Although historians have pointed out the exclusiveness of Neo-Confucianism as an intellectual and political movement in the Song era, it does not suggest gender segregation was a Neo-Confucian-exclusive notion. A number of Song Confucian moralists, including Neo-Confucians, contextualized their knowledge of the ancient ideal of gender segregation in stressful political and social atmosphere, and promoted it as the linchpin of a reconstructed social order in theory and practice. Despite their efforts to keep women behind the middle gate in elite families, women found many opportunities to cross the main gates of their houses and go outside in reality. Confucian scholars did not apply the same expectations for elite women to commoner women, and low-class women's presence in outside spheres was ubiquitous and quotidian. Actually, Song narratives discussing women's activities outside the household show elite males' acknowledgement and acceptance of a more flexible space for women, which went beyond the limits imagined by Confucian moral preaching. Women on the outside thus penetrated men's legitimate territory, but without jeopardizing the social order. Furthermore, women's place in the afterlife was not a reflection of the hierarchies on earth but a new construction. The strict inner-outer separation proposed in family precepts did not find a place in the Neo-Confucian discourse on afterlife and local practice. Taking these facts into account, one can no longer say that there was a unified and dominant ideology of female seclusion or confinement in the Song period.