Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation by Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee (review)

Book Reviews 131 Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation LI-HSIANG LISA ROSENLEE. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. ix, 200 pages. ISBN 978-0-7914-6750-3. US$21.95 paper. Confucianism and Women has been widely and well reviewed—and deservedly so. It is an ambitious and far-ranging work that manages both to be accessible to non-specialists, thereby facilitating consideration of Confucianism by feminist philosophers working outside the tradition, and to be provocative for scholars of Confucian studies. The cover features Mencius’s mother, that most over-determined image of Confucian female virtue, seated at her loom; the contents, however, range well beyond classical clichés to consider, in Rosenlee’s words, “the viability of Confucianism as a feminist ethical theory” (p. 11). It is a thoughtful and frequently insightful undertaking. Rosenlee opens her investigation with a succinct introduction to the origins of the Confucian/ru 儒 tradition and to its core concept of ren 仁, “the defining characteristic of Confucian personhood” (p. 35). She follows with a careful and nuanced discussion of yinyang 陰陽 theory and its relation to Chinese and Confucian sex and gender systems; along the way, she rightly refutes the historical assumption by Western scholars of an oppositional binary of femininity and masculinity framed in yin-yang terms. Noting that the apparent affinity of a falsely gendered yin-yang dichotomy accords with Western feminist gender paradigms of a binary opposition of femininity and masculinity, Rosenlee asserts that any such equation is problematic: “unlike its Western counterpart, the yin-yang metaphor is correlative, codetermining, and complementary through and through” and therefore “cannot function as an adequate theoretical justification for gender oppression in China” (p. 48). Rosenlee turns to the under-examined spatial dichotomy of nei-wai 內外. Freeing these concepts from the linguistic fixity of “inner-outer,” she expands on earlier work by John Hay, Dorothy Ko, and Susan Mann to suggest that even the broader connotation of “private-public” should be understood as a negotiation of ever-shifting boundaries. Through historical-textual study of both the spatial binary of nei-wai and the concept of differentiation between man and woman (nannü zhi bie 男女之別), Rosenlee identifies a process of boundary marking whose symbolic function “extended beyond gender and is intrinsically intertwined with the very definition of a civilized society” (p. 70). According to Rosenlee, the earliest reference to the nei-wai dichotomy is found in the Shujing 書經, in which it signifies the separation of the inner-focused world of the royal court and the outer, encompassing sphere of military operations; this spatial reference was then enlarged and correlated to gendered ritual distinctions as a symbolic marker of Han civilization, in contrast to the barbarians outside the physical borders. Nei-wai thus incorporated notions of otherness and hierarchical nonnormativity —notions that were operative within as well as across perceived spatial boundaries, e.g., conquered barbarians, those who regularly paid tribute to the Han court, were understood in nei terms in contrast to wai barbarians, those who invaded or paid irregular tribute (pp. 70-79, passim). Rosenlee’s peerless contribution is to chart how, over time and in ways specific to era, class, and locale, the functional division of labor within a 132 Journal of Chinese Religions family tended to confine women not only spatially to the domestic sphere but also, due to an identity based in female-identified tasks of childbearing and childrearing, to a conceptual sphere of other-identity—despite the nondualist and complementary nature of the yin-yang and nei-wai categories themselves. Rosenlee guides the reader through didactic texts about and for women, primarily the lienü 列女 (biographies of virtuous women) tradition in imperial histories and the Nüsishu 女 四書 (Four Books for Women) with the aim of challenging conventional assumptions of “feminist writings,” in which Chinese women are portrayed as “submissive, oppressed, and illiterate” (p. 95). She succeeds admirably, providing numerous examples of virtuous, talented, and learned women. Another goal is to discern accurately the sources of Chinese sexism; despite the positive examples mined from the literature, Rosenlee concludes that the problem of gender disparity in imperial China derived from the functional gendered distinction of neiwai : “The womanly sphere of nei, by and...