Zhou Zuoren’s View On Women And Its Significance

In the process of women’s liberation, a part of intellectuals have expressed their sympathy for the tragic fate of women in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. From modern times to the May Fourth period, more and more male pioneers came up with the appeal of women’s liberation and put it into practice. However, most of them focused on the acquisition of women’s social rights, even many female pioneers like Qiujin thought also more about women’s equal social status with men, and they encouraged women to take part in democratic national revolutions. However, Zhou Zuoren didn’t follow the trend blindly, but from the perspective of cultural criticism and reconstruction, he reflected on persecutes of women by the old morality and culture, and attempted to re-starting a new culture, a new morality.During this restarting, Zhou Zuoren, so-called philosopher, did not directly copy the Western feminist theory, neither seek to form metaphysical construction of this system. By his open culture vision, he introduced sexual psychology, cultural anthropology, biological evolution from the West, combining Chinese ancients’ thoughts like that of Yu Zhengxie and Li Zhi, thus, his view about women is more comprehensible for us Chinese.This paper tries to return to the historical native context of Zhou’s views on women and then discuss the construction of Zhou’s view on women as well as its significance from different perspective:history and reality of women’s liberation, cultural critic and reconstruction. The thesis is divided into three main parts. The first chapter "rebel’The Second Sex’" explains that Zhou is aware of the fact that women’s liberation should first start from the wake of their self-consciousness, this is the sine qua non of other women’s social rights. He attacks directly women’s inconscience and old feudal customs to try to make women know that they are not the "Second Sex" but a "person". The second chapter "women centered" discourse that, according to Zhou, a woman is not only a "person", but also a "woman", and she has her particularity. Zhou thinks that women should develop depending on her own nature instead of the reality of that time:women are perfectly equal to men. Zhou criticizes that phenomenon and looks for a kind of development just for women. He has also proposed a new "wife and mother" theory, according to which men and women’s duties should be carried out differently within the family; as for sex, men should admit that women have two side,"chaste" and "immoral", and achieve gender harmony basing on women’s needs. Chapter three "new sexual morality" shows Zhou’s opening thoughts about "sex". He reveals the old sexual morality in the feudal society, which is inhuman and hypocritical, no more than a long-term toxicity and oppression for women. While criticizing the old moral, he introduces a "net view" from the West to face people’s nature and desire, establishing thus coherence between spirit and body, which is the new sexual morality. Then the equality and harmony between the sexes is achieved by "the Art of love". In the path of women’s liberation, Zhou’s opinion is inspiring but also a little limited. And many of his forward-looking views are still instructive to women’s liberation movement in today’s China.