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The Chaste and the Licentious: Female Sexuality and Moral Discourse in Ming and Early Qing China

The three centuries of European "early modern" history stretch across China's last two dynasties, the Ming (1368-1644) and the Qing (1644-1911), commonly termed the "late imperial." One of the defining features of this period lies squarely in the gendered terrain of sexuality: women's sexuality, not men's, was thrust into the moral discourse unlike at any other time. The symbolic power of female sexuality was inscribed in two opposing cultural icons: the chaste and the licentious. Few women received the level of public attention conferred on chaste widows (jiefu) and faithful maidens (zbennii), young women who pledged a lifetime of fidelity to or committed suicide for their deceased fiancés. Such attention was owing to an all-out effort by the social elite and the state that promoted them. Chaste women were the subjects of commemorative writing by Confucian scholars and were recipients of awards and recogni tion from local and central government. Hundreds of thousands of chaste widows and faithful maidens were honored through jingbiao (court testi monials), with the state-financed building of stone arches and memorial shrines in their honor. Jingbiao was not a new institution,1 but it was in late imperial times that the jingbiao awardees began to be predominantly chaste widows and faithful maidens.2