The Way to Become a Female Sage: Im Yunjidang’s Confucian Feminism

Is there a counterpart to John Stuart Mill or Mary Wollstonecraft in the Confucian tradition? If so, who is it? This paper aims to introduce and examine the philosophical thought of a Korean female neo-Confucian thinker named Im Yunjidang 任允摯堂 (1721-1793) who ardently pursued Confucian sagehood and upheld moral equality between men and women by creatively reinterpreting Confucian classics as well as advancing a sophisticated neo-Confucian philosophy of human nature and moral self-cultivation. I try to make sense of Yunjidang’s “Confucian feminism” by paying attention to the neo-Confucian philosophical context in late Chosŏn Korea, in which Yunjidang was deeply embedded.