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Women and ConfuciusQ: Was Confucius ethnocentrist or gender-biased, or could he be considered an early egalitarian?
A: Confucius, both the real guy and the invented image, was a man of his time and culture. His late 04th century image, which was constructed in a time when the northern steppe peoples were militarily threating China, is made to express gratitude to an earlier statesman who had supposedly prevented a barbarian conquest of China. That same later image of "Confucius" elsewhere, in a passage written in c0322, threatens to leave his own corrupt state and go to live among the barbarian peoples of the east. That story concludes:
Analects 9:14: Someone said, They are crude; how will you manage? The Master said, If a gentleman were to dwell among them, what crudity would there be?
Here too, the idea is that the barbarians would be OK if someone were to teach them proper Sinitic behavior. The role of China (or of the Sinitic states which later became China) is to set the norms for everybody else. Cultural imperialism. It is probably as Sinocentric as one needs to get.
The question of women was being discussed in the 04c. A Shr poem written at about that time amounts to a protest against the better treatment, and the more honorable future, given to male children as against female children. Here, if you like, is a modern note of social-role protest. Nothing in the "Confucius" image of that time seems to move in that direction. Thus:
Analects 7:23: The Master said, Women and little people are hard to handle. If you let them get close, they presume, and if you keep them at a distance, they resent it.
People have tried to explain this away, but not convincingly. It is probably the answer to this part of your question, as asked. Women in politics (and there were some notoriously bad examples in this period) are disapproved of, and women in the home seem to be something of a problem also.
The point of your question seems to be, Can I as a right-thinking modern person continue to respect Confucius? And your test of that is, Did Confucius hold right views on issues that my world is very concerned with? We venture to suggest that this is asking too much of the past. The past is not us. What it offers for our inspiration is going to come out of different circumstances than ours, and it will sometimes express solutions other than the ones which we might wish to reach. Wisdom of any kind is so rare, however, that we recommend taking all of it that you can get. Don't refuse to pick up a dime off the ground, just because it's not a quarter. You may doubt the ability of blacks, but you can still enjoy the story of John Henry. You may hate war, but you can still acknowledge the courage and generosity of the guy who falls on the grenade, allowing his buddies in the same trench to go on living. You may find Confucius (and his world, and the whole of the ancient world) to be less than Politically Correct on the woman question, but on the other hand, you will never find a stronger statement of the public duty of the educated person in perilous times, or of the need of government to exist, not for its own glorification, but for the welfare of its people, than in the 04c sayings attributed by their makers to "Confucius".
So our advice is: Take what you get, wherever you find it, and keep your mind open about where you are going to find it. Don't go into the pharmacy determined to buy an overcoat. Culture wasn't made in one day, nor purchased at one store. Shop around. And may our best wishes go with you.
14 Mar 2004 / Contact The Project / Exit to Implications Page
