Widows on the Margins of the Family

This chapter begins with a widow suicide case from the end of the nineteenth century. Filed as a widow rape case, the case reveals the marginalized position of widows in this period, wedged between limited access to landed property and the continuing moral prescription of widow chastity. This chapter examines how the emergence of the patrilineal lineage system in late Chosŏn period reconfigured women’s inheritance rights in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. As families abandoned partible inheritance in favor of primogeniture during this period, daughters’ inheritance rights were replaced by those of mothers. At the same time, the rights and status of widows without heirs became increasingly precarious.