This paper explores how foreign conquest and ethnonationalist pressures shape gender norms and women’s status. When an ethnic group faces defeat by an external force, it often responds by emphasizing its cultural distinctiveness as a form of resistance. In the case of the 17th-century Manchu conquest of China, the conquered Han populace, unable to resist militarily, reaffirmed traditional practices to distinguish themselves culturally from their Manchu rulers. This cultural response led to a reinforcement of gender norms and the intensification of women’s subordination.
To investigate this process, we use a granular dataset detailing county-level Manchu military campaigns—including massacres, coerced submission, and other violent acts—and link these data to various indicators of women’s status. We examine over 43,000 records of chaste martyrs, analyze poetry referencing women, and employ computational methods on both historical and contemporary texts to gauge changes in gender norms. To measure long-term demographic consequences, we also utilize modern census data on sex ratio imbalances at birth and large-scale social media text analyses of gender attitudes.
Through identification strategies such as difference-in-differences and geographic regression discontinuity designs, the study finds that exposure to Manchu conquest activities led to a substantial rise in chaste martyrdom records, signaling more stringent expectations of Confucian female virtue. These shifts in gender norms persisted through time, reflecting an enduring legacy in present-day demographics and attitudes. Ultimately, this research reveals how a conquered population’s cultural reaffirmation, intended to uphold ethnic identity, had profound and lasting detrimental effects on women’s status.