The Vilification of Wu Zetian
I’ve noticed that people seem to admire female leaders much less than their male counterparts, even if they’re as good or better at their job. Attempting to rationally analyze modern-day politicians presents problems, I decided to look at how history portrayed Wu Zetian (624-705 CE), China’s only female emperor, and how the media today still treats female politicians similarly.
Charmed by her wit and beauty and deeply in love with her, emperor Gaozong gave Wu the privileged position of first concubine, second only to the empress. In 654 CE, Wu gave birth to a daughter. The most famous story about her life is that she had the empress, Lady Wang, visit her and her child, and then strangled the child soon after. She blamed the empress and Emperor Gaozong divorced her, making Wu empress. Although she didn’t formally hold the title, Wu was effectively the emperor of China in 660 CE, doing her husband’s work even when she was pregnant in 665 CE. This didn’t bother her husband, who enjoyed his life of pleasure, and was happy to hand over the reins of government. Ancient History Encyclopedia writes that “having been raised by her father to believe she was the equal of men, Wu saw no reason why women could not carry out the same practices and hold the same positions men could.”
Later, after her husband had died and China had gone through two other emperors, Wu crowned herself emperor of China, the first and only woman to sit on the throne and rule in her own name. She wanted to make clear that a new kind of ruler was on the throne and a new order had come, so she changed the dynasty of the country from the Tang dynasty to the Zhou. She was popular amongst her subjects, and her accomplishments included building the Longmen Grotto--huge statues carved in mountains--outside of Luoyang, establishing a secret police force to keep stability, reforming the structure of the government, and creating new characters for the Chinese writing system. Previously, a suggestion or complaint went through many different offices before reaching an official who could do something about it, but Wu eliminated this and created a literal petition box as a line of communication to the people. Many of the ideas for her reforms came from the people themselves.
Though Wu is most famous for murdering her child,, there is no way of knowing if it happened as historians wrote it. Confucian scholars of later times did not like the idea of a woman living out of the box that the Confucian philosophy put them in, a system that tells women to stay home and quietly serve their husband. A woman ruler challenged the traditional patriarchy, and many claimed that she had upset the balance of nature by taking power that belonged to a man. Scholars such as Sima Guang, who associated female rulers with self-indulgence and destruction, created literary models to paint women in power as breaking proper roles. They were unnatural in assuming the role of a man and in their lack of motherly instinct and gentleness.
Condemnation of female politicians still goes on today. From Hillary Clinton to Elizabeth Thompson, we consciously or subconsciously oppose a woman who steps out of her place. Women face the double standards of needing to be “assertive” to be taken seriously, while not seeming aggressive, women are pressured to fit beauty standards, but have their accomplishments be attributed to her looks. By looking to the past and seeing how bias has tinted our lenses of women, perhaps we can use what we learned to fix our lenses in the present.
Yes, Wu was ruthless, but she was every bit as immoral as Cao Pi, or any other male emperor. She was a skilled and effective ruler who listened to her people. Chinese historians paint Wu in a worse light because of her gender, which helps us look at bias and discrimination we still see today. And by studying the past, we can wipe our lenses clean and look towards a future where a woman and man of equal competence are seen as that—equals.
by GRACE YANG