The pre and early modern relationship between East Asian feminism, Confucian hegemony and Western imperialism is an extremely intricate one that cannot be dichotomised. While there were and are numerous points of conflict, as well as cooperation, between the mentioned institutions, their orientations and the modes of argument espoused across time, these dynamics must be complicated. By exploring the lived female experiences in Premodern in Korea and China, both rural and urban, and then tracing the emergence of Chinese feminism, we can see the ways in which women oriented themselves against and also alongside the Confucian tradition and, later, Western Imperialism. Indeed, the configuration of power between the latter two institutions can also be located against a gendered global hierarchy. In synthesising these notions, this article delineates women’s complex social roles and the emergence of feminism in East Asia. As well as this, it problematises female and feminist existence under Confucianism and their engagement with Western imperialism, two institutions which are themselves conversant.
The domestic and public spheres do not conceptually exist in a Confucianised East Asia in the same way they do in the Western world. Rather, the scholar JaHyun Kim Haboush has referred to them here as loose “spheres of activity [and/or] signifiers of morality”.[1] The ontological ambivalence of the inner quarters[2] and therefore those who operate within, however, meant that women had a basis from which they could renegotiate their station. The porosity of these boundaries can be seen both regionally and temporally. And of course, the female experience within premodern Korea saw vast difference differences between the rural and urban demographics as well as the upper and lower classes. With respect to that, different sections of the population, operating in those different spaces, were assigned particular class and gender-based roles which have been injected with different moral sentiments. In Korea and China, the establishment of separate moral literature for women was important to consolidating neo-Confucian culture as they were seen to be the transmitters of its particular brand of ethics and Way of life. Women were to fulfil this obligation through, note the androcentrism of the system, imparting a filial education, preserve her violable chastity/body, take care of her affines and servicing her husband.[3] Interestingly, a woman thereby held a position of considerable influence since she was tasked to ensure a conflict-free familial unit and therefore facilitated her husband’s efforts and complete devotion to outside civil affairs. With that appreciated, a woman’s value and role ultimately became heavily based on streamlining and priming the path to success of her male counterparts and she was only to exert more indirect forms of power under this system.[4]
On the note of female instruction, European missionaries and Chinese merchants, among other groups who espoused shifting agendas, began introducing girl’s educational institutions in the late 20th century.[5] On one hand, they sought to educate rural elite women or those in urban environments on how to be competent wives and wise mothers. On the other hand, they were to be delivered lessons of basic literacy and an understanding of home economy and management.[6] In these two objectives, we can see the dimensionality given to the female role and the ways in which the same forces were both furthering and hindering the feminist cause in different ways. Furthering in the fact that Western imperial projects impacted the female position in East Asia through informing and impressing their feminist framework. Indeed, the works of British liberal men such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer were imported into China and arguably formed the foundations of Chinese feminism.[7] He Yin’s engagement with Euro-American models of progress and equality was, however, very critical and she observed them to be societies which simply constituted less visible and economic form of oppression. A case in point, the forces of free market capitalism ruined many [female] livelihoods in China as they could not compete and it led them to working multiple jobs, being sold as wives and losing more of their agency to patriarchal forces.[8] Simply another form of inequality, the departure from liberalist values is seen at work also in the socio-economic subjugation of China by imperialist colonisers. The Western operations of gunboat diplomacy, opening China up to free market capitalism and the Opium Wars of the 1800s all speak to the gendered and racialised domination of the nation by the west and, in particular, Britain.[9] We can see that the global hierarchy that was being created, through a forceful imposition, emulated the domestic hierarchies. This was while the same imperial forces were in an indirectly cooperative dialogue with feminist thinkers of China.
By taking an in depth look at the lives of women in the Korean and Chinese societies, especially the instructions prescribed to them in the inner quarters, we can understand it as microcosmic of the gendered global hierarchy which began to emerge more clearly in the 20th century. This is an order which has also shaped the origins of the feminism which seeks to agentically contest and renegotiate the very hegemony that was created. The relationship between feminism, Confucianism and imperialism is therefore heavily intertwined and dense; we should not quickly simplify the individual components nor polarise their dynamics.
[1] Dorothy Ko, Jahyun Kim Haboush and Joan Piggott, Women and Confucian Cultures In Premodern China, Korea, And Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p.7
[2] Ibid, p. 135
[3] Ibid, p.152
[4] Ibid, p.165
[5] Liu, Lydia He, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko. The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory (Columbia University Press, 2013) p. 34
[6] ibid
[7] Ibid, p. 36
[8] Ibid, p. 32
[9] Ibid, p.28