er remarry. In fact, one of the worst insults you can give a woman in modern China is to call her "twice-married". In the Nu Jie (Precepts for Women) and the Nu er Jing (The Classic for Girls) these demeaning rules of conduct were hammered home for generations of Chinese women. Just as women are the chief defenders of the barbaric practice of genital mutilation for girls in sub-Saharan Africa, old Chinese grandmothers repeated these precepts to their daughters and grand-daughters throughout the centuries, warning them of dire consequences for transgression.
As bad as this was for women, during the Sung dynasty (960 -1279 A.D.) more severe mortifications were to follow. Isolated as they already were when they left their parents and went to live in the patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal villages of their husbands (usually consisting of an extended family or clan), they became increasingly segregated and secluded from the world when Buddhist missionaries from India arrived and began spreading even more mysogynistic doctrines.
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