Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China

Journal of the American Oriental Society, The, Jan-March, 2000 by Jane M. Geaney

On one reading, Confucian gender metaphysics may be ultimately more benign than its Western counterparts, even if it reserves androgynous sagehood for men. In the other, successive waves of Confucian ideologies--Han Confucian and Song and Ming-Qing neo-Confucian--overwhelmed an earlier, admittedly also (but less) male-dominated tradition in which wisdom and the capacity for moral judgment were relatively ungendered and in which women functioned as fully realized persons and were recognized as such. (p. 262)

Thus, either Confucian gender metaphysics is only slightly better than its Western counterparts, or Confucian gender metaphysics did not yet exist in the earlier traditions. In fact, much of Raphals' book suggests that what we term gender difference itself was not very evident in traditional China. Hence this book does not provide us with a Chinese Golden Age for purposes of gender comparison, not only because males were dominant in the time period presented here, but also because the people of that time seem to have been less interested in the concept of gender. As a result, Raphals' work may present more of a challenge to than an opportunity for a feminist interpretation of Confucianism.