ABSTRACT
Nushu, literally “women’s script,” is a writing system invented and used by unschooled, rural women in southern Hunan province to write the local Chinese dialect. As an introduction to the nushu script, this chapter aims to answer a few of the basic questions regarding this remarkable legacy. The difficulty in delineating the timeline for the development and use of nushu was, first of all, due to the script’s limited scale in use. It appears that nushu was only used by women in a small cluster of villages in the Shangjiangxu region. The chapter focuses on how writing was done to what was being written and why. The verse format of nushu writing is clearly indicative of its social function and literary value beyond routine communicative purposes. To most women of the nushu era, unfortunately, marriage meant the end of a happy adolescence and the beginning of a life filled with hardship and suffering.
