Men with virtue are talented, and women without talent are virtuous. ——Chen Jiru
In feudal society, it has always been dominated by male power, and women are more often only an accessory to men, and even a tool for reproduction. At that time, everyone took "a woman's talentlessness is morality" as the most reasonable saying, so women in the feudal period could not enjoy the right to education, and then it was difficult to obtain their own value, it was difficult to achieve personal economic independence, and it was difficult to obtain the power to sit on an equal footing with men.
This situation did not slowly improve until the end of the Qing Dynasty. In 1840, when British artillery opened the door of the Qing Dynasty, a large number of foreigners poured in with the new ideas that were relatively advanced than feudal social ideas at that time.
Among these ideas, there is the idea of equality between men and women, which has caused a great impact on the local Chinese thought in the late Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic, and some people have taken advantage of this wave of ideas to achieve the promotion of women's rights, but some people have not broken through this shackle until the end.
And Lu Ying, the eldest lady of the Lu family in Anhui, could not escape this spell.
The Lu family, where Lu Ying is located, is a well-known salt merchant in Anhui, and the family is very well-off. Unfortunately, the Lu family is indeed a traditional feudal family, and the cultivation of Lu Ying is also based on the female red of the piano and chess, and Lu Ying is not allowed to enter the new school to study.
But Lu Ying has been smart and cute since he was a child, and when he grows up, he is even more beautiful and moving, plus he is everyone's bridesmaid, kind and talkative, and he has become a generation of celebrities in the local area, if it were not for the fact that Lu Ying had already been famous and had a master, and this master was not small, then the people who lined up at the door of the Lu family to ask for relatives would definitely be hundreds of thousands.
And this so-called master, who is not small, is called Zhang Wuling. Zhang Wuling was the grand young master of the Zhang family, one of the four major families in Hefei, and his grandfather was Zhang Shusheng, a minister of the late Qing Dynasty, who served as the chief inspector, governor, and general of the Huai Army in the late Qing Dynasty. His father, Zhang Yingu, was both a Qing Dynasty minister and a wealthy local merchant, and with money and power in his hands, the Zhang family was included in the list of the four major families in Hefei, only under the Li family and the Duan family where Li Hongzhang sat.
At that time, the Zhang family wanted to go further in the salt industry, so they married the Lu family, and the parents of both sides betrothed Zhang Wuling and Lu Ying. When both of them reached marriageable age, two people who had not met several times became married. Since then, Lu Ying has become the daughter-in-law of the Zhang family.
Although the two have not met several times, they are not very disgusted with the marriage. Zhang Wuling is a talented educator in modern history, especially in women's education and the promotion of women's rights. And Lu Ying is beautiful, dignified and generous, and only manages Zhang Wuling's family affairs in a disciplined manner, so the two can be regarded as very harmonious after marriage.
But under this harmony, there is this kind of danger lurking. One is that the relationship between the two is harmonious, so that the night song turns over the clouds and rain, and the other is the feudal ideology of many children and many blessings, thus Lu Ying has become a "fertility machine".
In 1906, the 20-year-old Lu Ying married into the Zhang family, in the next 16 years, a total of 14 children were born for Zhang Wuling, of which 5 died early, which made Lu Ying quite devastated, coupled with successive pregnancies and births, completely overdrawn Lu Ying's vitality, and at the age of 36, Lu Ying died of illness due to extreme weakness.
Among the 9 children she left behind, the four daughters were born beautiful and talented, their names were zhang yuanhe, Zhang Yunhe, Zhang Zhaohe and Zhang Chonghe, that is, the "Four Sisters of Hefei" in the north and south of the later civilization, of which Zhang Zhaohe also married Shen Congwen, a famous modern writer and novelist, so he was the most famous among the four sisters.
The four sisters have received a new type of education under Zhang Wuling's arrangement, they have their own talents, their own abilities, plus their own origins are also very good, so they do not need to cling to men to live, so the four sisters have finally been able to die well, did not follow the old path of their mothers.