 A recurring theme in the more recent literature on this subject is that views of women in the early period of Confucianism were relatively positive compared to the views adopted later. Raphals (1998) has extracted from the literature of the Warring States Period (during which Confucius lived) and the later Han Dynasty portraits of women who were active and sometimes very effective participants in their societies. For example, the “Collected Life Stories of Women” (Lienu zhuan) depicts women as having the same intellectual virtues as men, providing strategy and counsel to their rulers, husbands, fathers and sons, excelling in logic and argument, and presenting sagely wisdom. Nylan reads classical Chinese texts as talking “with almost stunning clarity of the power for good and evil that women bring to politics” (2000, 212), and she concludes that “[o]ur stereotypes of ancient China do not come so much from … [these texts] as from relatively recent sources, the Neo-Confucians and the May Fourth reformers” (2000, 213). At the same time, it must be said that the powerful women of ancient China were almost always excluded from official positions of power and authority.