The Woman Radical: How the Chinese Language Defines Women

The Woman Radical: How the Chinese Language Defines Women, presents a completely new way of looking at Chinese language, culture, and history. Most of us recognize the power language has to shape our perceptions of ourselves and the rest of the universe. The core of the book; Encyclopedic Dictionary of Characters; focuses on one-hundred-forty-four words that describe or refer to women. Each of these words has the Woman Radical as the base symbol to which other symbols are added to produce different words. Huang; a renowned artist as well as a scholar; has dissected, analyzed, and explained these one-hundred-forty-four words, as well as represented them in seventy-four pages of her own interpretive calligraphy, to reveal a disturbing pernicious linguistically-based cultural denigration of women. In her re-telling the story of Early China and the evolution of the Chinese language, Huang illuminates and questions some of the most cherished beliefs of traditional Chinese culture. She reasons that when we understand the how s and why s of a culture s denigration of its women, collective and personal wounds can be identified and healed. She posits many cultures employ similar tactics to diminish and control women on every continent. The purpose of The Woman Radical is to aid in the healing of not only Chinese women, but all women.