Since the early twentieth century, the situation for women in traditional China, owing to various historical reasons and political motivations, was criticized as the consequences and evidence of sexism, which many scholars have attributed to Confucianism. Confucius has thus been harshly condemned for his discrimination of women on the unanimous basis of Analects 17.25, where he allegedly said that “only women and petty people are difficult to deal with.” Yet, prior to the twentieth century, this passage was rarely read in a gender perspective. The gender reading clearly is a product of modern scholarship and is empowered and reinforced by gender studies in the West. The time gap evidently contributes to the hermeneutical discrepancy between Confucius's intended meaning and modern scholars' interpretations. In interpreting classical texts, Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) strove to recover their “original meanings.” With regard to Analects 17.25, he did not read it from a gender perspective and took “women” and “petty people” to mean “male servants” and “maids” instead. Zhu's gloss on the passage, however, is brief and concise and he did not provide any argument for his reading. This paper, citing Zhu Xi's relevant discussions, provides the argumentation he himself might have offered and examines his reading from a variety of perspectives including conceptual categories, pragmatic analysis, contextual unity, and intertextual cross-referencing. It will also test Zhu's reading against the philosophical coherence of Confucius's teaching on interpersonal relationships. In conclusion, Zhu's own hermeneutic principles will be briefly analyzed with regard to Analects 17.25.