The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Ban Zhao

c. 45 – 116 CE

Han scholar and historian who completed the History of the Former Han and wrote Instructions for Women, a Confucian guide to the virtues of a wife.

Hand-coloured print of a woman in Chinese dress, seated in a carved chair and reading a book
Imagined likeness from a French illustrated volume on China, about 1847, made some seventeen centuries after her death.Public domain · See the original

Ban Zhao’s elder brother was the court historian Ban Gu, and her great-aunt was Ban Jieyu, a concubine famed for her learning, and was raised with a learning rare for women of her day. She wrote on ethics, politics, history and astronomy.

She came from a long line of learned officials. When her brother died in prison in 92 CE, she completed his official history of the Western Han, the Han Shu.

Key ideas

Virtue relative to role
In line with Confucian tradition, Ban Zhao held that virtue depends on one’s role: a good ruler and a good servant show different virtues, and her Instructions for Women sets out those proper to a wife.
Instructions for Women
Her best-known work collects social and moral norms for women, focused on a wife’s duties to her husband and, to a lesser degree, her children.
A woman scholar
Her own career crossed the boundary between the inner and outer spheres that Confucian thought assigned to women and men: she became a leading scholar of ethics, politics, history and astronomy.
Tradition
Chinese
Region
Han China

Key works

  • Instructions for Women (Nüjie)
  • History of the Former Han (completion) (Han Shu)

Sources

  1. Alexus McLeod, Philosophy in Han Dynasty China, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  2. Li-Hsiang Rosenlee, Gender in Confucian Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy