Hey there—I'd just caution you to be careful to make sure you're saying what you mean: in a couple of places you say "word" when you mean "character". It's not true that the Chinese *word* for 'man' is 'field' + 'strength', although the *character*—i.e., the symbol used to write the word, not the word itself—is.

The "good" character being made up of woman + son is incredible. It's very interesting how language shows gendered emotions. I remember always being annoyed as a child that in a family with 6 nieces and just 1 nephew, we were always referred to in masculine terms.

I know that it's common for people to use the term 'ancestor worship' for the chinese practice, but I'd really like to stress that a closer word to it is ancestor veneration. There's a big difference.Also, something I found very interesting -- if you look up the etymology of 女, you'll find that the original form was a woman pointing to her breasts.While we're at it, go and look up the Cantonese word for 'bitch; nosy, insane, extremely loud, or badly behaving woman' - 八婆, or its slightly more polite Mandarin equivalent, 三八. Really it's only 3 and 8 put together, which seems innocuous enough, if nonsensical, but then one remembers that March 8 (3/8) is International Woman's Day. Make of that what you will. 

I would like to hear from the  Chinese about the significance of all this, rather than some Western academic.

I'd recommend not reading too much into the visual components of a character... a lot of the components are in a character for linguistic reasons and not cultural ones, and many of them were created so long ago that the origins are lost. So, just because the character for "good" includes the pictograph for "woman" doesn't mean that the concept of "good" in Chinese culture inherently includes women somehow.

I'm going to echo other respondents on here and say that you are most likely reading too much into the meaning of these characters.  I've studied classical (i.e. ancient) Chinese and modern Mandarin so can tell you, for instance, that the charater for 'good' originally was a verb 'to like'.  So, in fact, it's actually quite a sweet character, in which the people closest to the original transcriber embodied everything he (it was most likely a man, admittedly) liked! 

When you take characters that were in existence in at least 400BC and try to retrospectively apply them to modern culture you can only end up with a mish-mash of cultural irrelevancies.  This is like someone saying we should change from the term "manual labour" to "personal labour" because MANual labour is inherently male.  In fact, the root of 'manual' is actually from the Latin manu meaning 'hand'.  I'm sure that most people on here are aware of this, but to a non-native speaker it might seem like a very sexist, outdated term, or this might think that this would encourage our culture to perceive men as labourers!

China is a complex and diverse country and the patrilocal system of marriage doesn't always apply.  Generalisations like this often serve to assist the government in asserting the "one China, one culture" ideals over minority peoples who might practise polygamy (Hui minority), polyandry (Tibetan minority) or 'walking marriages' (matrilineal, women-led casual relationships, whereby any resulting children are raised by the mother and her brothers). 

As a personal observation (and one observed in Fong's "Only Hope" book), the patrilocal system is dying out - it cannot function in a one-child society.  What is instead happening is that women are expected to be the caregivers for both sides of their family.  This has led to a perception that women are "more dutiful" than men and all the associated problems. 

Interestingly, the practice of 'bridewealth' is providing an opposite force in most cities.  This is the opposite of a dowry - when a couple marry, the groom's parents buy a flat for the new couple.  This is naturally very expensive and can financally cripple families.  I expect a lot more will be written about bridewealth in the future.  Incidentally, most people in China don't move in with the husband's parents.  If you go to a major urban centre you may well notice that there are no flats big enough for more than one couple anyway - another trend dying out from the effects of the one-child policy and urbanisation. 

Someone who knows more about languages can say whether or how Chinese
reveals more about the cultural contexts of its word origins than
English does.

These ideogrammating compounds are only one type of hanzi formation, and as far as I know most compound hanzi use an element for soundalike and an element to classify the concept. For example, mother, 媽 (mā), is composed of  女 (nǚ, "woman") and 馬 (mǎ, "horse"). So 媽 sounds like mǎ/ "horse" but means something related to women. Ergo, mā/ "mother".

Then again, it is easy to essentialize a foreign language. The Chinese writing system was developed during the Shang dynasty and evolved over time. Trying to derive an insight on modern Chinese society (and taking into account the historical changes that have happened in China since the fall of the Qing dynasty to today (and which incidentally involve a complete reform of the writing system), is like trying to say something about modern American society by the lexical analysis of the Old Germanic language, or maybe Latin.

The Romans only let men inherit, and the English word "patrimony" (from pater, "father") reflects this situation, but you can't say anything meaningful about modern Western society from that factoid, because of the social changes that have happened meanwhile. Similarly with the history of hanzi.

"So, the next time someone sees a common pattern of gendered behavior,
and attributes it to genetics or evolution, I’m going to ask them to
first demonstrate that the pattern holds among people who aren’t exposed
to any language at all (and raised by parents who haven’t been exposed
to language either)."

Deaf children, with deaf parents, in many parts of the world instinctively develop their own language among their families, even if the parents were not signed to and can only mime basic ideas. The children of these families will still develop highly complex language amongst themselves (our ability to communicate seems to be innate as long as we have someone to practice with). However, these families are not immune to gendered behavior. They experience it the same as all other cultures, even though they have no linguistic link to the outside world and often can't read. This could be due to viewing the behavior of others in the community and mimicing it, or genetics, but regardless language is not a significant factor in gendered behavior and purging our language of gendered roots would change nothing.

Just FYI: In Japanese, the character is female (not specifically human) + child (not particularly "son") and the character makes love/like/favor. I wasn't aware that this differed in Chinese.

You know what I'm reading? Some ethnocentrism.

I guess I'll share an example of how not to read into these characters too much... I can only speak from Japanese but just as an example, it shouldn't matter that the meaning differs in chinese.
女(women)＋宀(radical for roof (home))＝安（い）(cheap/inexpensive)
You could easily teach that to someone ignorent of chinese writing system and they would believe that it's being patrilocal, but 安 can be used in many other ways. (peaceful,safe etc)

Thank you for the comments.

I know a lot about Chinese history and society from years of study and teaching as well as multiple visits. Chinese language is not something I know a lot about -- I have little feel for it, and can hardly imagine growing up with it. It's amazing to me that such different childhood cognitive experiences produce people around the world who are in some ways so similar.But at the level of expertise this blog post required, being a "Western academic" is not a serious disqualification. I have read enough about these few characters, and discussed them enough with native speakers, to feel pretty confident that their origins are as I described them.Word origins do not determine social structures. Language is not destiny.

In the post I made no pronouncements about the effect of these characters on contemporary society. They are relics, but living relics, too. China inarguably has a "patrilocal tradition," which has never been universal but was widespread. The migration of tens of millions of Chinese workers from the country to the cities in the last few decades has been called the greatest migration in human history. Following on the heels of the vast reorganization of the countryside by collectivization, among other changes, I think it's safe to say that all aspects of Chinese tradition -- especially those related to family life -- have been transformed.

And yet, there are still women living in China whose feet were bound in the 1930s! The presence of history is felt in all societies, via many pathways, but it is never replicated.

I do agree that many gendered concepts are incorporated in Chinese characters as Chinese is my first language. However, this analysis of Chinese characters simply takes it out of historical context, which has been developing and evolving for more than 2000 years. The forms and writings of Chinese characters have changed a lot under different political regimes. The first change came from Qin Dynasty (221 BC-207 BC), and the second significant change, I'd say, the split of PRC (which is mainland China where simplified Chinese characters are 'artificially' implemented for political reasons) and ROC (which is Taiwan where traditional Chinese characters are preserved and used nowadays). 

Also, your analysis can be easily critiqued for your Western, middle class position because you simply victimized Chinese women. It is not to say that Chinese women are not suffering from patriarchal system, but power mechanisms work differently in various social and historical context. What the West considered to be oppressive might work in the opposite way in the rest of the world, and vice versa.

Also, I would like to mention that women's rights and gender equality have become significant issues both in Chinese and Taiwanese governmental policies. Most of the general public have long discarded 'traditional' values and 'conservative' practices. I do acknowledge that power operates in different way to subject women to patriarchal family. However, academics cannot simply ignore the fact that that the 'other' society they are talking about changes in a similar way like their 'own' society does.  

Well, to cover every aspect of this issue might mean writing another two or three PhD theses, which is definitely not what I intend to do at the moment. So, I just briefly scribbled down whatever came into my mind.....

I'm kind of surprised that, of all the examples to choose from, the examples chosen aren't that strong. I would never wish to argue that Chinese characters do not contain huge amounts of patriarchy, as evidenced by characters such as 奸 (plug it into google translate, seriously), 奴 (slave), 妄 (rash, preposterous), 妨 (harm, hinder), 妒嫉 (both characters mean jealousy on their own, but are more commonly used together), 妖 (monster, demon, witch, etc). You could also argue that having a special 偏旁 to denote femaleness is an act of othering, since there is no 偏旁 for the male, as the default human.

HOWEVER,
Given the many meanings that one Chinese character can contain, it's really hard to say that 女 + 子 means woman and son. It could also be interpreted as woman, women, woman and child, or, as my dad uses for my brother and I, daughter and son. 

TL;DR, this topic has merit, do dig deeper, remember that chinese characters mean many things

I agree that it's important to make the distinction here between written and spoken versions of Chinese.

Got me thinking about how written English with its Latin alphabet is so devoid of  pictographic elements in visually representing the language ... Maybe "B" as in "Boob" and "Butt" come to my (admittedly puerile) mind if I read into it.  A reader of written English wouldn't make much of that, taking the "B" as a neutral phonetic symbol.  Not knowing much about Chinese writing, I'd follow the previous statements that those characters are similarly neutral to the reader.

Not to say the historical origins of those characters aren't necessarily loaded with meaning and revealing of gender hierarchy ... the post definitely offers an etic analysis for discussion.
 

Suggested reading:
The ideographic myth
Yingzi - if English was written like Chinese

And what about these signs from western culture:
♀: unicod (hex) 2640 (mirror, i.e. putting makeup)♂: unicode (hex) 2642 (hunter, i.e. bow and arrow) 

Whilst
I'm a non Chinese person who is still learning the language despite
many years having passed since commencement of studies, I'll dare to
venture into the deep end here. 子 zi/zǐ can mean a shortened form of  儿子
érzi (son) but it also has several other meanings. Indeed, for 好 hǎo
(good), the interpretation I was taught is that it is a combination of
the words 女儿 nǚ ér (daughter) and 儿子 érzi (son) with the repeated 儿 ér
(also short for 'son') simply dropped. Therefore it expresses the idea
that children in general are good rather than favouring any particular
(cis?) gender.

Obviously, it's not without it's problems. The case of 女儿 nǚ ér
(daughter) leaps out just as one thinks that the issue of 好 hǎo (good)
had been resolved. But English is hardly flawless in this regard.
Indeed, the word vagina come from the Latin for 'sheath'. No further
translation necessary, I think!

Further language note: 子 zi is often used to turn something into an
object e.g. 筷子 kuài zi (chopsticks), 电子 diàn zǐ (electricity/electron),
杯子 bēizi (cup/a glass), et cetera.

A lot of languages have sexist features, in my native language, portuguese, for example, we have two words for "they" a female one and a male one, when you are referring to a group of boys you use the male, and for a group of girls you use the female. However, when there is a group of lots of girls, but only one boy, you have to use the male word, regardless of the quantity of women.

I think that you are right in that the topic is not that well or that deeply covered. However, I think that there are some really good valid critiques as to why your method of doing the analysis falls short.

I have noted in a different comment new work that looks at how the structure of the Chinese characters help a reader associate a word into a category. Others have also pointed out that the Chinese characters have developed over a LONG period of time and have taken on various meanings over that period of time (much like the word "quaint" has had a myriad of meanings throughout English language history).

You note that you are learning Chinese, and having learned Spanish as an adult (after growing up speaking Japanese and English), I can tell you that even though Spanish is a world closer to English than Japanese, the language remains flat to me. Even though grammar came as a breeze (for the most part) and light reading in Spanish is relatively simple for me, the language remains flat to me. This manifests itself in an inability to speak and write with as much fluency and cognition as I have in listening and reading, and when I do speak, the language becomes as flat as a board (and about as deep as a playing card).

I have come recently to recognize that this is just a part of the learning process, and that I will likely never have as deep an appreciation for Spanish as I do for English or Japanese; I have little emotional history with the language to complement the cerebral understanding that I have of it.

At the end, it is the always the hazard of the new language learner to remember to not address the "flatness" of the new language with depth garnered from the mother tongue's culture. It sets you up for (at best) kind talking down and (on the worse end) ridicule, both stemming from a plain recognition that your understanding lacks a depth that you cannot comprehend (and will likely never comprehend as fully as you do with your first language).

The conversation got a little off the track I intended, which was more about patrilocality than patriarchy per se. Of course, patriarchy is embedded in many languages, in old and new ways. The patrilocal aspect in wài pó seems more specific to China and was my original focus, and it's not very ambiguous in the construction of the term. This post was a combination of one called "Chinese: Maternal grandmothers, outside women", and one called "Good woman child language," which Lisa and I called "How Patriarchy Is Written Into Chinese Characters" for this post. (In that older post, incidentally, I did give the definition of  子 as "child or son," which I inadvertently shortened to "son" in  condensing the post. For the point about patriarchy, however, whether it's "child" or "son" that combines with "female" to make "good" is a difference, but not one that changes the whole story.) Anyway, I appreciate the comments and am happy the post sparked an interesting discussion.

Since no one pointed this out yet, I also would like to mention that wai po 外婆 is by no means the universal phrase for maternal grandmother. In my family, for example, we say lao la 姥姥, which more or less is an affectionate way of saying old woman, and many of my Chinese friends simply use po po 婆婆. Furthermore, there are very marked ways in which gender is particularly obscured in the Chinese language: for instance, the word for third person male, female, and non-gendered are all the same in spoken Chinese, and I believe were also originally written with the same character (again, not an expert on the history of the Chinese language, and I can't find a source, so take that with a grain of salt). If you go searching for meaning in any language, you'll find similar sociological meanings written into every word, but as others have stated it is unuseful to apply modern understandings of social constructs on traditional languages that have been in use for millennia. 

if patrilocal is harmful to women, is matrilocal harmful to men?

Why is a blog run by 2 PhD Sociology professors posting this amateurish and ethnocentric observation by someone who is "working on Chinese Characters for Beginners"?

Although I agree that the dominant Han Chinese culture has been historically patrilocal (and still is to some extent - my parents lived with my paternal grandparents up until when I was a toddler), I also agree with a lot of the comments about not overextrapolating or overgeneralizing culture from language.  Cultures and languages are constantly evolving, but it doesn't mean that they always change at the same pace.  For example, the Chinese character for surname, 姓, has a female radical because thousands of years ago when that character was created, China had a matriarchal society.   (I can't find any English scholarly articles on this, but there's an English translation of a Chinese book called  Origins of Chinese Names: http://books.google.com/books?id=l1vR-x9_pEEC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false.)  So one could just as easily say that "matriarchy is written into Chinese characters" as well.

I grew up in Hong Kong and left after finishing high school in the early 1990s. I remember the gender bias in the Chinese language was being discussed way back then. Some of my teachers might have pointed that out to the students too. So in a way, this is common knowledge to me - although I do believe most in Hong Kong would brush aside the significance of the gender bias embedded in the Chinese language.  

While it probably was not be your intention to come across as condescending, when I read your essay, I did think "Duh, don't you think that some of us Chinese would be smart enough to have figured that out already?" And I thought you should have looked up if someone had studied it more systematically. I do hate the condescension in the Western academia, especially when it comes to gender issues in the rest of the world. 

Interestingly enough (or not... haha): the Japanese character for woman is the same as in/was taken from Chinese. Stack that character three times (in Japanese) and you get the word for "cunning, wicked person."

I have a degree in linguistics and in translation, and would like to add something to this discussion. I appreciate the motivation behind your post on the connection of the Chinese patrilocal system and its connection with Chinese characters (demonstrating that our perceptions and behaviours are not independent of our ancient cultures). However, I see your argument as flawed, particularly with regard to your final paragraph: 

So, the next time someone sees a common pattern of gendered behavior, and attributes it to genetics or evolution, I’m going to ask them to first demonstrate that the pattern holds among people who aren’t exposed to any language at all (and raised by parents who haven’t been exposed to language either). Otherwise, the influence of ancient cultures is impossible to scrub from the data.

The most obvious problem with this is that it is incredibly rare to find a child (and parents) without "any language at all." Such a situation would require these individuals to have no means of real communication. It would only be possible if they had had no important human interaction until after they were too old to fully access their human capacity for language (anywhere between 6 and 14 years old). Research on individuals in such situations explains that they do not just lack language, but also have numerous developmental and social interaction problems as well. I believe you probably were referring to people who do not have what we  conceive of as "normal" language -- namely people who are deaf and use some sort of signing system. However, a sign languages are just as fully developed and complex as spoken languages. So in fact, perhaps you were referring to individuals who a) have a language with no writing system, or b) who are illiterate. In either case, they are still fluent in a language. This is particularly relevant to the case of Chinese culture (and I realize that China actually has many different cultures). Until fairly recently, literacy in China was quite low, and there are still Chinese today who do not have full competency in reading and writing Chinese. Lastly, oral Mandarin Chinese does distinguish gender to the same extent that English and many other languages to. 

All of these factors would seem to complicate the claim that the elements of one's writing system have a significant link to gendered behaviour. Yes, a writing system can reflect the attitudes or beliefs of the society that developed it (no one is arguing that the characters 外婆 do not show how an ancient people once conceived of family relationships) but it does not actually have an important impact on on the behaviour of a language's modern-day speakers.

And that’s how liberals legitimize imperialist aggression.