Patriarchy in the Confucian Tradition
The issue of Confucianism and sexism is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. Despite its lofty religious teaching, Confucianism has often been criticized for its dismissive and negative attitude toward women.
The single most notorious statement made by Confucius regarding women is truly incriminating: “Women and the petty men are alike, in that they are both hard to deal with” (Analects 17:23). In addition, one of the most prominent features of Confucianism during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 âñå) and beyond is the oppression of the female by the male. Cleverly manipulating the traditional yin-yang belief into an argument for the priority of yang over yin, hence the male over the female, Han Confucians and their successors in later dynasties insisted that women submit to their fathers when young, their husbands when married, and their sons when old and widowed. This aspect of Confucianism in imperial China became a major cause of its criticism in the modem period. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Confucianism has been portrayed as a sexist, patriarchal ideology responsible for the oppression of women in China. The insidious Chinese practices of foot binding (the crushing of the feet of young girls with long binding cloth to make walking difficult and painful, but supposedly feminine and seductive), concubinage (the keeping of multiple wives by one man), disallowance of women-initiated divorce, prohibition against remarriage, and encouragement of widow suicide have all been blamed on Confucianism.This view of Confucianism may, however, be too broad-stroked in characterizing the 2,000 years of Chinese gender history. It makes no distinction between theory and practice, as well as wishful normative values versus actual, living experiences. The oppression of women by Confucian men during China’s imperial periods, admittedly real and widespread, should not result in an outright denial of the intellectual and religious dynamism of Confucianism as a teaching of human improvement and self-cultivation with no gender specificity. Just as any petty man can become a sage, potentially, so can a woman, at least theoretically. So there is nothing doctrinally in Confucianism that denies women’s parity with men. Some contemporary scholars have taken note of the parallels between Confucian and feminist ethics. Confucianism as an ethical and religious teaching, with its emphasis on mutual care, empathy, responsible government, and communal welfare, shares many similarities with feminist care ethics.5