The Sage and the Second Sex: Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender PDF
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The Sage and the Second Sex The Sage and the Second Sex Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender Edited by Chenyang Li With a Foreword by Patricia Ebrey Open Court Chicago and La Salle, Illinois To order books from Open Court, call toll free 1-800-815-2280. Open Court Publishing Company is a division of Carus Publishing Company. © 2000 by Cams Publishing Company First printing 2000* All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Open Court Publishing Company, 315 Fifth Street, P.O. Box 300, Pern, Illinois 61354-0300. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The sage and the second sex : Confucianism, ethics, and gender / Edited by Chenyang Li ; with a foreword by Patricia Ebrey p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8126-9418-X (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-8126-9419-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Women in Confucianism—China. 2. Feminism—Moral and ethical aspects—China. 3. Confucianism. I. Li, Chenyang, 1956- HQ1676 .S24 2000 305.42'0951—dc21 00-029672 For Dr. Hong Xiao Contents Foreword by Patricia Ebrey ix Acknowledgments 15 Introduction: Can Confucianism Come to Terms with Feminism? 1 Chenyang Li 1. The Confucian Concept of Jen and the Feminist Ethics of Care: A Comparative Study 23 Chenyang Li 2. Feminism as Radical Confucianism: Self and Tradition 43 Joel J Kupperman 3. Menzi, Xunzi and Modem Feminist Ethics 57 Philip J. Ivanhoe 4. Sexism, With Chinese Characteristics 75 David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames 5. From Confucius Through Ecofeminism to Partnership Ethics 97 Ingrid Shafir 6. Li Zhi and John Stuart Mill: A Confucian Feminist Critique of Liberal Feminism 113 Pauline Lee 7. The View of Women in Early Confucianism 133 Paul Rakita Goldin viii Contents 8. Prudery and Prurience: Historical Roots of the Confucian Conundrum Concerning Women, Sexuality, and Power 163 Sandra A. Wawrytko 9. Golden Spindles and Axes: Elite Women in the Achaemenid and Han Empires 199 Michael Nylan 10. Gendered Virtue Reconsidered: Notes from the Warring States and Han 223 Lisa Raphals Contributors 249 Index 253 Foreword Confucianism has meant many things over the centuries in China. Feminism, in its much shorter history, has also taken many forms, made many claims, and lent support to many different social policies. Not surprisingly, therefore, the encounters between these two complex sets of ideas have been complicated. Scholars and activists, in China and the West, have drawn on one to challenge the other in several distinct ways. Early in the twentieth century, Chinese reformers, influenced at least in directly by Western feminism, decried the deleterious effects of Confucianism on women. The “New Culture” reading of Confucianism was that it sacrificed individuals for the sake of families and fell particularly hard on women. Chen Duxiu, for instance, wrote in New Youth in 1916 that women would not be able to take their proper place in society so long as they were bound by Confu- cian teachings such as “To be a woman is to submit,” or “Men and women do not sit on the same mat,” or “Never disobey or be lazy in carrying out the orders of parents or parents-in-law.”1 In the decades that followed, Chinese Marxists, even when adhering to a materialist interpretation of history, rarely challenged the view that Confu cianism was bad for women, and Chinese government organs commonly blamed the persistence of “feudal remnants” for part of what held women back. In 1985 one author explained that the “physical and mental gap” that persisted between the attainments of men and women could be explained in terms of the long history of denigrating and repressing women, mentioning in particular “feudal morality and ethics” with its “three obediences and four vir tues” and its ideas that “men are superior and women are inferior” and that “the absence of talent in a woman is a virtue.”2 Those who have blamed Confucianism for holding back Chinese women have usually used the term loosely to cover the whole gamut of orthodox, normative behavior related to the family in late imperial times. Confucian au thors over the centuries celebrated the patrilineal, patriarchal, patrilocal family system, and urged men and women alike to be filial, loyal to their families, and serious in their obligations to their ancestors and kin. The ideas that underlay the daily practice of the Chinese family system can thus with some justice be labeled “Confucian.” Tracts for women’s education and exemplary biographies Foreword X of virtuous women, easily labeled Confucian in this general sense, certainly promoted an inequality of the sexes, arguing for the moral rightness of sepa rate spheres for men and women and women’s subordination to the male heads of their households. Those who have defended Confucianism against charges of abetting the oppression of women, not surprisingly, have defined Confucianism differendy. Confucianism, as they use it, is not the conventional morality of the Confucian elite of late imperial times, or even the ideas to be found in the inspirational literature written by later Confiicians, but the core ideas of the founders and leading thinkers of Confucianism, who may have been guilty of ignoring women or taking their status for granted, but who never set out to denigrate or oppress them. They see no reason to blame Confucius, Mencius, Cheng Yi, or Zhu Xi for taking for granted basic features of the social order in which they lived, since philosophers and religious teachers the world over have usually accepted much about the social systems around them. Today Confucianism is not the same target as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although it still certainly has associations with the past, it is no longer the ideology of those in power, and it is important to keep in mind that its ideas have become detached from particular social forms. None of those who identify themselves as Confiicians argue that the separation of the sexes should be reinstated, that parents should have control over their children’s marriages, that wives or children should endure mistreatment out of devotion to fidelity or filiality, or that widows should renounce remarriage. Confiicians today, in Asia and in the West, want Confucianism to evolve in a way that accommodates all the changes that have occurred in the family system as well as ideas about the equality of males and females introduced by feminism. Writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the authors of this volume bring a wide range of expertise to this ongoing engagement of femi nism and Confucianism. In his introduction, Chenyang Li frames the project of this book as one of revitalizing Confucianism, of finding within it the concep tual flexibility to embrace notions of male-female equality. He finds validation of some key elements in Confucianism in their parallels to some contemporary feminist theories. Readers whose interests are primarily in the future of Confu cianism or comparative philosophy will find much to think about in his overview of the issues. As an historian, I can more usefully highlight some of what this book has to offer other readers, particularly those interested in Chinese history in gen eral or Chinese women’s history in particular. The authors whose work is pre sented here challenge the New Culture reading of the links between Chinese women and Confucianism in three principal ways: they suggest that women’s situations were not as bad as supposed; that core Confucian teachings had little to do with anything bad about their situations; and that Confucianism offers an ethical vision compatible with feminism.
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