Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation

Abstract

Can one be both a Confucian and a feminist without apology? In this book, Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee challenges the stereotyping representation of Confucianism as an extremely sexist ideology, a theory that must be totally eradicated for China to make any real progress on gender issues. Rosenlee also questions the implicit practice of Western transnational and global feminists who all too quickly embrace the assumption that Chinese women’s liberation (as in any third world country) can come only from Western ethical theories. Through abundant use of philosophical and historical texts from the pre-Qin to the late Qing periods and insightful analysis of social practices such as the customs of widowhood and footbinding in their appropriate contexts, Rosenlee successfully demonstrates the possibility of creating a viable theory of Confucian feminism. Chapter 1 situates the discourse on gender oppression in its historical context as part of the nationalistic discourse of China in the early twentieth century. Humiliated by countless defeats at the hands of the new imperial powers of Japan and the West, literati of the Reform Movement and the May Fourth Movement blamed Confucianism and patriarchal practice for what was wrong with the Old China. A total and radical rejection of Confucianism was completed in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s. At approximately the same time, “there was a surge of interest in Chinese gender studies on the part of Western feminists as well as Asian specialists” (1). However, in this new wave of transnational and global feminist discourse, Rosenlee finds that Western cultural and ethical assumptions are almost uniformly privileged in cross-cultural gender studies over other ethical theories from other cultures. In other words, “while the concept of ‘gender’ is well articulated” in feminist scholarship, “the concept of culture remains relatively marginal” (2). Nonetheless, if one affirms that (a) a Chinese woman is not only a gendered being but also a cultural being and (b) gender is a cultural-social construction, then this neglect of the cultural element is self-contradictory. First, in transposing a familiar Western gender paradigm to Chinese culture as the universal conceptual framework “within which the condition of Chinese women is comprehended and its possible liberation theorized,” Western feminists “in effect, essentialize the category of ‘woman’” and reduce Dao (2008) 7:461–465 DOI 10.1007/s11712-008-9082-9