Social Roles and Statuses of Women in Imperial China: The Apology of Confucian Culture and Comparison with the Situation in Medieval Europe

The paper considers the social statuses and roles of women in Imperial China since the Zhou era. The portrait of a woman proposed by Confucian thinkers is compared with the real historical and cultural representations of women in China. It is proved that despite serious and sometimes just criticising the Confucianism by modern liberal researchers, the doctrine of Confucius in most cases considered a woman as a legally emancipated creature equal to a man. Confucianism legitimised the high social statuses of widows and mothers, and gave women the right to perform a wide range of social roles outside the scope of family: from a midwife to a military general. The treatment of women in Imperial China is compared in the paper with the cultural gender traditions of medieval Europe