Fascinating article here about the Chinese language known as Nushu, an ancient language that developed in the Yao community of Hunan, remarkable in that it is known and used only by women.
The language, in danger of becoming dead, is being preserved partly through the passion of Chinese who feel it is a vital part of their heritage, and partly due to a thriving tourist trade that has become fascinated by this secret language of women singing, speaking, and sewing together (the characters were not only used for writing but were often employed in women's embroidery as another form of communication).
The article is really interesting-- definitely worth a read. What struck me most about it is how it is an extreme example of the peculiar bonding of women throughout history, one that has a great deal to do with the shared experience of oppression and subjugation. Women used Nushu to commiserate with their "sworn sisters" about their arranged marriages and the womanly duties society forced upon them:
But there are heretical expressions of independence and frustration with men. One Nushu tale describes a wife in an arranged marriage who runs away on her wedding night after discovering how ugly her husband is. Another tells of a woman who is so impatient that she marches off to her fiance's home demanding to know why he has not yet married her.
In most writings, however, the dominant theme is resignation rather than rebellion. The happiest Nushu poems are those exchanged by girlfriends when they become "sworn sisters". The saddest - and most famous - form of Nushu literature is the third-day book, a lament for the loss of a sister to marriage. These books, presented to brides three days after their wedding, also contained space at the back to be used as a diary. Wives considered these so precious that they had them buried or burned with them when they died, so they could take the Nushu from their sworn sisters to the next world.
Only a handful survive, one of which belonged to the great grandmother of Hu Meiyue. As she leafs through the embroidered indigo cotton-and-linen-bound book, the 100-year-old pages look in danger of crumbling. But the words still have power. "Now we sit together because our feelings are disturbed by the imminent marriage of one of our sworn sisters and we must write the third-day book. We cherish the days when we are together and hate losing one of our sisters. After she gets married it will be difficult to meet her so we worry that she will be lonely. For a woman, marriage means losing everything, including her family and her sworn sisters."
For all the jokes that have been made about women and men speaking different languages, here's a literal example. And the writing points up the brutal truth that, when women speak amongst themselves, historically marriage is seen as an inescapable burden, a hardship, hardly the joyous occasion it is supposed to be. To some extent that's changed, but not entirely-- even now that it's much more common for women to choose when and to whom they will marry, the pressure to marry is still tremendous. Women are still accused of neglecting their children if they work outside the home, and the health benefits to marriage are still far greater for men than women. Even the process of getting married traditionally burdens the woman-- the man, in asking the woman to marry him, is essentially handing her a year or more of extra work to plan the event while he does next to nothing. (This is speaking of the strictly traditional model-- although many couples are more flexible and egalitarian about their wedding plans, I've still watched many friends take on the lion's share of the work for their wedding while their fiance had it relatively easy.)
No real conclusions here...just an interesting phenomenon leading to musings about how much things have changed, and how much they are the same.
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