Social Status of Widows in Qing Dynasty

The chastity cult in Qing China caused a striking ambiguity of widows’ status. They were praised and honored. Widow’s status became a symbol of the elite when a woman had enough financial freedom to protect her virtue and not to remarry. Their lives were described in the biographies and local gazetteers as Confucian legends about dignity. But no political agenda could mitigate the bitterness and hardships of a woman who lost her husband in the imperial times. The article analyzes the bilateral nature of widowhood in the Qing dynasty: governmental proclamations, juridical formulations, and widows’ biographies written by gentry, on the one hand, and women’s inner perception of chastity that we read between the lines in the legal documents. How did the concept of fidelity glorified in the law relate to real-life practices? The paper summarizes that state politics and the law often contradicted reality that detracted from women’s internal sense of morality and women’s personal meaning-making the chastity cult in Qing China.