Confucianism and the Lives of Women

Abstract

The connections between Confucianism and the lives of women have been a subject of interest since the turn of the 19th century, taken up, first, by missionaries and travelers as part of their anthropological observations of the “natives”; then by the Reform Movement and the May Fourth Movement, culminating in the Cultural Revolution as part of the nationalistic discourse; and lastly by the contemporary feminists as part of their “outreach” effort to form a global sisterhood. In all these three approaches, Confucianism is portrayed as a negative force in the lives of women. Up to the mid-1990s, the notion of universal victimhood of women overshadowed the notion of female agency in Chinese gender studies. Now with the rise of the field of comparative feminist philosophy exploring positive feminist space within Confucianism, the theoretical construction of Confucian feminism emerges as the latest attempt to reconceptualize the complex connections between Confucianism and the lives of women.