Rethinking Gender Equity in Contemporary Confucianism Paper Proposal for the 2017 AAS in Asia Conference Submitted by Brian Hoffert, North Central College

During the twentieth century, Confucianism was strongly criticized for its promotion of rigidly defined social roles that limited the potential of certain segments of society and hindered China’s attempts to adapt to the modern world. Women were particularly affected by the restrictive demands of social conformity for they were subordinated to their fathers when young, to their husbands when married, and to their sons when widowed. As Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee concludes in Confucianism and Women, “The nei-wai [內外 inner/outer] gender division of labor not only reduces women’s function in the patrilineal family to their reproductive capacity, but also denies women of all classes a legitimate access to vital cultural resources that are needed for the cultivation of the consummated Confucian personhood, which marks the substance of being one’s own person in the world.”1 While this paper will not defend the historical treatment of women in “Confucian” China, it will argue that the Confucian ideal of social harmony demands the minimization (if not elimination) of all forms of oppression and that the tradition has always possessed the conceptual resources to establish and maintain gender equity. More specifically, I will argue that humaneness (ren 仁) and ritual propriety (li 禮) are properly understood as mutually generating virtues in the sense that normative patterns of behavior help us to cultivate humaneness if and only if the normative patterns of behavior truly embody a genuine concern for the welfare of others. Historically, Confucian gender roles were primarily determined by men and became increasingly oppressive over time, which undermined Confucianism’s ability to provide a moral foundation for Chinese society and contributed to the tradition’s decline in the twentieth century. With the resurgence of Confucianism in the twenty-first century, however, the time is ripe to examine contemporary social norms to determine the extent to which they embody the principle of humaneness. Towards this end, my paper will conclude with some thoughts on how the theory of ren and li as mutually generating virtues can contribute to the establishment of gender equity in the present era.

1 Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee, Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 113.