One of the most prominent features of Confucianism is the belief in the importance of the family and in the hierarchy of the family. While Confucius recognized the importance of friend-friend relationships and emperor-subject relationships, he considered family relationships the backbone of society.
Confucius began his studies by looking at Chinese villages. While doing so, he recognized three pairs of relationships within each family. To his mind, these relationships where hierarchal with one person "in charge" of the other. The relationships pairs he recognized were parent to child, husband to wife, and elder to younger. In each case, Confucius believed that one person (the husband, parent, or elder) should command and protect while the other (the wife, the child, or the younger) should obey. Each position came with it certain responsibilities and obligations.
Obviously, Chinese Confucian society was, and continues to be highly paternalistic. This makes it quite similar to most societies in human history, although few societies have developed such a rigid, formalized family hierarchy as did the Chinese. Although it is less true today as China continues to modernize, the chief goal of Chinese families for many thousands of years was to perpetuate the family name. That is why such a premium was placed on boys. Boys perpetuated the family name while girls did not.
Thus, the eldest child of each family has given more authority in the family than any of the girls, no matter how much older than him they might be. Once the husband/father of the family died, leadership of the family passed to the eldest son who had command of everyone within the family, including his own mother. If the family had no son, the family name might die. Some Chinese believed that ghosts were the souls of members of dead families. Without anyone to tend their graves and honor their memory, the ghosts wandered the earth hoping to join some other family.
Everyone in a Chinese Confucian family literally knew their rank. The father had authority over the wife who had authority over the children. Boys had authority over the girls and the elder children had authority over the younger children. Even in youth, however, younger boys had authority over elder girls. If a grandfather was still alive, he was the most important member of the family with a grandmother the most important woman.
The relationships could get quite complicated. If a man happened to have multiple wives, than his first wife outranked his second and third wife as did her children. If all of her children were girls, however, the boys from the subsequent marriages would be more important than her own children. Interestingly, the children of wife #2 or wife #3 recognized wife #1 as their mother because she was the most important wife. They called their own biological mother "aunt."
While this hierarchy may be confusing for outsiders to understand, it makes perfect sense to the Chinese and it seems to have worked. Chinese civilization has survived largely unchanged for thousands of years while the West suffered through multiple collapses. Confucianism may not match our modern ideas about gender equality and individual liberty, but it is still espoused by hundreds of millions of Chinese today. That makes it one of the largest religions in the world and an important religion for the rest of the world to understand.
