Susan M. Greenhalgh -- BOUND FEET, HOBBLED LIVES: WOMEN IN OLD CHINA
"Women are as different from men as earth is from heaven ...
Women are, indeed, human beings, but they are of a lower state than men …"
Attributed to Confucius (551-478 B.C.)1
The most brutal symbol of the subjugation of Chinese women was the bound
foot, a grotesque mutilation of the foot in which the four lesser toes were broken
and bent under into the sole, and the sale and heel were forced as close
together as possible. The result was great pain and suffering for 60 to 80
percent of the female population.2 Women in the upper class had to be
transported in palanquins or carried on the backs of female servants whose feet
were not compressed. Women in the lower class were forced to hobble about
on short stumps, maintaining their balance with a cane or a rapid fluttering
motion of the arms. Yet the tiny bound foot had many devotees. Poets sang its
praise as the essence of feminine frailty. Lovers were infatuated by a bound
foot peeking out from the coverlet or gently caressed in the palm. Lascivious
men even claimed that binding forced the blood to flow upward, increasing the
development of the buttocks and thighs, and enhancing the voluptuousness of
the vagina.3
According to literary and artistic sources, the custom originated during the fifty
years that elapsed between the T'ang and Sung Dynasties (907-959 A.D.).4
Tradition traces the first bound foot to the court of poet-aesthete Li Yu, Emperor
of the Southern T'ang Dynasty (961-975 A.D.). At this time of wealth and
expansion the courts were graced with thousands of courtesans who danced
and wrote fine poetry. In Li Yu's court the favorite was the exquisite dancer
Yao-niang (Deep-eyed Maiden). For her the emperor built a golden lotus six
feet high, adorned with jewels, pearls, and golden threads. Thereupon he
ordered Yao-niang to bind her feet with strips of white silk, making them small
and graceful and arched like the crescent moon. Then on dainty feet she could
whirl like a rising cloud on the carmine carpel, or dance out on the golden petals,
giving rise to lotuses with every step.
Whether or not Yao-niang was, in fact, the first to bind her feet, "golden lotus"
(chin lien) did become the poetic euphemism for a fashion and an aesthetic ideal
which, as Lin Yutang points out, had actually been evolving since earliest times.5
It had long been fashionable for women to walk slowly with a slight swaying
motion, and during the Chou Dynasty [Zhou] (1122-221 B.C.) both men and
women compressed their feet to moderate degrees.6 But it was only in the late
T'ang and early Sung periods (roughly 750-1100 A.D.) that foot-binding became
a predominantly female custom and spread to women in all segments of society.
Why it spread at that time is unclear, but it may have been related to increased
threats from barbarians at the borders. Under strong pressure to maintain order
and control, the state may have encouraged binding the feet of women within the
borders to induce an atmosphere of social stability.7
Concurrently, developments in communications and transportation provided
effective channels for dispersal. From the court, the custom was picked up by
the urban upper class. Benefiting from an expanding market economy, the
upper class could afford to support crippled women as testimony to its lavishly
wasteful style of life. Gradually the bound foot became a mark of gentility and
spread to the lower class. Since female labor was an economic necessity to
the poor, only those people with some hope of marrying daughters into richer
families bound their feet. The bindings were applied loosely and relatively late,
enabling the girls to perform household chores, work in the fields on their knees,
or take on indoor employment, such as making paper money or doing
needlework. Those families too destitute to have hope of improving their social
standing left their daughters' feet large, and sent them to work in the fields or in
the shops of carpenters and blacksmiths.8
Transmission of the custom followed the pattern of migration from north to
south,9 although the practice was never so widespread in the south where
female labor was utilized far more than in the north.10 As time went by,
foot-binding became more and more pervasive. Receiving official and popular
sanction during the Ming (1368-1644 A.D.), the custom was so popular that the
first ruler of the succeeding Manchu Dynasty [Qing] (1644-1912 A.D.) was forced
to rescind his order banning the practice. Even without Manchu support, the
bound foot reached its greatest prevalence in the nineteenth century; then, with
the introduction of Western ideas and increased opportunities for women, its
popularity waned until, in the early decades of the present century, it was finally
eliminated by law.
The process of shaping the "three-inch golden lotus” -- for that was the idea -usually began at age five or six,11 although the upper class began binding as
early as age three and the peasantry began as late as age twelve or thirteen.
The initial binding was always performed by the mother or grandmother, whose
"maternal feelings of compassion were more than offset by social
Ms. Greenhalgh received her B.A. in psychology from Wellesley College and is in the doctoral program at Columbia University in the field of cultural anthropology, specializing in China.
She has studied Chinese art at Harvard University and has also studied Mandarin Chinese (both modern and classical). This article is to appear in a book tentatively entitled Manstrocities, edited by Diana E.
H. Russell 2 considerations," 12 such as the necessity of finding a husband for the girl. The
account that follows is typical of the stories told of little girls who suffered in the
thousand-year-long foot-binding era.
Born into an old-fashioned family at P'ing-hsi, I was inflicted with the pain of
foot-binding when I was seven years old . . . I wept and hid in a neighbor's
home, but mother found me, scolded me, and dragged me home. She shut
the bedroom door, boiled water, and from a box withdrew binding, shoes, knife,
needle, and thread . . . She washed and placed alum on my feet and cut the
toenails. She then bent my toes toward the plantar with a binding cloth ten feet
long and two inches wide, doing the right foot first and then the left. She
finished binding and ordered me to walk, but when I did the pain proved
unbearable.
That night, mother wouldn't let me remove the shoes. My feet felt on fire and I
couldn't sleep; mother struck me for crying . . . The feet were washed and
rebound after three or four days, with alum added. After several months, all
toes but the big one were pressed against the inner surface . . . Mother would
remove the bindings and wipe the blood and pus which dripped from my feet.
She told me that only with removal of the flesh could my feet become slender. If
I mistakenly punctured a sore, the blood gushed like a stream.
Every two weeks, I changed to new shoes. Each new pair was one-to
two-tenths of an inch smaller than the previous one . . . After changing more
than ten pairs of shoes, my feet were reduced to a little over four inches . . .
Four of the toes were curled in like so many dead caterpillars; no outsider would
ever have believed that they belonged to a human being. It took two years to
achieve the three-inch model ...13
Such gross tampering with the human anatomy was bound to have severe
medical repercussions. It was said that one out of ten girls died from
foot-binding or its after effects. Reports of Western doctors practicing in
China at the turn of the century yield gruesome details: when the bindings
were removed from one little girl in Chungking her feet were found hanging by
the tendons, with gangrene extending above the ankles; another child in
Nanking had an ulcer extending halfway up her knee and would have died
from blood poisoning had her leg not been amputated.14 Although Western
doctors probably saw the most grotesque cases, poorly bound feet must have
resulted in many deaths, especially in the countryside where there was little
knowledge of ways to combat infection.
Although for many the pain of bound feet never disappeared, for those fortunate
enough to have skillful mothers the pain subsided after one or two years. At
that time, care of the feet was assumed by the victim and became part of a
lifelong routine which was carried
out in strictest privacy.15 Once a
week or so the fully bandaged feet
were soaked in a bucket of hot
water. The loosened bandages
were then removed, dead skin and
calluses rubbed or cut off, and the
feet perfumed to hide the noisome
odor of putrescent flesh. The foot
was then kneaded more fully into
the desired shape, pulverized alum
Stages of foot-­‐binding was dusted on to absorb
perspiration, and clean bandages
quickly applied before the blood had time to recirculate. For the pain was least
when the feet were so firmly and so constantly bound that they were deadened
by the pressure of the bandages.16
Over the bandages, those who could afford them wore dainty, embroidered little
shoes with one-to two-inch wooden heels to balance and support the weight of
the body. Special occasions demanded special shoes and one seductive pair
was always reserved for bedtime use. Just above the three-inch slipper the
ankle, grossly swollen and deformed, was concealed by leggings which fastened
above the calf and hung down just far enough to permit the tiny point of the toe to
peek provocatively out from under the skirt.17
Though the bound foot may have had aesthetic merit and erotic appeal, these
factors are hardly sufficient to explain the persistence for one thousand years of
a custom which brutally maimed the female population and kept a sizable portion
of the labor force of a labor-intensive economy from working in the public sphere.
Several explanations have been advanced to account for the persistence of the
practice. One, proposed by Veblen, suggests that, at a certain stage of economic
evolution, conspicuous leisure is a means to enhance good repute.18 The
woman with bound feet is "incapable of useful effort and must therefore be
supported in her idleness by her owner. She is useless and expensive, and she
is consequently valuable as evidence of [the family's] pecuniary strength."
Though such a mutilation is "of unquestioned repulsiveness to the untrained
sense," a connection arises between pecuniary value and aesthetic value, until
our canons of taste are so modified that they hold those customs most
conspicuously wasteful as also most aesthetically pleasing. Though Veblen's
3 patriarchal family, which in turn received official support for over two thousand
years.
Normal foot Bound foot explanation overemphasizes psychological needs and omits social and political
factors, his description of the process is useful and will be referred to again.
The majority of writers have tried to link the persistence of foot-binding to
"inherent forces" in the Chinese social system or to "flaws" in the Chinese
personality. Thus Francis Hsu attributes endurance of the practice to inertia in
the social system, a reflection of the "unwillingness of Chinese to initiate or
become involved in a fight for or against any cause."19 Missionaries and other
Westerners living in China after 1840 were especially prone to "character flaw"
explanations. By portraying a "barbaric" custom like foot-binding in Christian
terms of "abnormal obedience" and "capacity for suffering,"20 the Westerners
assured themselves of ready sympathy and understanding from readers back
home. Unfortunately these "explanations" did little to promote understanding.
Instead, they only delayed the formulation of a more credible hypothesis which
tied foot-binding to the dominant institutions of Chinese society.
This approach would start with an examination of the core social, political, moral,
and economic institution of Chinese society: the patriarchal family. The
Chinese family was both the root and microcosm of a highly centralized and
stratified political system. "The root of the empire is in the state," Mencius said.
"The root of the state is in the family."21 If an individual is taught to respect
authority in the family he or she will also respect authority outside the family and
be an obedient subject of the empire. To strengthen authority in the family was
to lessen the likelihood of disorder and rebellion in the empire. Thus the world's
largest enduring state was built and maintained on the foundation of the
Just as Chinese society was hierarchically ordered to assure firm lines of control,
within the Chinese family there was sharp stratification of status and distribution
of function by age and sex. The ruling principles of domination were parents
over children and males over females. Parental authority was asserted from
the moment a child entered the world. According to tradition, a child's body
belonged to its parents; thus, parents could beat or dispose of their children as
they pleased without risk of community opprobrium. Because little girls were
economic liabilities, they were often drowned in infancy, sold into slavery or
prostitution, or given away as "little daughters-in-law' (t'ung-yang-hsi) to be
raised in the family of their future husband. Children who survived had a moral
and legal obligation to repay parental care by observing filial piety (hsiao [xiao]).
Ideally, filial piety meant absolute obedience and devotion to parents. It
entailed providing for them in their old age and remembering the spirits of
generations past by regularly observing ancestor worship. Marriage was a
sacred duty contracted not to satisfy the desires of two individuals, but to assure
continuity of the patrilineal line. Marriage was arranged by the son's parents
with the aim of obtaining a daughter-in-law to perform domestic chores and to
produce a growing family with earning power to provide security for their old
age.22 Children had no say in the choice of a partner and, once married, were
pressured to remain in the joint family,23 where the senior male parent controlled
all family resources and the senior female parent controlled all domestic affairs.
The written symbol for hsiao leaves no doubt about who had authority in the
Chinese family: it consists of the graph for "old" supported by the graph for "son"
(or more loosely, "child") underneath.
The dominance of males over females is, of course, the bedrock of the
patriarchal family system. In China the family was not only patriarchal, but also
patrilineal, patrilocal, and patronymic. Within such a family the birth of a little
girl was almost always an occasion for disappointment. Unlike a son, a
daughter could make no substantial contribution to the family economy. Nor
could she offer ancestral sacrifices or glorify the family by official appointment or
literary attainment. And, since the little girl was only a temporary member of
her natal family, everything spent on her upbringing and education was
irrecoverable. Though there was no lack of affection for a daughter, the
parents' aim was simply to raise her as cheaply as possible with the end of
securing the most advantageous marriage for both the daughter and
themselves.
4 To assure her marriageability it was thought best to bring her up in strict
accordance with the rules governing correct female behavior. Written in the
second century A.D., the Precepts for Women (Nu Chieh) codified the principle
of male dominance in the Three Obediences (San Ts'ung) and Four Virtues (Ssu
Te). According to the former, before a woman is married she must obey her
father; when married she must live for her husband; and as a widow she must
serve her sons. As one Chinese male put it, "the chief end of a woman in China
is to live as a good daughter, a good wife and a good mother . .. 24 (for) a true
Chinese woman has no self" (the emphases are his). The Four Virtues that
had to be learned were:
Woman's Behavior: chaste and yielding, calm and upright
Woman's Speech: not talkative, yet agreeable
Woman's Carriage and Appearance: restrained and exquisite
Woman's Occupation: handiwork, embroidery.25
Although these canons represented cultural ideals, women had no choice but to
follow them, for there were no socially acceptable alternatives to marriage and
submission to the family system.
Ideally, the Confucian patterns of authority -- male over female, old over young -should have maintained the stability of the patriarchal family. In practice,
though, these rigid norms could not be enforced with complete efficiency. The
greatest threat to the family system came from the women because they married
in from an outside family. Women marrying into the patriarchal family could
disrupt its stability by offering dissenting opinions about the allocation of labor
and goods within the family, or by simply refusing to accept patterns of authority
and interaction already established, and returning to their natal homes.
With the introduction of foot-binding, the patriarchal family had a superb device
for physically preventing the women from disrupting its stability. Indeed,
foot-binding did not simply keep women from threatening the family system; it
also strengthened and perpetuated the system itself.
As a mechanism for consolidating and perpetuating the kinship system,
foot-binding functioned differently in the premarital and post-marital phases of a
female's life. As noted above, before marriage the little girl held only temporary
membership in her natal family. Since her labor would eventually be lost to her
husband's family, her parents' aim was not to train her to be clever or productive,
but to rear her for making the best marriage match possible.26 From the
standpoint of the girl's family the optimal match was with a family moving up the
ladder of status and success.
For parents the advantages of marrying a daughter into a family of higher status
were probably more political than economic. The most immediate source of
economic gain was the gift of money sent to the bride's family from the groom's
parents. Other potential sources of profit, such as loans or business deals with
the son-in-law's family, were less immediate and hinged on a multitude of
unforeseeable factors. Political benefits, however, were more persuasive. For
having relatives in office or even making contacts with influential people was the
best way to gain immunity from political exploitation.27 In addition to political
gains for the family there were advantages for the daughter, for the higher she
married, the less degrading manual labor she would have to perform.
If marriage up the social ladder were most desirable, how could parents
improve their daughter's chances for making such a match? At least since
mid-Yuan times (ca. 1300 A.D.) one essential step in grooming a daughter for
marriage into the gentry was binding her feet. For in China, as elsewhere, to
gain a secure position at high levels of society it was necessary to emulate and
visibly display the lifestyle and ideals of the higher class. The higher stratum
of Chinese society lived by an ideal of conspicuous leisure, whereby members
of the gentry competed for prestige by exhausting their wealth in sumptuous
feasts and extravagant displays at weddings and other events.28 Hiring
servants to do the housework, they had the feet of their own women bound,
making them useless and expensive to maintain, and thus, as Veblen put it,
valuable evidence of pecuniary strength. The sooner, the tighter, and the
tinier the feet were bound, the more conspicuously wasteful the family proved
itself to be. Though it necessitated crippling much of the population, this norm
was vigorously accepted by the gentry and emulated wherever possible by the
peasantry.29
As it filtered down through the masses of the peasantry, the norm of the bound
foot lost its elite associations, and in many parts of China the practice became
an essential criterion for any girl's marriageability. Tiny feet were more
important than a pretty face, for the former gave evidence of social standing
while the latter was merely gratuitous, or as the Chinese would say,
heaven-sent.30 Peasant daughters who could not afford to have their labor
power impaired for life often swathed their feet just prior to marriage and
unbound them soon after (much to the dismay of unsuspecting husbands!).
The pervasiveness of the belief that foot-binding was essential not only for
marrying into "more respectable and literary families," 31 but for concluding any
marriage is evident from the testimony of elderly Taiwanese women
interviewed by Levy in 1960-1961:
5 "How did your mother feel when she first began binding your
feet?"
"She surely felt bad, but with unbound feet a girl would not easily
find a husband ..."
"My cousin told me that no one wanted to marry a woman with
big feet."32
After marriage, foot-binding continued to serve the family system by preventing
the new bride from becoming a disruptive factor. Unable to wander far, the
young wife was confined to the house where she was under the strict
surveillance of her mother-in-law. Disciplined to submit to the authority of her
new family, she was constantly reminded that she could be replaced by a
second wife or a concubine if she failed to produce a son or to execute her
household duties. With no economic independence, except perhaps a small
cache of "private money" brought along at marriage,33 the daughter-in-law had
little leverage to influence decisions that directly affected her life.34 Though at
marriage she probably moved into a compound with her husband's parents, his
unmarried siblings, and his married brothers with their families, at some point in
the family's development it was likely that the balance of forces would favor
division of the family property and separation into conjugal households. Such
division was naturally opposed by the parents, who ruled the large household
and were assured comfortable means of support by their control over family
property and purse. At “division," a collective arrangement for the parents'
support was usually worked out, but their new status of “collective dependents,"
deprived of family membership, was one they wanted to delay as long as
possible.
Although it was in the parents' interest to delay family division, it was in the
daughter-in-Iaw's interest to hasten the process, for only when free from the
mother-in-Iaw's authority could she gain control over her domestic concerns. In
this conflict of interests, foot-binding again supported the family system with its
elevation of age over youth and male over female. For bound feet kept the
daughter-in-law from raising her status by restricting her to unpaid domestic
labor. And they prevented her from rebelling against the system by physically
secluding her in the home under the rule of the representative of family authority,
the mother-in-law. Though the mother-in-law, too, was confined by bound feet,
she at least had the power of control over the whole family’s domestic affairs.
Once foot-binding was established, then, its perpetuation became bound up with
that of the family system in a vicious, self-repetitive cycle: the family system
demanded footbound wives to do its domestic and reproductive tasks; and
footbound wives, physically constrained from doing otherwise, reinforced the
power structures which strengthened the system.
Given this self-perpetuating cycle, it is not surprising that pressure for eliminating
the custom did not come from within; rather, it came only as part of a larger
movement for family reform which followed the intrusion of Western imperialism
in the nineteenth century. Although liberal thinkers had long condemned the
custom in fiction and poetry, it was not until the 1890's that champions of
women's rights made significant headway. Led by Western missionaries and
urban, upper-class Chinese, they organized natural-foot societies and distributed
pamphlets with strongly worded propaganda:
The present is no time of peace. Foreign women have natural feet; they
are daring, and can defend themselves; whilst Chinese women have
bound feet, and are too weak even to bear the weight of their own clothes .
..
Moreover, the laws of the empire ordain the punishment of the wicked by
cutting in pieces, beheading, and strangling; but there is nothing about
binding of the feet: the laws are too merciful for that.36
These efforts at foot reform coincided with changes in the environment which
provided more opportunities for women outside the home. Industrialization was
slowly creating a market for female labor, while improved transportation facilities
were carrying young people of both sexes to jobs far away from the mental and
physical confines of the family compound. By drawing girls out of the home,
missionary schools too became excellent channels for transmitting new ideas of
female liberation.37 With increasing opportunities for employment and
education, footbound women were impeded from participating in modern life.
Those most cognizant of this -- women of the urban intellectual and treaty-port
elites –w ere also the most able to take advantage of the new opportunities, and
became the first to abandon the custom.
At the same time that the environment was providing new extra-familial roles for
women, ideological props to the old family system were beginning to crumble.
Competitive capitalism fostered notions of individualism and personal
development which were not in accord with subordination of the individual to the
family. Furthermore, progressive weakening of imperial power during the
nineteenth century led to diminished faith in the Confucian orthodoxy of family
authority. Finally, the strong sense of public humiliation at the incursions of the
West into the Middle Kingdom hastened the drive for national liberation and entry
6 into the modern world. The need to save the national face was a strong
incentive to give up a custom which not only hindered modernization by keeping
women out of the labor force, but also brought ridicule from the Westerners
themselves.
As the movement for foot and female liberation accelerated, it was joined by
powerful and influential statesmen in the early twentieth century. After the
overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1912, the new leaders were determined to
wipe out the practice and issued a series of stringent anti-foot-binding decrees.
With decades of propaganda work behind them, they had remarkable success
persuading mothers not to bind the feet of their little girls. In Tinghsien, for
example, a 1929 survey showed that 95.1 percent of the girls born after 1910
had unbound feet, compared to only 2.3 percent of those born before 1900.38
However, success in convincing women who had been bound in childhood to
unbind was much slower. Because unbinding was so painful, the bleeding so
profuse, and the likelihood of regaining natural foot shape so slim, many women
chose to evade the law rather than suffer again. Indeed, travelers in the
Chinese countryside as late as the 1940's and 1950's reported seeing bound
feet among middle-aged and elderly women. 39
Since the communist regime has not attempted to coerce women into unbinding,
traces of the custom will linger on until the older generation of women passes
away. Yet -- it must be hastily added -- even the demise of this monstrous
practice will not guarantee women in China freedom from the patriarchal family
system, which has persisted to the present day.40 What it will do -- and already
has done for the younger generation -- is to free their bodies to take advantage
of the new opportunities for participation in public work and politics opening up
under the current regime.41 For Chinese women this is, without doubt, a giant
step forward.
Source. Greenhalgh, Susan. “Bound Feet. Hobbled Lives: Women in Old China”.
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. Vol. 2. No.1 (Spring. 1977). pp. 7-21
Published by: University of Nebraska
Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3346103
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NOTES
I would like to thank Myron Cohen, Norma Diamond, Cy Greenhalgh, Steve
Harrell, Laurie Kendall, and Marsha Wagner for their valuable comments and
criticisms of this paper.
11
James W. Bashford, China: An Interpretation (New York: Abingdon Press, 1916), p.
128.
This estimate is probably conservative. It is based on four sources: figures collected
for Tinghsien in the north which showed that 99.2 percent of the 492 women born
before 1890 had bound feet. -- Sidney D. Gamble, "The Disappearance of
Foot-binding in Tinghsien," The American Journal of Sociology, 49, No.2 (1943),
182; an estimate that nine-tenths of the women in China practiced the custom -Adele M. Fielde, Pagoda Shadows (Boston: W. G. Corthel, 1890), p. 45; a judgment
that 90 percent of the women in Fuchow city and 30 to 40 percent in the Fuchow
suburbs bound their feet -- Justus Doolittle, Social Life of the Chinese (1865; rpt.
Taipei: Ch'ung-wen Publ. Co., 1966), II, 201); and estimates of 70 to 80 percent for
the most fashionable parts of the country and 40 to 50 percent elsewhere -- The
Chinese Repository, 3, No. 12 (April 1835), 538.
This nonsense was rebutted by medical scientists who found the calf and foot
greatly atrophied due to lack of exercise, but discovered no evidence for any
physiological effect on the vagina. See the "Report of Peking Hospital 1868" in E.
T.C. Werner and Henry R. Tedder, ed., Descriptive Sociology of the Chinese
(London: Williams and Norgate, 1910), p. 143.
Howard S. Levy, Chinese Foot-binding (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966), pp. 37-39;
R. H. van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1961), p. 216.
Levy's book is the most comprehensive work on the custom in English. It is a
valuable source of information, illustrations, and provocative ideas.
Lin Yutang, My Country and My People (New York: John Day Co., 1935), p. 166.
L. C. Arlington, "Further Notes on Foot-binding," New China Review (1920), pp.
211-14.
See Raymond Dawson, Imperial China (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1972), pp.
97-179; Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford Univ.
Press, 1973), pp. 131-45.
John L. Buck, Land Utilization in China (1937; rpt. New York: Council on
Economic and Cultural Affairs, 1956), p. 292; Doolittle, p. 61; Werner and
Tedder, p. 6,
See Fig. 2 in Elvin, p. 204.
Olga Lang, Chinese Family and Society (1946; rpt. New York: Archon, 1968), p. 53.
Although the geographical distribution and ethnic differences in acceptance of the
custom suggest some intriguing puzzles (see Levy, pp. 47, 52-55), I leave them to
other students of Chinese history to piece together. Here I simply treat the custom
as a Han Chinese phenomenon occurring within China proper.
The age of foot-binding coincided with the "age of reason" for the son (ca. six
years), when the father suddenly became a stern authority figure and the son was
expected to be obedient and responsible. This coincidence lends tentative support
to my hypothesis, elaborated below, that foot-binding was above all a means for
preparing the little girl for marriage and adult life in her future husband's family.
Foot-binding was certainly consonant with other socializing techniques, which
were based on the belief that physical punishment was necessary to motivate
learning. See Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 1972), esp. pp. 68-79.
12 Levy, p. 249.
13 Ibid., pp. 26-28.
14 Mrs . Archibald Little, The Chinese As I Have Seen Them (London:
Hutchinson & Co., 1899), pp. 140, 142-43.
15 It was considered strictly taboo to remove the bandages in public, even at death.
Instances of suicide were reported when men accidentally happened to see a bare
foot. Helen Foster Snow, Women in Modern China (The Hague: Mouton & Co.,
1967), p. 223. The consequences of breaking the taboo were not always so grim,
though, as the delightful story told by Ning Lao T'ai-t'ai shows. See Ida Pruitt, A
Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman (1945; rpt.
Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 79-80.
16 Fielde, p. 41.
17 Various styles of shoes and leggings are illustrated in Levy, passim., and R. H. van
Gulik, p. 221.
18 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Bennett A.
Cerf, 1934), esp. pp. 148-50, 166.
19 Francis L. K. Hsu, Americans and Chinese (London: Cresset Press, 1955), p. 360.
20 Florence Ayscough, Chinese Women Yesterday and Today (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co 1937), Arthur H. Smith Village Life in China, (1899; rpt. Boston: Little, Brown &
Co., 1970) p.198 , pp. Xl, Xli. and Chinese Characteristics (1894,rpt . Port
Washlngton, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970).
21 Mencius, Book 4, Chapter 5. James Legge, trans" The Works of Mencius,” in The
Four Books (New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1966), p. 698.
22 C. K. Yang, A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition (Cambridge: M.I.T.
Press, 1959), p. 83.
23 The Joint family was the most complex stage of the developmental process of the
Chinese family. As defined by Lang, whose work is a standard source on family
structure, the joint family consisted of "parents, their unmarried children, their
married sons (more than one) and sons' wives and children." Less developed
stages were the stem family, i.e., "parents, their unmarried children, and one
married son with wife and children" and the conjugal family:-which consisted of
"man, wife or wives, and children." Lang, p. 14.
24 Ku Hing-ming, The Spirit of the Chinese People (Peking: Commercial Press, 1922), p.
7 25
26
27
76.
Ayscough, p. 286.
This probably does not apply to the poorest classes. Since their only hope was to
find husbands for their daughters in the same class, they had no choice but to
leave their girls' feet in the natural state and train them to be hard and efficient
workers.
According to Fei, "The mechanism of bringing influence to bear from the
bottom upward was worked through the informal pressure of the gentry
upon their relatives in office or out , the more fearful the ruler and the more
tiger-like, the more valuable is the gentry's protective covering. In such
circumstances it is difficult to survive except by attaching one's self to
some big families." (emphases mine) Fei Hsiao-tung, China's Gentry:
Essays in Rural-Urban Relations (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953),
pp. 32, 84. This is corroborated by Fairbank: "In Chinese circumstances,
advancement for the common man has lain in the direction of connections
with the bureaucracy." John King Fairbank, "The Nature of Chinese
Society," in Imperial China, ed. Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (New
York: Random House, 1967), p. 48.