In1896, an unusually astute American misionary in Korea wrote of the typical Korean wife, "... her sway is as despotic as any absolute monarch on earth." This statement overstated the case, but it went a long way in illuminating the real role of women in Korea, as well as much of the Confucian East Asia.
But a century later, misconceptions about the status of women in East Asian societies still abound. East Asian societies are routinely condemned in the bar of Western opinion for being sexist, prescribing for women a lowly, servile status, and treating them in an inhumane manner.
So it should be no surprise that in a recent New York Times article about Korea (Sept. 4, 1995) the same panoply of criticisms was trotted out. According to the article what makes Korean society really repulsive is its sexism. It is a society that yields, among other unmentionables, the spectacle of grandfathers rapping the table, as a signal for their granddaughters to bring food.
The difficulty with this strand of criticisms about the gender roles in East Asia is that few who voice it are in a position to make an intelligent judgment about it.
By this I am emphatically not recycling the old platitude, propagated by good little academics, that goes something like "Cultural values are relative, and we cannot make normative judgment about cultures." This expresses, in the guise of open-mindedness, a kind of intellectual laziness and cowardice.
My point is rather that understanding must come before judgment. Only by a sympathetic study of the basic principles underpinning a particular cultural practice can one arrive at a standpoint from which meaningful judgment can be rendered about it. Open-mindedness is like a boat which one must use when crossing the river but must then abandon when traveling by foot afterwards.
Although a full elucidation of the East Asian cultural practice in regard to women is obviously beyond the purview of a column, I should like at least to redress some key misconceptions about it. Two that come to mind are the notion that the position of women in East Asia is a result of arbitrary convention, without logic, foisted upon the weaker sex by domineering men, and the claim that women in East Asia are oppressed.
The East Asian social system, of which its sexual arrangement forms the centerpiece, is permeated by Confucianism. Confucius and his philosophical heirs believed that healthy families are the basis of the healthy society. This is because the immediate, felt attachment that individuals feel for the family -- aided by a rich nexus of customs and social sanctions -- is the best antidote for man's intrinsic selfishness, and without curbing man's natural impulse to selfishness society is impossible. Moreover, it was thought that the spirit of self-sacrifice and caring engendered by the natural love for family can easily be transformed into the love of the fatherland, without which no society can persevere.
But the family, which is in the last analysis the union of man and woman, cannot endure by natural attraction alone. Being neither romantics nor sentimentalists, the Confucian thinkers flatly asserted that the couple must not only love each other, but must feel they need each other. They knew that the sweet sentiments of the heart are transitory, and they must be strengthened by necessity.
What the Confucian thinkers proposed then, appropriating the Taoist theory of yin and yang, is that the two sexes are different and complementary, unable to live without one another. Two self-sufficient beings joined together by common, ephemeral lust would have no reason to form permanent ties. As in Rousseau's state of nature, they would part after their passions are spent. Hence was born the rigid differentiation of roles for man and woman.
But why must women be assigned to the domestic sphere? The Confucian answer is based on nature. The originators of Confucianism considered it self-evident that women were by nature superior nurturers than men. To convert men into nurturers, on the other hand, would be a gross and unprofitable distortion of nature. As Allan Bloom wrote so bitingly: "Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk."
This does not mean, however, that in practice women are oppressed or relegated to inferior status in the family. Perhaps we should be mindful here of Lao Tzu's famous passage in "Tao Te Ching" where the woman, by taking an apparently lower position, actually rules the man.
In the domestic sphere, the wife is absolutely the master in East Asian families. She has the first and last say in every decision regarding household affairs, ranging from the education of the children to the use of the family finances. Indeed East Asian husbands hand over their paychecks to their wives and in return are given allowances.
In such societies founded on Confucian principles of gender roles, families act as units and individuals always think in terms of the collective good. There is little doubt also that such societies, rather than ones based on radical individualism and egalitarianism of the West, can best combat the decay of morals and decline of civic spirit.
But is this vision of the proper role of the sexes distinctively Confucian or even East Asian? A tradition of thought roughly congruent to that of Confucianism regarding the same issues exists in the West. Indeed this tradition has far more distinguished pedigree than modern liberalism, tracing its lineage from Aristotle to Rousseau.
The West's shallow criticism of the East Asian social system is a manifestation of its own intellectual parochialism. That parochialism betrays not only lack of a proper understanding of alien philosophical systems, but knowledge of its own past as well.
