Due to Confucianism’s view that women are to be submissive to men in all levels of the social hierarchy, coupled with early text that shed negative light on the idea of female rulers. It made the idea of powerful women seem stranger and often unnatural since they would have challenged the authority of men. Rulers and influential women, similar to hens, represented dynastic decline. As a wife, Wu also broke standards set by Confucius followers regarding marriage. Chinese women could not have multiple husbands and some could not remarry after their husband’s death but men were allowed to have several wives. Emperors kept up to thousands of concubines for their own pleasures. However, Wu Zetian changed traditions by forcing Emperor Li Zhi to
…show more content…
She was demonized because she was born into a patriarchal society that was heavily influenced by Confucius ideology which criticized her inability to fit into a role assigned to her sex. The demonization of Wu Zetian is important to recognize and prevent because it is an example of how societal expectations had allowed history to be written and a historical figure to represented in a certain light instead of being represented fairly. By not representing a figure or event equally and allowing their opinions to permeate their writing, historians risk losing a side of a story that would be key to understand a group of people or a country as a whole. Current historians and government cannot allow history to be so unfairly written because as time progress forward many societies have changed and could only learn from the past if the past is objective and unbiased. This is important because as the world become accessible through a touch of a button or a tap on a screen, information is easily received and sent. People of all types are interacting with each other and they all deserve to have historians write unbiased history about them. Perhaps, it is it impossible to be completely unbiased but historians should at least seek to portray historical figures and events in both a positive and negative
She was demonized because she was born into a patriarchal society that was heavily influenced by Confucius ideology which criticized her inability to fit into a role assigned to her sex. The demonization of Wu Zetian is important to recognize and prevent because it is an example of how societal expectations had allowed history to be written and a historical figure to represented in a certain light instead of being represented fairly. By not representing a figure or event equally and allowing their opinions to permeate their writing, historians risk losing a side of a story that would be key to understand a group of people or a country as a whole. Current historians and government cannot allow history to be so unfairly written because as time progress forward many societies have changed and could only learn from the past if the past is objective and unbiased. This is important because as the world become accessible through a touch of a button or a tap on a screen, information is easily received and sent. People of all types are interacting with each other and they all deserve to have historians write unbiased history about them. Perhaps, it is it impossible to be completely unbiased but historians should at least seek to portray historical figures and events in both a positive and negative