Benefiting from her longitudinal fieldwork since 1992, Fei-wen Liu's ethnographic-rich monograph on nüshu (in conjunction with nüge) reveals the life of peasant women in rural Jiangyong of Hunan Province in south China. Nüshu is a female-specific writing system, a script of local women's own invention that men could not understand, and nüge are female-specific songs. Because of their sung performance, nüshu were often referred to as nüge in Jiangyong.

In chapter 1, Liu summarizes the discovery of nüshu and her fieldwork experiences, and introduces the four main research subjects (Tang, Yanxin, Xinkui, and Meiyue). In chapter 2, she provides an overall analysis of the practices of nüshu and nüge in six domains, with exemplary texts for each domain, including sworn sisterhood, wedding performance, biographical laments, worship verses, narratives, and transcriptions of male-authored literature (p. 19). From chapter 3 to chapter 6, she elaborates on the life histories of the four individuals to “broaden our understanding of women's lifeworlds beyond the expressive horizons of nüshu and nüge” (p. 208). In the concluding chapter 7, Liu highlights the women's subjectivity expressed in the practice of nüshu and nüge, while drawing attention also to their limitations regarding omitting women's glory as well as the influence of modern social movements in rural Jiangyong. At the end of the book, Liu expresses her concerns about “Han Chinese chauvinism” (p. 211) and the current challenge for this women's writing to “survive the threat posed by the emergence of the new nüshu” (p. 213).

Liu mentions that she intends her monograph to engage with gender studies, the anthropology of emotions, literature and performance, and Chinese studies (p. 3). I would like to point out her work's significance to resistance studies. Everyday resistanceFootnote ¹ has been a popular focus for several decades, with theoretical sophistication in social sciences and humanities (e.g., anthropology, political science, and history). Liu herself does not necessarily consider nüshu as a form of resistance or a weapon of empowerment (p. 2). She argues that it is instead “evidence of women's failure to gain recognition from men,” due to the fact that men could not care less about it despite its visibility (in its written form) and audibility (in its sung performance). Nevertheless, I think nüshu and nüge are remarkable inventions of women's resistance to the extreme patriarchal roots in traditional Chinese culture, precisely due to the fact that the men paid little attention to them, thus giving women the freedom to practice them as an outlet for lamentation.

Similar to how traditional handicrafts practiced by women were passed down with no formal training (e.g., the Miao embroidery at my research site in Fenghuang, Hunan), Jiangyong women learned to sing nüge and to read and write nüshu from kinswomen or peers while doing needlework together or during wedding singing sessions (p. 18). This practice helped form women-women ties for mutual support, and provided means of challenging their exclusion from public life. Even though neither the content nor the communication of nüshu and nüge were meant to be political, nüshu and nüge did offer a counter discourse to the local gazetteers, as illustrated by the accounts of widowhood and sworn sisterhood, the two subjects highlighted in both local gazetteers and nüshu and nüge (p. 205). In the gazetteers’ accounts, widowhood was highly encouraged, remarriage was condemned in the interest of the deceased husband and his lineage, and the sworn sisterhood was depicted suspiciously; in nüshu and nüge, in contrast, remarriage was an option and sworn sisterhood was celebrated (p. 205).

As a native of Hunan, with my hometown about 170 miles north of Jiangyong, the only place that nüshu was practiced, I wonder: Why only Jiangyong? Why are there no other places in Hunan, or China, or the world where similar female-specific writing systems appeared? Liu briefly introduces Jiangyong (pp. 4–5) regarding the discovery of nüshu. But it might be useful if greater details were offered for an overall picture of Jiangyong's geography, ethnicity, socioeconomics, and especially its women. Both its particularity and its representativeness would help contextualize Jiangyong in a broader context within rural south China, and help explain its unique position as the only place in the world where local women invented a female-specific writing system. Nevertheless, Gendered Words pays attention to the complex relationship between written nüshu and oral nüge and explores how rural Chinese women survived through the transitions of the early Republican era and the Communist Liberation. It is a major contribution to nüshu scholarship as well as its related fields.