Back to Basics: nüshu — the Secret Chinese Language by Women, For Women

Back to Basics: nüshu — the Secret Chinese Language by Women, For Women

Did you know there is still a language that was created and used exclusively by one gender? It’s called nüshu 女书, which literally means “women’s writing”—a language by women, for women. When the female gender in China was still seen as affiliates of men within the social unit, a group of women from the Yao ethnicity banded together and created a secret script, nüshu, in Jiangyong County, a small town in Hunan Province. Close-up of a historical c…