Abstract
Based upon field research conducted in China in the 1990s and 2000s, this article examines older Chinese women’s views and practices surrounding sexual interaction in later life. In contrast to local clinical depictions of middle-aged and elderly Chinese women as repressed by feudal superstitions concerning sex in later life, this research shows that more middle-aged and elderly Chinese women are sexually active than such clinical sources assume. Furthermore, there is no neat correspondence between sexual attitudes and sexual activity, and Chinese women’s attitudes concerning later life sex are often much more liberal than their behavior. Absence of sexual activity among older Chinese women is more closely related to problems in the marital relationship in general and/or to health problems than it is to attitudes about age and sex. At the same time, many Chinese women challenge the claims of western sexology that presume the marital relationship and sexual interaction to be a top necessity for a good quality of life in the later years. These findings have important implications for public health education, clinical training, and health and social service delivery in China.
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Notes
These Chinese clinical health education books are written in Chinese characters, an ideographic form of writing that is understood all across the nation of China, despite its many spoken dialects.
Chinese names are written surname first, followed by personal name, such as Xu Rongzhou.
Guan’s article shows that in his rural Henan study, 78.9% of the sample was married, and 78.9% of the sample had their own bedroom. He does not explicitly say that all of the married couples had their own bedroom, but it seems like so much of a coincidence that the percentage would be precisely the same, that either this is the case or perhaps the second figure is a typo.
Xu (1997) suspects that abuse of wives by husbands and mothers-in-law is based first in patriarchal, patrilineal, patrilocal Confucian culture that treated incoming wives as inferiors meant to serve their husbands and mothers-in-law by bearing sons and doing housework. Xu also suspects that the dehumanizing violence of the Cultural Revolution added another layer of brutality to domestic life. In analyzing survey data from Chengdu in Sichuan Province from prior to 1988 (N = 586), she found that about 13% of the sample of women said that their husband had kicked, hit, or beat them in the past decade.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health Predoctoral Award, the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China Graduate Fellowship, the Cora DuBois Dissertation Fellowship, the Dean's Fund Award for Faculty Research of the University of Vermont (UVM), and the Asian Studies Faculty Research Award funded through grants to UVM from the Freeman Foundation, the Parimitas Foundation, and the Lintilac Foundation.
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Shea, J.L. Older Women, Marital Relationships, and Sexuality in China. Ageing Int 36, 361–377 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-011-9114-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12126-011-9114-3