In China, a tradition of women’s writing that stretches back almost two centuries is on the verge of dying out. Thank goodness for progress.
Nushu is a unique form of Chinese that uses symbols for sounds rather than for specific meanings (as traditional Chinese character scripts do). Moreover, it was developed by women to communicate with other women.
According to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, nushu was in use by women in China at least since the Taiping Rebellion of 1850. Barred from any sort of formal education, and with little power at all, women in China used nushu to write letters, compose poems and songs, and tell their stories.
Interestingly, while some Leftists in the United States were pushing Communist China as a model, the Cultural Revolution attacked nushu as feudalistic. “The women who knew nushu, who used to get together to sing [nushu songs], were seized and protested against and criticized,” Zhou Shuoyi told The Los Angeles Times. “And the materials they had were confiscated and burned.”
Zhou himself reports being denounced in 1958 as a “rightist” for his scholarly research into the women’s-only script.
Ironically what the Communist Chinese could not do, progress has. With widespread education of girls in China, nushu has all but died out. It just isn’t relevant anymore.
That’s progress. Women in China still face enormous problems, but today they are largely the same problems faced by anyone being forced to live under one of the last remaining Communist governments in the world.
Radical feminist accounts of the lives of women in China focus on practices such as footbinding, which is certainly part of the story, but so are the creative ways in which women responded to their second class status, such as nushu, which should not be forgotten.
Source:
China’s Mother Tongue Is Dying. Henry Chus, The Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2002.