Late in her life, Ban Zhao wrote Nujie, known in English as Lessons for Women, a short treatise addressed to the women of her own family but copied and circulated far beyond it almost immediately. The text laid out a program of female conduct built around humility, deference to husband and in-laws, careful speech and diligent household management, virtues explicitly framed in Confucian terms as the female counterpart to the obligations Confucian ethics placed on men. At the same time, and less often emphasized in later summaries of the work, Ban Zhao argued directly for the education of girls, on the practical grounds that a woman could not be expected to fulfill duties she had never been taught, and that families who educated their sons while leaving their daughters ignorant were acting against their own household's interests.
That combination, a demand for women's education paired with an insistence on female submission within the household, gave Lessons for Women an unusually long institutional afterlife. It was copied into later compendia of instruction for women, cited by teachers and family heads for roughly two thousand years after its composition, and became one of the most consistently reproduced statements of Confucian gender norms in Chinese history, shaping expectations of female behavior long after the specific household circumstances that had prompted Ban Zhao to write it were forgotten. Modern scholars reading the text alongside her own career, as historian, astronomer and court advisor, have noted the tension between the constrained role Lessons for Women prescribes and the far less constrained life its author actually led.