Chastity. During the Song dynasty (960-1279) chastity was held as the highest virtue of women. This philosophical outlook was largely promoted by the Chenq (yi)-Zhu (xi) doctrines, which proposed that for a woman to lose her virtue was worse than starving to death. Such a high social demand on women became the moral base for the "cult of chastity," which turned into a social trend. Neo-Confucian moral ethics discouraged a widow from remarrying, and in most regions her remarriage was considered adultery, because chastity required a woman to remain forever a wife to her husband, even after his death. When a widow was allowed to remarry, she was stripped of the privileges she once had with her former husband's family. For example, she had no right to take with her the family property and could not retain her...