Prof. Tan Sor-Hoon is a Professor of Philosophy at Singapore Management University, the Academic Director of Politics, Law and Economics (PLE) major, and a Lee Kong Chian Fellow. She writes primarily on Confucianism and democratic theory. In this first of a two-part series, The Diacritic’s Wang Xing Hao speaks to Prof. Tan on her most recent work on feminism and Confucianism.
To begin, often when I talk to people and I say that I’m interested in Confucianism, the first thing they point out is its “oppressive” nature towards women. How far would you say that Confucianism is indeed a philosophy that is oppressive towards women?
When people say “Confucianism,” they can mean many things—they do not necessarily mean Confucianism as a philosophy. Quite often, they think of Confucianism as oppressive because Confucianism has been accepted as the dominant ideology (in the sense that this school of thought has dominated society) of China and the rest of East Asia for many centuries. Those societies are oppressive to women, although perhaps not quite to the extent that outsiders tend to assume. Nevertheless, if we agree that, in the past, Chinese society as well as other East Asian societies under the influence of Confucianism have been oppressive, then they immediately draw the inference that Confucian philosophy must be oppressive to women.
I think we need to look at this from a number of different perspectives. One is whether the teachings and the philosophy associated with Confucian texts advocate for the oppression of women outright. Here, again, there are more complications depending on what you consider as Confucian texts. For example, as philosophers, we usually prefer to keep the number of texts minimal. I know one scholar who insists that only the Analects (a collection of sayings by Confucius as recorded by his disciples) should be counted as Confucian philosophy; everything else should not be counted. However, most of us take a broader view and would at least include the three pre-Qin texts: Confucius, Mencius, and the Xunzi.[mfn]Confucius (Kongzi 孔子), Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), and Xunzi (荀子) are the three classical Confucian thinkers, all of whom flourished before the founding of the Qin (秦) dynasty, which is the first centralised state in China founded in 221 BCE. Most of the great intellectual traditions of China, including Confucianism, began before the founding of Qin, during the Spring and Autumn period (770–ca. 475 BCE) and the Warring States period (ca. 475–221 BCE).[/mfn] Others who are more sensitive to Confucianism as a tradition of thought, as opposed to picking just one or two texts and calling that Confucian philosophy, might include, for example, what the Chinese people have traditionally accepted as the Chinese classics. This group had thirteen key texts[mfn]There are numerous collections of classics in the Confucian tradition. The Five Classics (五经) are five pre-Qin texts that were already prominent in the time of Confucius, and the teachings of Confucius and his successors were heavily based upon this group of texts. This collection grew to become the Thirteen Classics (十三经) by the Song Dynasty as the basis of the imperial examination system. This meant that this group of texts were widely read and can be considered the cultural baseline of the literati of the time. Additions to form the group of thirteen include commentaries on one of the Five Classics and the works of Confucius and Mencius.[/mfn] by the time of the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE). These classics include a set of texts that cover rituals called the ritual texts, and the ritual texts do have content which advocates gender inequality. Frankly speaking, traditional Confucians—people who consider themselves as Confucian such as Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming—do usually include these ritual texts.[mfn]Zhu Xi (朱熹) and Wang Yangming (王阳明) are two of the most influential later Confucians in a movement called Neo-Confucianism (宋明理学). Neo-Confucianism became prominent in the Song dynasty, and their interpretation of Confucianism is considered orthodox by many Confucians even today. While Neo-Confucians claimed that they were returning to the true meaning of the Confucian classics, scholars now believe that they were influenced by Buddhist ideas prevalent in Chinese society at the time.[/mfn]
From that perspective, one could then say that Confucianism as a philosophy is not in favor of gender equality. However, one then has to ask the further question: if we determine that there is certain content in Confucian philosophy which can be considered as at least unfair to women (if not outright oppressive), is this content essential to Confucianism as a philosophy? Again, different scholars have different answers to this. Some do think that it is very central and essential. Others would say that this is actually more a result of the specific historical context. The Confucian scholars and their texts certainly did not protest gender inequalities. They went along with what was already happening in society because their concern was elsewhere. If you look at the most central part of their philosophy and their virtues, such as benevolence, righteousness, ritual propriety, and wisdom,[mfn]In the original Chinese, they are benevolence (ren 仁), righteousness (yi 义), ritual propriety (li 礼) and wisdom (zhi 智).[/mfn] in today’s context where gender equality has become an extremely widespread if not a universal aspiration, can we understand those virtues as described in the Confucian texts as actually gender-neutral, or at least as something that women could aspire to just as much as men can? Many scholars these days, and certainly many women, would agree that a woman can be a junzi (a morally exemplary person).[mfn]Originally a term referring to aristocracy, Confucius reinterpreted the term junzi (君子) to signify a morally exemplary person regardless of birth. It can be variously translated as “gentleman” or “superior person”, and is contrasted with the petty person (xiaoren 小人).[/mfn] If you take that approach, then you would have to conclude that you do not think Confucian philosophy has to be oppressive to women, even though they may have been complicit in East Asian society’s oppression of women in the past.
You shared with us your forthcoming article on feminist challenges to Confucianism. In your article, you also talked about the gendered division of labour where women are more in the inner, domestic sphere and men are at the outer, public sphere. Where did this sort of division of labour come from? Would you say this is a result of Confucian ideas, or did Confucian ideas contribute to their propagation?
My own view is certainly that gender inequality had already existed in the societies in which Confucianism became dominant. When Confucianism gained influence, it did not create the gendered division of labour; rather, Confucianism went along with it and did not oppose it.
Feminist literature has quite a few theories about the origin of the patriarchy, though such theories also exist outside of feminist thought. One example of the latter is one by Friedrich Engels, thinker and Karl Marx’s closest collaborator. It is actually a theory that is mainly concerned about social inequality, but it also happens to explain the origin of patriarchy and why labour is divided along gender lines. It all has to do with the fact that, when society starts to accumulate wealth, people want to ensure that their wealth stay within their family. In other words, that it is passed on to their own children rather than those of others.
In early human societies, wealth was usually accumulated through plunder and combat, and since men are physically stronger, they tended to be better able to amass wealth through such means. After these men have accumulated wealth, they now want to pass their assets on to their children.
However, these men then have to worry about illegitimate children, since, unlike for women, it is difficult for men to know whether a child is actually their own. For women, unless she was comatose when her child was born, she pretty much knows which is her child. No one can bluff the mother on this (except maybe in very convoluted ways). (laughs) According to Engel’s theory, this is why men want to control the sexuality of women—to ensure that their resources are passed down to their actual children rather than the illegitimate children of another man. One way to control the sexuality of women is to confine them to the domestic sphere, hence the division.
Another way to explain the domestic orientation of women could also be because of the simple biological fact that women are the ones who give birth to children. It is almost a matter of evolution that they are biologically able to care for children, and their personality is also affected by that to some extent. However, I think that many people tend to push this line of thinking too far. They generalise it almost to the extent that men are outright incapable of caring for children, which we all know is nonsense.
However, in the past when the demands for making a living were a lot more difficult, men were worn out by physical labour and so often did not have the energy to also look after the children. For example, in a hunter-gatherer society, how much physical labour had to go into simply keeping a small family alive? Someone had to do it. If the men who were physically stronger contributed the physical labour that kept the family group alive, they certainly did not have the extra energy to also look after the children. Since women were not as effective when it came to the type of physical labour required for that society’s economic activities, they then ended up with the caring activities—which largely took place in a domestic setting. This is a very crude way of explaining it, certainly, but as a general outline, it makes a certain sense. You can see why that division of labour came about in societies which operated in that way.
However, people gave greater significance to that system by giving it a normative value, causing it to become more than a system that arose simply out of economic efficiency. When there is technological change—technology in the broadest sense of the word—and change in the way economic activities are carried out, then this division of labour becomes unnecessary. Unfortunately, most societies turn this gender division in labour into almost a kind of normative value defended as immutable natural law or on religious grounds. Chinese society, like most other societies that we know of, also did this. However, one thing about the Chinese is that, precisely because they were so ingenious, they go very far in everything that they turn their hand to. Hence, when they decided that this gendered division of labour is a good system and that it is worth preserving and enhancing, they go very far in enhancing it. They turn it into a cultural system, and this has its oppressive aspect in that women’s freedom became curtailed. For example, it was not acceptable that women become government officials. You have exceptional cases where women became the ruler of the state, for example, but these are usually considered aberrations, and those rulers received a lot of negative responses.
However, I think this system was actually less oppressive than some people may imagine exactly because of the way that the system of gender division was enhanced. For example, much earlier than other societies, the Chinese started to pay a lot of attention to the education of women. This is because, even though women were not allowed to do many things, they had their own distinctive responsibilities—the responsibilities of taking care of the domestic sphere—which were not simple. From very early on, the Chinese, especially rich households, recognised that being responsible for the domestic sphere may mean that women had to take care of not just their immediate family with a few children, their husband, and their in-laws, but also their whole clan. So, it takes a lot of skills—people skills as well as other practical skills. Although still not the majority, the upper-class women in Chinese society were educated from quite an early period of society. But their education then tends to be gendered, it is focused on helping them do their work as well as possible, it tends to focus on their domestic responsibilities. Many of these women obviously were just as intelligent as their menfolk, and their intellectual horizons were actually not that narrow as they were literate. There was no real limit as to what they could learn, and many of them actually went into domains very distant from domestic skills. For example, Ban Zhao wrote as though all women should care about was taking care of their domestic responsibilities in her little tract on the instructions for her daughters,[mfn]Ban Zhao (班昭) wrote Lessons for Women (nüjie 女诫) as instruction for her daughters. It later became widely circulated as one of the Four Books for Women (nü sishu 女四书). This collection was intended as the female equivalent of the Four Books, another key group of texts in the Confucian canon as part of the aforementioned Thirteen Classics.[/mfn] but she herself was a very distinguished scholar. She was respected as a historian because she took over the job of completing the Book of Han,[mfn]The Book of Han (汉书) is the first history to cover a single dynasty. It is a hugely important work of Chinese historiography and served as the model for all other dynastic histories.[/mfn] a history of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), when her brother, Ban Gu, who is usually listed as the author of the text passed away. Some parts of the Book of Han were her own work, and other historians consulted her when they could not understand the work . So, basically, she was a teacher not only to the ladies of the imperial court but also to male scholars. You can see that throughout Chinese history women have accomplished a great deal despite the unequal system, the gendered division of labour that is the basis of a lot of gender inequality within the society.
You have described how, historically, there was more space for women in Confucianism—more autonomy and power—than people might think. My question now is what is the value of Confucian feminism in the modern day? Why try to reconcile Confucianism with feminism instead of simply embracing mainstream feminism?
If all you are interested in is gender equality, then I would say: there is no reason to turn to Confucianism. In fact, that is the hard part. But then, I should hope that most feminists are not only interested in feminism. There is a lot more going on in everyone’s lives. Perhaps, for some feminists, that is all that they are interested in, but for people who want to talk about Confucian feminism, the reason usually comes from either an appreciation or a commitment to Confucianism in the first place. If those feminists are not already committed to Confucianism, they may not think that the loss of Confucianism is great, but many people who study Confucianism certainly think it is. However, consider that there are many women who are committed to Confucianism or live in societies that still show the influence of Confucianism. As feminists, they also think that having more gender equality in these societies would help women. Does that mean that they ought to force ‘mainstream’ feminism, or Western feminism, on these women? Is that the right thing to do? Because, after all, just because those societies may be unfair to women does not mean that these women do not value other aspects of their society and culture. If that is the case, then the feminism that would really help them is one that is compatible and well-integrated with their own culture, with Confucianism.
In that case, could you outline what a Confucian feminism might look like? How is it different from mainstream feminism?
My understanding of Confucianism is that what is central to the Confucian worldview is the importance of human relationships. Even when asking about or answering questions about one’s self, you do not actually start off with an ‘I’ defined without reference to other people. You actually start off with ‘I’ as a daughter, ‘I’ as a wife, ‘I’ as a mother. So, from that perspective, the individual’s very self is constituted by all the significant relationships in her life. So, for a feminist, this would mean a much less individualistic outlook and a much more relational one. This is distinct from a social outlook: it is not that you allow other people, and certainly not society, to dictate how you should live your life. Rather, it influences how you should exercise your freedom. In making the choices in your life, you would give a lot more weight to those relationships, and among those relationships, the relationship of care, for example, would not necessarily be considered an imposition to Confucian feminists who are traditionally assigned this responsibility.[mfn]While this conception differs from strands of feminism which emphasise individual autonomy above all else, it resonates with the ethics of care (or care ethics) proposed by some feminists.[/mfn] There are, however, circumstances under which you can be taken for granted, and it is then that you are oppressed. But I think a modern Confucian feminist would want to turn that into an advantage and want to say that being able to care for others is in fact a very important way of nurturing the humanity in yourself, and that responsibility should be recognized rather than rejected. These are just some beginning thoughts. It is a question that does not have a straightforward answer, because there are other people who are much more interested and experienced in discussing Confucian feminism than myself; they’ve written whole books about how this could be done. But for myself, this is the direction that my own exploration has been heading.
I see. Earlier you did say that a part of why Confucian feminism is useful is because it is part of the cultural heritage of many people, and so they want to reconcile their feminist ideas with their own identity and cultural inheritance. But for people who, culturally, have nothing to do with Confucianism, what do you think Confucian feminism can give them? How might mainstream feminism learn from Confucian feminism? Is it similar to the relational aspect you were talking about just now?
If you already know something, then there is no need to learn from another person. You learn from others precisely because they know something different from what you know, or because they have a perspective different from yours. There is a potential for learning precisely in the difference between Confucian feminism and other kinds of feminism. It is up to them whether they think that they have something to learn from Confucian feminism in the same way that Confucian feminists think that Confucians have something to learn from Western feminism. For example, you will certainly not want to go too far with the individualism of certain kinds of Western feminism, but there is the central idea of gender equality that is worth aspiring to. This is certainly something that Confucians have learned from others. This is not something that was ever an issue in traditional Confucian thought in Confucian society. Even among Confucians who have rejected the idea that women are somehow inferior, they do not push it to the extent to say that women are equal. Modern Confucian feminists then should ask themselves how far they want to push this, and when we say equal, what do we mean by equal? Do we accept gender equality as defined by other kinds of feminism or do we have our own distinctive understanding of gender equality according to a Confucian interpretation? Therefore, there is always potential for mutual learning, but I would not want to stipulate what they have to learn from Confucian feminism.
Stay tuned for the second half of this dialogue, in which Prof. Tan Sor-Hoon speaks more about how to build a democracy compatible with Confucianism, and the necessity of renegotiating expectations within filial piety.