Word Weavers: The Heroines of Jiangyong

Womanica

Wonder Media Network and iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Education, History

4.3 • 920 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Heroines of Jiangyong were women in rural China who made a secret language – Nüshu – to communicate with each other. Nüshu translates directly to “women’s writing” and is a series of phonetic scripts. The practice is estimated to go back as far as the Shang Dynasty 1600 to 1046 BCE. For centuries it was the language of female defiance to the Chinese patriarchy, legitimizing the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of rural women who had been denied access to an education.

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1:14.4	Hello.
1:15.6	From Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Wamanica.
1:19.7	This month we're talking about word beavers, people who coined terms, popularized words,
1:24.6	and even created entirely new languages.
1:28.1	These activists, writers, artists, and scholars
1:30.7	used language to shape ideas and give voice to experiences that once had no name.
1:41.8	Imagine, you're standing on a cliff above Zhangyang in southern China's Hunan province.
	...

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