The sancong side, three obediences and four virtues, comes from the Han ritual compilations and from Ban Zhao, not from Confucius, who mentions women almost not at all — the one notorious remark at Analects 17.25 about women and servants being difficult to keep is a single line whose interpretation is contested and which has borne a great deal of weight. The three obediences prescribe following the father before marriage, the husband after, and the son in widowhood; the four virtues cover conduct, speech, appearance and work. What matters is the trajectory: these hardened enormously in the Song and after, and the Neo-Confucian formulation attributed to Cheng Yi — that starving to death is a small matter but losing one's virtue is a grave one, offered in a discussion of widow remarriage — became a cudgel. The material consequences included footbinding, the state-sponsored erection of chastity arches honouring widows who refused remarriage or committed suicide, and the exclusion of daughters from lineage genealogies. The tradition's own principle of remonstrance was never extended to those it bound most tightly, and Chinese and Korean feminist scholarship has made this the central charge.