Dowry Wealth and Wifely Virtue in Mid-Qing Gentry Households

In his mission to "save the world," the upright official Chen Hongmou attacked conspicuous consumption wherever he served in office.¹ Lavish dowries, which were all the rage in Jiangsu province in Chen's day, topped his list of odious Jiangnan "local customs."² An extravagant dowry could serve a moral purpose, however, as biographies and memoirs often explain. A wife who wished to put her dowry to virtuous use, for example, could pawn or sell her jewelry to buy books for a son or a spouse studying for the exams. A bride whose modest dowry was confined to practical items like quilts and chamber pots, by contrast, had to make her mark as a virtuous wife by other means, even her own manual labor. In other words, a bride's dowry represented a paradox: its value could be criticized for extravagance, but it might also become the secret of a household's scholarly survival, reputation, and success.

Chen Hongmou characteristically acknowledged the practical importance of a dowry's monetary value when he urged that brides be dowered with land (liantian) or investment capital (zhuangzi) instead of jewelry and expensive commodities.³ But in the middle stratum of gentry families who made up much of Chen's audience, what property a family owned—if any—was earmarked for equal division or inheritance by male heirs. Assets transferred to a daughter as dowry had to be sequestered from that property. This principle of sequestration applied to all assets set aside for dowry: land and other forms of immovable property as well as valuables such as jewelry or fine fabric passed down from mother to daughter or daughter-in-law (or even granddaughter-in-law, as we shall see below). Dowry assets once transferred in turn constituted "separate wealth" or a "private account" (sicai, sifang qian, etc.) for use by the bride who brought it to her marital family.

On the other hand, most records stress that dowry assets were converted into cash—through sale or pawning or investment—to meet a woman's wifely obligations to her marital family: burial for a spouse's parents, memorial arches for honored relatives, study stipends for sons, and marriage expenses for offspring. These wifely uses of the dowry joined its virtuous use to its monetary value. The larger the dowry, the more virtuous the wife. But a valuable dowry had other virtuous uses, from the point of view of scholarly families. A valuable dowry helped to ease a daughter's burdens after marriage, making the difference between manual labor or leisure for a wife whose marital family encountered financial difficulty. A valuable dowry ensured sustenance for a woman and her children in the event of her husband's prolonged absence (extremely common) or his death (not uncommon). A dowry of some worth gave a woman the spending power to feed her parents-in-law the delicacies expected from a filial daughter-in-law, the wherewithal to entertain guests in a manner that would give her husband or her sons dignity and win them powerful connections; and the means to ensure that her own daughter entered marriage with a modicum of the same security.

Thus whereas Chen Hongmou was hardly alone in condemning extravagant dowries (which were even criticized as a cause of female infanticide in some areas during the Qing period⁴), from the point of view of women who received them and the families who bestowed them, lavish dowries supplied crucial support for a woman's performance as an exemplary Confucian daughter-in-law, wife, and mother.

The paradoxical nature of the dowry in Qing times became apparent to me while I was writing a book about the women in a nineteenth-century literati family of modest means.⁵ This family's legendary frugality was a necessary response to the straitened conditions under which its menfolk labored as teachers, physicians, and aspiring minor officials. What puzzled me, though, in the records of their modest lifestyle, were constant references to wining and dining friends and relatives, frequent accounts of generous aid to those less fortunate, and the unflagging capacity...