Widowism

An attack on chastity policing can still explain women through another prejudice. Lu Xun’s “Widowism”, written in November and published in December 1925, later entered Fen. It examines girls’ education and the rumors that turn letters, laughter, outings and male visitors into signs of sexual misconduct.

Women in authority can reproduce discipline

Lu Xun connects women’s marriage and employment through the unequal distribution of household labor. Unchanged household responsibilities make marriage difficult to combine with professional employment, concentrating educational work among unmarried women. New, educated administrators can nevertheless reproduce the surveillance they replace. The useful question is not whether women are especially cruel to women, but whether sharing a gender removes the disciplinary function of an office.

Rumor circulates between school authorities, educated men and newspapers. An allegation gains credibility from its institutional origin, so ordinary youthful behavior becomes evidence of a need for control. Students lose both freedom of action and authority over what their actions mean.

An explanation that must be rejected

Lu Xun also associates unmarried life with jealousy, malice and frustrated sexuality. He treats heterosexual intimacy and motherhood as important conditions of women’s emotional development. These are unsupported generalizations in the essay, not established psychological findings. His final refusal to demand marriage for every unmarried educator does not remove the stigma built into that account.

My Views on Chastity helps trace the force and limits of his criticism of traditional morality. Angela Chen’s Ace separates sexual desire, emotional capacity and human worth. Read together, they preserve the institutional question without replacing one moral compulsion with another sexual norm. Challenging surveillance should enlarge the range of lives people may lead, not require proof that their intimacy meets the critic’s preferred model.