Biographies of Exemplary Women (Lie Nv Zhuan, 列女传)is a book introducing the conduct of ancient Chinese females. The author is Liu Xiang, a Confucian scholar in the Western Han Dynasty. At that time, the relatives of the emperor on his wife's side or favored concubines' sides held great power; they were generally responsible for the political turbulence. Liu Xiang deemed that political preaching should start from the people close to the emperor. So he wrote the book to admonish the emperor, the concubines and their relatives.

Liu Xiang took the examples of wise and virtuous women who helped the country or the family rise to prosperity as well as the examples of those women who received much favor yet caused the fall of a dynasty or a family recorded in the Book of Songs and the Book of History, compiling those stories into a book - Biographies of Exemplary Women. The book is divided into seven volumes, telling the stories of 105 women in total. The seven volumes include: the Biographies of Mothers, the Biographies of the Virtuous, the Biographies of the Wise, the Biographies of the Chaste, the Biographies of the Righteous, the Biographies of the Eloquent, and the Biographies of the Evil.

Biographies of Exemplary Women has exerted great influence on the later generations. Some stories from the book have been handed down until now, such as Mencius' Mother Moved House Three Times. Later, the historical books tended to have articles specially recording the exemplary events of women in all dynasties.