 The Nüjie is a compendium of norms for women, social and moral, in line with traditional Confucian views. One of these views was that virtue was relative to role and position in society. Not only would a virtuous ruler and a virtuous servant look different because of their different ways of manifesting particular kinds of virtue, but the virtues exemplified by the virtuous ruler and servant were different. There was a heavy focus in early Confucianism on roles connected to relationships, with the central relationships in human life being seen as those between parent and child, ruler and servant, and husband and wife—part of the so-called “Five Relationships” (wu lun 五倫). Ban’s Nüjie focused specifically on the virtues proper to the woman as wife, that is, mainly in relationship to her husband, and to a lesser extent toward her children. As with discussions of role norms for other individuals in Confucian texts, the focus in the Nüjie is very much on the responsibilities of the wife toward the husband. The earlier Western Han author Liu Xiang’s Lienü Zhuan (“Biographies of Exemplary Women”) contained many examples of virtuous women, including Ban Zhao’s ancestor Ban Jieyu. It seems that despite the focus on presenting women as ideally subordinate in key ways to men, particularly with respect to a husband, there was no strict regulation against women engaging in scholarship. Indeed, Ban’s description of her own situation and her motivation for writing the Nüjie gives us a window onto the lives and expectations of women in the Eastern Han period: