Girls whose feet were bound would never again be able to walk fluidly, severely limiting their ability to move through the world. Many cultural accounts of foot-binding have been written, especially from a feminist perspective , and many academic studies mention the process. Cummings went to Beijing in to study why older Chinese women had 80 percent fewer hip fractures than American women of the same age range. They invited more than women to a lab at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where participants performed a series of regular motions e.
During those travels, he had never once seen a woman with her feet in the same condition as those of the second study participant. Read: The peculiar history of foot-binding in China. Soon after, another woman came in with a crutch and an odd kind of shoe. Then more women with bound feet started coming in. The women he met spent much of their life in or very close to their home, their disability preventing them from venturing farther out.
Probably one of the most detrimental practices was one that women in China performed for nearly one thousand years. Footbinding, a long and painful process, produced tiny feet in women. Modern people may find it hard to understand, but the reasons for footbinding went deeper than fashion and reflected the role of women in Chinese society and Confucian moral values for women of domesticity, motherhood, and handwork.
It was necessary for a woman to have bound feet in order to marry well and achieve a good and moral life. The first definite evidence of footbinding dates from the Song dynasty — from the tomb of Lady Huang, the wife of an Imperial clansmen. It may also have developed from popular dances that came to China during the Tang dynasty — from western regions along the Silk Road.
Richly embroidered slippers also came to China at this time. The lotus, the sacred flower associated with Buddhism, became associated with the small shoes. At a time when most Chinese people existed only a few rice bowls away from starvation, being able to keep economically unproductive women whose only practical functions — due to crippled feet — were decorative, sexual and reproductive, was a powerful status marker.
I can easily afford to feed all these useless mouths! Chinese women — as ever — colluded in this patriarchal oppression, often for the most well-intended reasons. Aspirational mothers of pretty girls from poor families bound their daughters' feet in the hope of attracting a wealthy match, who could extract their offspring from the desperate poverty that had blighted their own horizons.
A complicated, time-consuming process, the bandages usually stayed on for days or even weeks at a time. When they were eventually undone, the nasty state of the bandages, and the grossly deformed, suppurating feet they covered, can only be imagined — especially in hot weather. Strident opposition on the part of 19th-century Christian missionaries gradually effected social change and the practice was eventually outlawed.
Nevertheless, decades elapsed between official abolition and the actual end of foot binding. When my mother bound my feet I didn't cry. But at night when I lay in bed I cried. The feet were bleeding and infected for one year. I washed it with water. After a year the pain went away and I could walk again. Last living women in China with bound feet — Yang went on to have two children and five grandchildren.
But they come from a generation where it is difficult for them to see themselves as individuals. They don't see their story as important -- they don't matter, they are forgotten women," says Farrell. Last living women in China with bound feet — Feet binding started in the Song dynasty and fell out of fashion in the early 20th century when it was banned by the government. We all do something to make ourselves more attractive or to help us feel better.
Today, we see surgical toe tucks to beautify the foot, rib removal to make the waist smaller," says Farrell. Girls began hand spinning yarn as young as 6 or 7 -- roughly the same ages as when their feet were bound. The women they spoke to made the connection between the two:. At around age 10, I started to spin cotton. Each time she bound my feet, it hurt until I cried," one woman who was born in told the researchers. Foot-binding dates to the Song dynasty and spread from court circles to wealthy elites and eventually from the city to the countryside.
By the 19th century, it was commonplace across China. It began to decline in the early years of the 20th century, with its demise usually attributed to ideological campaigns led by missionaries and reformers, and subsequent moves by the Nationalist government followed by the Communists to ban the practice.
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