Chaste Widowhood

Why did chaste widowhood become so prominent in late imperial China? Existing explanations emphasize Confucian moral discourse, lineage honor, state recognition, and concerns over female chastity. I examine whether population growth contributed to the formation and strengthening of cultural expectations that attached moral value to widow non-remarriage. By making non-remarriage publicly valuable, chaste widowhood could restrict widows' return to fertility-bearing unions, a post-marital margin of China's preventive checks. I combine two newly assembled datasets: nationwide Chinese genealogy microdata and chaste-woman cases from the Ming Shilu. In prefecture-by-period fixed-effects panels, a larger local male population is associated with more chaste-woman cases. In the 50-year panel, a doubling of the population measure is associated with about 8 percent more cases. The relationship remains positive after accounting for genealogy coverage and composition, observed widowhood events, and local recognition capacity. It is not stronger in places with greater state reach. The evidence suggests that population growth contributed to the development and growing force of cultural expectations surrounding widow non-remarriage.