# Modern readers record later commentarial uses of softness imagery to naturalise female subordination

Date: 1934

## The fact

Waley’s 1934 discussion and later feminist sinology record that commentarial traditions on the Daodejing’s valley, water, and infant imagery were used to praise ‘feminine’ yielding as a social role, not only as a metaphor for non-coercion. The dated public English instrument is that modern critical statement of a received use.

## Context

Water imagery can criticise hard power. It can also tell women to yield. The worsening path is the second use as documented in modern criticism, not a claim that the silk books are a misogynist statute.

[Laozi](/people/laozi) is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official museum, encyclopedia, agency, or edition pages and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: Arthur Waley, The Way and Its Power (scan) (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.185280; Internet Archive).

## Significance

A metaphor is not a family code. Do not invent a Zhou gender law from a valley image.

A metaphor is not a family code. Do not invent a Zhou gender law from a valley image.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is [protection-of-minority-rights](/drivers/protection-of-minority-rights). The welfare reading used in this dossier is worsening. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Laozi: https://factrail.ai/people/laozi

## Drivers

- Protection of Minority Rights: https://factrail.ai/drivers/protection-of-minority-rights

## Sources

- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/daoism/
- https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.185280

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/lz-gendered-wuwei-commentaries