Before 1949, Jiangyong County operated under an agrarian economy and women had to abide by patriarchal Confucian practices such as the Three Obediences. Women were confined to the home (through foot binding) and were assigned roles in housework and needlework instead of fieldwork, which allowed the practice of Nüshu to develop. Specifically, unmarried women, also known as "upstairs girls," oftentimes gathered in groups in upstairs chambers to embroider and sing. The practice of singing Nüge (women's song) allowed young women to learn Nüshu.
It is not known when Nüshu came into being. The difficulty in dating Nüshu is due to local customs of burning or burying Nüshu texts with their owners and the difficulty in textiles and paper surviving in humid environments.However, many of the simplifications found in Nüshu had been in informal use in standard Chinese since the Song and Yuan dynasty (13th–14th century). It seems to have reached its peak during the latter part of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).
Though a local educated worker at the Jiangyong Cultural Office (Zhou Shuoyi) had collected, studied and translated many Nüshu texts into standard Chinese, he was unable to draw outside attention to the script until a report was submitted to the central government on this subject in 1983
During the latter part of the 20th century, owing more to wider social, cultural and political changes than the narrow fact of greater access to hanzi literacy, younger girls and women stopped learning Nüshu, and it began falling into disuse, as older users died. The script was suppressed by the Japanese during their invasion of China in the 1930s-40s, because they feared that the Chinese could use it to send secret messages, and also during China's Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The last original writers of the script died in the 1990s (the last one in 2004).
It is no longer customary for women to learn Nüshu, and literacy in Nüshu is now limited to a few scholars who learned it from the last women who were literate in it. However, after Yang Yueqing made a documentary about Nüshu, the government of the People's Republic of China started to popularize the effort to preserve the increasingly endangered script, and some younger women are beginning to learn it.
Nüshu is a syllabic script derived from Chinese characters that was used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China.
Written language is a the transformation of reality into abstract lines.
Becoming Ink. With my conceptional Artwork I recreate the moment when objects and feelings becoming written words.
In the society of old China, women where not allowed to learn writing, those women found their own way to fulfill the need of writing reality down.
The subject of secretness, hide and in a way to shut out woman from being on equal intellectual terms as Men.
I combined the objects with secret stories I collected from various females, they all be written in Nvshu. Written secrets in a secret language.
Like a secret message, brought into the open than decoded into a secret language again.
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