Understanding the changing social status of Chinese women from the Chinese characters

It is generally accepted that Chinese women were inferior to their male counterparts in the feudal society. This can be well illustrated in the morals for women in old times which could be best summarized as “San Cong Si De”(Three Obedience and Four Virtues for women—Three Obedience includes obeying her father before marriage, her husband when married, and her sons in widowhood and Four Virtues refers to morality, proper speech, modest manner and diligent work). However, from the Chinese characters, we can see that women once enjoyed high social status at the beginning of Chinese civilization.

From the formation of Chinese characters, we could tell for sure that China at first was a matriarchal society which was dominated by women. It is a well known fact that people value their family names highly in Chinese culture. And it is the character for women   and that for life  that makes the character for family name (?). And the women part   and the part for children   makes the character for good .It is women giving birth to their children that guarantees the blood line of a certain family. So it is quite natural that women enjoyed the most rights and made decisions on important occasions. Not only that, characters found in inscriptions on oracle bones indicate that most noble families used the characters containing the women part, such as Ji  Gui Si Yao , Jiang  Lou  Ji  , Yin ?An  and so on, which clearly shows the high social status of women at that time.

Yet, being an agricultural society, it is the physical strength that determines one’s social status. As time went on, men who are blessed with greater strength are gradually taking over the social power and the society finally changed into a patriarchal one. This trend also left its mark on the Chinese language. After the Xia Dynasty, few family names bear the character for women. The family name Ji  which consisted of the women part and the part for good fortune  even deleted the former part in the following. What’s more, a large number of characters containing the negative meanings were created by using the character for women. Just like envy ?treacherousness ?greedy ?slave … to name just a few. The Chinese character for concubine is a combination of the women  and the symbol for instruments for torture for convicts  Once at a time, people would use this word to talk about women who were concubines, bought or robbed, or those who were convicts and deprived of the chancing of serving in the royal palace. The character for compromise  shows a hand grabbing a woman, which bears the meaning of control and submission. On the other hand, it is the character for men made the left part for the word for rules As language is the best carrier and representation for culture. From the linguistic phenomena we could know something about the society. If you are interested in Chinese, please do not hesitate to get involved in the Chinese language.