Below we looked at fashion and Chinese girls' obsession with pink. How harmless it seems, compared to the earlier fashion of foot binding.
Xiong Xiufeng, 90 ...tells her own story. Her father died young, leaving eight children. When she was 5, her mother began binding her feet. At night, the pain was so intense that she couldn't sleep, but when she tried to remove the binding cloth, her mother beat her with a stick and warned her that she would never get married.
The Wall Street Journal offered this piece on how the last generation of women with bound feet is finally dying out. It was considered an attractive quality for over a thousand years in all social classes. While every child suffered agonies over the breaking and binding of the foot, the peasant woman suffered throughout life with their inability to move easily and to keep up with the necessary chores. Can you imagine chasing toddlers on little stubs of crushed bone?
Why a half-crippled woman was considered a catch to prospective rural husbands is a point of dispute among experts. One theory is that foot-binding among commoners was motivated by dreams of marrying up. But Melissa Brown, an assistant professor of anthropology at Stanford University, says her surveys of bound-foot women found that only a small proportion married someone of a higher class. About half married into the same class and some ended up in a poorer household. She's among the scholars who contend that -- strange as it sounds -- rural foot-binding was driven by economics. It forced girls and women to work at home, spinning yarn, processing tea and shucking oysters.
"How do you get a naturally healthy 6-year-old to sit for hours? You break her feet," Prof. Brown says. For Chinese mothers seeking fertile, hard-working girls for their sons to marry, bound feet meant obedience and restraint.
The economic logic for binding started to unravel when machine-made cotton yarn became widely available in the early 20th century, coinciding with a bust in tea prices. At the same time, abolitionist movements began in prosperous coastal regions, initially led by foreign missionaries. At public rallies, women were urged to burn their foot-binding cloths. Activists composed "letting-feet-out" songs.
While it may or may not have been erotic to men (scholars disagree on the evidence) it was something that women did to their own daughters, as the opening quote reminds us. Similarly, it is women who hold down their own daughters to mutilate their genitalia in some cultures, and women who are the most catty about the sartorial details of others.
John Vollmer, a New York-based expert on Asian costumes ... points out that the Westerners appalled by foot-binding a century ago included women who wore rib-crushing whale-bone corsets to effect an hourglass figure. "What we think of as sexy parts of the body, like cinched waists or feet in stiletto heels, are not without health consequences," he says.
Well, women follow all sorts of trends that aren't healthy, from diet to cosmetic surgery, from ingesting hormones to allowing themselves to be used as sex objects by others. Still, foot-binding causes us to stop and wonder about our good sense, and if it gives us pause about other choices then that's a good thing.
[Btw, we touched on this topic once before here.]
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