Built on twenty years of fieldwork in rural Jiangyong of Hunan Province in south China, this book explores the world's only gender-defined and now disappearing "women's script" known as nushu. What drove peasant women to create a script of their own and write, and how do those writings throw new light on how gender is addressed in epistemology and historiography and how the unprivileged social class uses marginalized forms of expression to negotiate with the dominant social structure. Further, how have the politics of salvaging this disappearing centuries-old cultural heritage molded a new...