Women only writing

This fascinates me becasue I am a linguist and particularly enjoy sociolinguistics and orthographic matters. Here's women-only Chinese script, recently discovered, age unknown. And the questions are fascinating, particularly that of how come it's only used by women. I suppose the smart money has to be on smething to do with their lack of access to education, a means of empowerment and solidarity in a feudal society.

It's a pointer to a phenomenon observed elsewhere of the human ability ot take cultural artefacts and re-work them to serve one's own purposes. Once the idea of writing is out there it can be taken up by others if their access to it is restricted and they see in it a means ot their own ends. That's why we need to be careful of assigning single-use meanings to technology and art forms. The consumption and use of such things may be fairly polyvalent depending on time, place and users. It's also why we should ask ourselves regularly what, for example, our Churchy stuff might actually convey to someone who isn't in the know: we all try to make sense of stuff but sometimes we make the wrong connections and our meaning may be other than that intended.

For example what is the meaning conveyed by having the kids leave the main body of the Church part of the way through the service? We know that it's so that they can engage in Christian education appropriate to their age. But is that how it looks and is read? Perhaps it could be interpreted as a comment on the boringness of adult church activity [later leading to 'Please don't make me stay, it must be awful'], or perhaps it could be read as an exercise of power: we do different things now but the adults stay in the priviledged nicely carpetted well decorated places [I know that this doesn't work in all churches] while 'we kids' go off to the draughty hall to do some silly things with paints ...

Anyway I guess you get the picture.