, and according to the law, the wife also had to sit and beheaded Because this woman had some background in the family, she asked the emperor to dissolve the marriage contract with him, so that she could save her life, and finally the emperor approved it, so it became a divorce event recorded in history, but it did not have many representatives, and it was a kind of self-protection under special circumstances.
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In the Tang Dynasty, the word divorce gradually became a common word, for example, the "Book of Tang" recorded: "Princess Gu'an, and her mother-in-law did not agree with the edict to divorce." Since then, some of the elite classes have also separated from each other due to emotional discord, so it can be seen that at that time, divorce belonged to the upper class, and few ordinary people could do this. Behind these is the face of the royal family, which ends the humiliation and injustice of the woman in the form of divorce.
This form of transformation can be regarded as a counterattack of the aristocratic power class women against the patriarchal society, because since the Zhou Dynasty, women have always been in a passive position, only by the "seven out", such as the "Book of Rites" has: "Women have seven to go, not to obey their parents, to go, to go, childless, to go, to fornication, to go, to envy, to go, to have evil diseases, to say more, to go, to steal, to go, not to obey their parents, for their anti-morality also ..." It can be seen that most of these seven reasons are a norm in the sense of sensibility, the subjective color is too strong, so these so-called "crimes" It is indeed chilling enough to let the housewife who has paid for this family leave.
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Fortunately, there is also a corresponding "three no-nos", that is, the woman is abandoned by the husband, according to the etiquette system, she should return to the mother's home, but if there is no one in the mother's family, the husband's family cannot abandon the wife. After the death of the in-laws, the wife shall serve them for three years according to the etiquette system, and shall not abandon them, and if the husband was originally poor, and after marrying the wife, he became rich because of his wife's reasons, and the wife was kind to the husband and should not be abandoned.
In the Tang Dynasty, there were more specific norms for the divorce of men and women, if the wife did not commit the crime of "seven out", the man could not divorce his wife casually, if he was suspended, the government would be sentenced to invalidity after intervention, and required the man to go to the woman's mother's house to apologize and invite the wife home to seek a broken mirror. However, if a woman suffers from a bad illness or has an affair, even if she has the situation of "three not going", she will still be dismissed according to the man's wishes. In fact, there is another more uncomfortable dispersion, that is, two people have a good relationship, but they are not optimistic about their parents, and even because of the so-called "generational" reasons, they cannot be together. This includes the love between the great poet Lu You of the Song Dynasty and Tang Wan, because the separation of the parents eventually caused great regrets, so many years later, Lu You wrote a poem "Phoenix" to commemorate the sincere love.
In the Northern Song Dynasty, the famous divorce incident was Li Qingzhao, because in her time, women needed to go to jail for divorce. Li Qingzhao's remarriage and encounter became a hot topic of discussion after his death, even beyond the study of his art. In a patriarchal society where men are superior to women, women are required to be absolutely dependent on men, so from the perspective of marriage, they put forward the gender inequality requirement of "from one end to the end" for women." Husbands who die and do not marry " have become the norms of ethics and morality for women. Li Qingzhao was unwilling to take a bold step towards remarriage in the face of the deserted life of widowhood.
Li Qingzhao
A man named Zhang Ruzhou appeared, completely changing Li Qingzhao's later years and plunging her into a huge controversy.
When they first met, Zhang Ruzhou coveted the valuable cultural relics that Li Qingzhao's boat was full of. At this time, he saw that Li Qingzhao disregarded the world's views and resolutely chose to remarry. However, 3 months after the marriage, Li Qingzhao found that Zhang Ruzhou actually valued those cultural relics and antiques, not her person, so she "sued him for an increase in the number of counts" and accused Zhang Ruzhou of lying about the number of times he took the imperial examination to cheat the official position, and Zhang Ruzhou was immediately punished. However, according to the criminal law at that time, the wife had to serve two to three years in prison for denouncing her husband. Thanks to Zhao Mingcheng's cousin's rescue, Li Qingzhao was released after spending several days in prison. Her marriage also ended with the end of the prison disaster. This kind of behavior naturally seemed shocking at the time, causing repeated doubts among future generations of scholars.
Li Qingzhao's previous step already meant offending all of Zhao Mingcheng's relatives, and as a result, there was already a wide range of unfavorable public opinions at that time, so there was a lot of public opinion about Li Qingzhao's "late years and quite out of rhythm" and "late festivals and no returns" several times. According to their idea, Li Qingzhao only had to live in widowhood and die is the only "right way." Even in the Ming Dynasty, many literati still mocked this, saying that Li Qingzhao said, "What does it mean to return to Zhang Ruzhou after the death of Defu?" Wenjun endured shame, and could still have pity in his eyes. Yi An is more suitable, and it is really not as good as the peach blossom in the water. "The History of Ancient and Modern Women" attacked Li Qingzhao's body in this way, which can be described as a real evil.