Page "Confucianism" Paragraph 89

She wrote the Nüjie ostensibly for her daughters, instructing them on how to live proper Confucian lives as wives and mothers.

Although this is a relatively rare instance of a female Confucian voice, Ban Zhao almost entirely accepts the prevailing views concerning women's proper roles ; they should be silent, hard-working, and compliant.

She stresses the complementarity and equal importance of the male and female roles according to yin-yang theory, but she clearly accepts the dominance of the yang-male.

Her only departure from the standard male versions of this orthodoxy is that she insists on the necessity of educating girls and women.

We should not underestimate the significance of this point, as education was the bottom line qualification for being a junzi or " noble person ,"... her example suggests that the Confucian prescription for a meaningful life as a woman was apparently not stifling for all women.

Even some women of the literate elite, for whom Confucianism was quite explicitly the norm, were able to flourish by living their lives according to that model.