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Hong, Fan. Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom: The Liberation of Women’s Bodies in Modern China. London: Frank Cass, 1997. Pp. xiv, 342. Notes, illustrations, notes on translation, appendices, selected bibliography, index. $49.50 cb.
“Great families favoured footbinding, lesser families followed in imitation. For women,
the bound foot was the passport to all that was good in life” (48). The validity of that
passport lasted for about a millennium, until the arrival of Christianity in China through
Western invasions. In Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom: the Liberation of Women’s Bodies
in Modern China, Fan Hong, a lecturer in sociology and social history of sport at DeMontfort
University in England, seeks to explore the relationship between the evolution of women’s
exercise and female physical liberation in the social, cultural, and political contexts of
modern China. The study covers a period of more than 100 years, from the first “opening”
of China through the Opium War in 1840 to the Communist seizure of power in 1949.
The significance of the study, as the author argues, lies in its recognition of physical emancipation as “the prerequisite of further emancipation.” According to Hong, “To recognize
this fact is to fill a large and hitherto missing piece in the cultural jigsaw that comprises a
picture of women and their struggle for freedom in modern China” (12).
Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom examines Chinese women’s emancipation in three
areas of social existence: religion, culture, and politics. The books central theme is clear.
The Western invasions beginning in 1840 brought fundamental changes to China. For
every Chinese woman, the author maintains, the year 1840 was the turning point between
“a life of dependence systematized and sanctioned by society” and one that gradually gained
freedom (289). Although the peasant women rebels of the Taiping Rebellion formed the
first organized group that challenged the traditional role of women in Confucian China
and represented a new femininity “with unbound feet, robust physiques, militant attitudes and proven courage” (289), it was unmistakably a Western religion that significantly
transformed Chinese women’s bodies. “Christianity brought to Chinese women the normality of unmutilated limbs—the basic requirement of physical emancipation” (6).
Along with Christianity there came the influence of Western culture. Christian missionaries brought modern Western exercise to a nation that greatly needed competitive
exercise and sport, for the traditional “non-competitive nature of Chinese exercise had
helped to make China incapable of facing up to, and successfully adapting to new trends
and new forces in the world” (7). Modern Western exercise apparently contributed to the
cultural change in China and provided the Chinese, particularly women, with a new
means to obtain a healthier body. Yet to conclude that Western exercise brought China
revitalizing energy because of its competitiveness is off the mark. When the conservative
Chinese patriots tried to reject Western exercise (along with Western culture in general), it
was not competitiveness they wanted to reject, but anything Western. After all, the Christian missionaries initially brought mainly non-competitive exercises to China, such as
gymnastics. It was the health-oriented exercise, not competitive sports, that set Chinese
women on the path to their physical liberation.
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BOOK REVIEWS
The most substantially researched and informative section of the book is Hong’s analysis
of Chinese women’s physical liberation as the byproduct of both the nationalist and communist ideologies in chapters five through seven: “Iron Women of the Jiangxi Soviet,”
“Freedom Without Feminism: Yan’an Women,” and “One Step Backward and One Step
Forward: Emancipation and Exercise in the Nationalist Area.” It is intriguing, but not
surprising, that Chinese women’s physical emancipation benefited from both the Nationalist and Communist political agendas. From banning footbinding to promoting exercise
and sport competition, neither the Communists nor the Nationalists cared much about
women’s rights; they cared only for their own military and economic survival. To the
Communists, physically liberated and trained women meant strong soldiers and workers
rather than citizens who deserved equal rights that were afforded to men. “The Communist Women’s Movement in China was never to be an independent manifestation but part
and parcel of the peasant and worker revolutionary liberation movement” (293). Interestingly, when most American college women were engaged in “Play Days” under the anticompetition slogan “Every sport for a girl and every girl in a sport,” women who lived in
the Communist area of China took part in vigorous exercise and competitive sports under
the motto “Everybody is to do exercise.” The former, based on a unique feminist ideology,
aimed at protecting women from men’s control and potential exploitation; the latter sought
“equality” between men and women without feminism.
Women’s physical liberation in the Nationalist controlled area was a different story
but resulted from similar political motives. As early as 1929, the Nationalist government
passed the first sports law in Chinese history that both promoted women’s participation in
exercise and sport and guaranteed equal opportunities for women. The legal protection,
however, did not come from the advancement of feminism. The Nationalist Party encouraged women’s participation in exercise so that they could better fulfill their domestic and
public duties and, more importantly, as strong mothers, produce strong soldiers. In Hong’s
well-taken words, “Paradoxically, women’s exercise, [sic] partially denied women’s traditional image and partially confirmed their traditional responsibilities” (296).
Chinese women’s physical emancipation made tremendous progress in both the Communist- and Nationalist-controlled areas, as a byproduct of the parties’ political agendas
rather than the result of women’s rights movement. If anything, the women’s movement in
China seemed to be moving backward between the 1920s and the 1940s compared to its
heyday during the May Fourth era. Readers searching for answers to the connection between feminism and Chinese women’s physical liberation will be dissatisfied with the
absence of such a connection in the book, specifically the absence of any mention of
independent feminist movement that contributed to the liberation.
Hong must be commended for her excellent job of chronicling Chinese women’s
physical emancipation and placing it in historical context. In fact, the study is an extensive
review of modern Chinese history in general. This book of more than three hundred pages
seems short considering all the work that may have been put into its final production. As
the author acknowledges, the one hundred-work selected bibliography “represents merely
a fraction of the English sources considered.” Since the work is mainly based on primary
and secondary sources in the Chinese language, which needed to be translated into English (a much more difficult task than, for example, from German to English), one can
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hardly underestimate the tedious and demanding labor involved. The hard work is also
evident in the more than eleven hundred footnotes, many of which are lengthy paragraphs with enough details to satisfy the most critical eyes.
Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom also has some problems. Hong maintains that
Western culture viewed exercise as part of education “from the time of the Renaissance
onwards” (7), whereas it is common knowledge that such a view toward exercise had been
in existence since ancient Greece. In assessing the influence of Western exercise in China
during the period of 1860-1894, Hong claims that the Qing government paid little attention to exercises such as basketball, baseball, volleyball, tennis, and track and field. This
assertion makes little sense, since volleyball was only invented in 1895, and baseball was
not brought to China until 1907 (35). Basketball, though already invented by James
Naismith in 1891, was unlikely a popular sport in China by 1894 because the first report
of a basketball game in China occurred in 1896 (35). The earliest track and field meeting
in China took place in 1904 (36). Finally, Hong seems to contradict herself on the issue of
footbinding. While acknowledging the historical fact that the bound foot was “a girl’s
pride,” “the passport to all that was good in life,” and that “mothers” perpetuated the
thousand-year old custom (25), Hong apparently prefers to draw her conclusion from a
pre-conceptualized theory that men created submissive women and used footbinding as
“the ultimate tool to deny women the physical expression of freedom’ and that footbinding
was “the pre-eminent symbol of sexual oppression” (196). One only wonders how the
Chinese women took such an inhumane and humiliating practice as a pride for more than
a thousand years. A better explanation to this puzzle may be found in a less academically
oriented history of the Chinese custom. In Splendid Slippers: A Thousand Years of An Erotic
Tradition (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1997), author Beverley Jackson demonstrates
that the bound foot was considered beautiful, fashionable, and erotic, thus “a girl’s pride.”
She makes a reserved but clear statement: “I am not able to tell you that Confucian
philosophy and male domination are responsible for one thousand years of Chinese women
binding their feet. After all, it was not men who performed the actual binding and perpetuated the custom. It was mothers and grandmothers who did this” (3).
These criticisms aside, Footbinding, Feminism and Freedom is a unique contribution
to the growing literature on women’s struggle for equality in sport as well as in society. It is
a fine book and should be on the reading list of scholars interested in women’s sport and
emancipation.
—YING WU
Millersville University
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