Nushu (Chinese women's script) literacy and literature

Women and girls in one part of southwestern Hunan province in China used an exclusively female script to write of their lives in a variety of genres. Men couldn't read any of it. This study of the local women's literature known as nushu addresses the need for an introduction to what women and girls were actually writing and reading in this script. By distinguishing between personal and public genres, and then relating these genres to the life stages of their writers and readers, this study reads nushu texts in the contexts of their production and reception. Accordingly, it treats texts as social practices rather than as objects occupying an autonomous realm of other texts. Through the examination of highly formulaic textual conventions of self-representation that women and girls both inherited and perpetuated, this study probes the relationship between social subjects and textual subjects that preceded the experience of individuals, and suggests how social and textual subjects shaped each other. This inquiry shows that while nushu texts can convey some of the ways their writers and readers understood themselves and their experiences, this literature was also teaching them ways of interpreting their lives, amounting in essence to a women's knowledge in its own literacy, a knowledge both consistent with and divergent from that produced in Chinese literacy. This study helps correct the common misperception that because this literacy excluded men it must have been covert and subversive, and offers a reappraisal of resistance in nushu literature.