Virtuous Women And Talented Women

Insight into what Dream of the Red Chamber is actually about

Virtuous Women And Talented Women

We saw yesterday that Li Wan’s father, Li Shouzhong, had an interesting opinion about women. His motto was “女子無才便是德,” which translates to something like “female virtue lies in the absence of talent.”

That phrase doesn’t really mean much to you and I, aside from its obvious sexist nature. However, if you were an educated Chinese reader in the late Ming or early Qing dynasty, this phrase would have seemed quite familiar.

I wrote yesterday that David Hawkes’ translation, “a stupid woman is a virtuous one,” is actually a pretty bad distortion of the original and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what Cao Xueqin was actually saying. Let’s dive into that a little bit deeper.

First of all, the phrase 女子無才便是德 is not a Cao Xueqin creation. As scholar Chen Dongyuan has discovered, and as this excellent Chinese Wikipedia article describes, the phrase dates back to the early 17th century at the latest.男子有德便是才，女子無才便是德。