A New Perspective on the Cultural Interpretation of Jiangyong Nüshu in China

AbstractNüshu, as a folk practice with gendered characteristics, is often included in discussions of Chinese female culture. This article contends that so-called ‘gentlewomen’ (君子女) were an important group that spread traditional Chinese Confucian culture among rural women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province. Women’s scripts and women’s oral composition of texts opened up a channel between China’s mainstream society and rural society, and between male-dominated society and female society, which undertook the function of providing rural education in Confucian culture and promoting the conscious acceptance of Confucianism by rural women. AcknowledgementsThe work in this article is supported by Guangdong Province Department of Education, China (programme number 2022WTSCX103). I am grateful for the suggestions and translations made by Kelly Will and Professor Wang Shengyu regarding this article. Thanks also go to the Folklore editors Dr Jessica Hemming and Dr Antone Minard.Supplemental DataSupplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2023.2221527Notes1 The Yao people are among the fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups in China. They mainly reside in the southern regions of the country.2 ‘Feudal society’ is a generalized concept in China, describing the complex social form that began in the Qin dynasty and ended, technically, in 1911. There is also a viewpoint that a society based on agriculture could be called a ‘feudal society’ (see, for example, Zhang Zhiqiang Citation2022).3 In traditional Chinese culture, the left represents men and the right represents women, so the left is ‘more noble’ than the right. In the view of Zhang Manhua, the diagonal angling from high on the right to low on the left of women’s script signifies women’s resistance to patriarchal society.4 All translations from Chinese works are by the author.5 Confucian orthodoxy means propagating Confucian doctrines in a fixed orthodox manner. The sequence was: Confucius founded the Confucian school and passed it on to Mencius and Xunzi and other sages.6 Daoism is an indigenous religion in China, which originated during the period of the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE).7 Plain learning is also called down-to-earth learning. It refers to simple, plain learning in ancient China; later it refers to the Confucian classics.8 Yan Zhitui (531–597 CE) was a thinker and educator in the Northern and Southern Dynasties (420–589 CE) of China. He wrote the Family Instructions of the Yan Clan (顏氏家訓), based on his own experience and the principles of regulating a family, which became an important work of Confucianism.9 The two Local Gazetteers of Yongzhou Prefecture were written during the Kangxi emperor’s reign (1661–1722 CE) and the Daoguang emperor’s reign (1820–50 CE) of the Qing dynasty.10 It must be emphasized that the female elite group received the same Confucian education and the same Chinese characters as did men, rather than women’s script.11 Nüshu was discovered in the 1980s. At that time, only a few gentlewomen, including Gao Yinxian and Yi Nianhua, were alive. Therefore, they were considered the earliest bearers of the tradition. Many of the nüshu texts and examples of women’s scripts we can see today were written by them.12 Zhou Shuoyi (1926–2006), a native of Jiangyong County, was the first man to discover and study women’s scripts.13 Expanded Words of Wisdom is a children’s primer (啟蒙讀物) (texts that children started reading when they reached the age of two or three years) compiled during the Ming period. This book collected all kinds of proverbs and sayings of China.14 My grandmother Jiang Xiyu (1934–2018), a native of Jiangyong County, studied in Jiangyong during her childhood, then enrolled in modern schools and eventually graduated from normal college. My great-aunt Jiang Huaiyu (b. 1936), from Jiangyong County, worked in Shijiazhuang city, Hebei Province, and graduated from Fushun Petroleum College in the 1950s.15 If the mother and other elder female relatives could write women’s scripts, they would write the warnings themselves in a third-day book, then send it to the bride. If they could not write women’s scripts, they would ask a gentlewoman to write what they wanted to say in the third-day book, then they would buy it from the gentlewoman and send it to the bride as a gift.16 Some popular ballads and tales were created by men, such as Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai (梁山伯與祝英台), but Jiangyong women transcribed these famous ballads into women’s scripts and repeatedly chanted them. Gong Zhebing first discovered and collected three women’s scripts texts from Jiangyong women in the 1980s. These were famous Chinese tales transcribed into women’s script versions (Gong Zhebing 1983, 123). Zhao Liming pointed this out in A Compendium of Chinese Nüshu, which collected all women’s scripts texts found since the 1950s, including transcribed versions of Chinese-character famous ballads and tales (Zhao Liming Citation1992, 903). These had been composed by men, but they were popular among women as well and spread among women in transcribed women’s scripts form, which showed that Jiangyong women accepted the mainstream culture promoted in these works.17 Cooling Day is a festival held every July. It is very hot in summer and married women went back to their mothers’ homes and stayed in the shade of trees or rooms, which helped them feel cooler.Additional informationNotes on contributorsHe YanHe Yan is a lecturer and researcher from the School of Humanities and Education at Foshan University, Foshan, China. Her research interests are in intangible cultural heritage and the folklore of China, especially in women’s scripts folk culture. She has published some articles and participated in editing several academic books and textbooks.