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...
