But despite the efforts of reformists, foot binding persisted well into the 20th century. In the January issue of The Atlantic , Pearl Buck whose book The Good Earth is one of the most influential ever written about China described meeting a young woman who had recently decided to unbind her feet in accordance with the latest fashion:.
Yesterday she came in a delicate blue satin of a more fashionable cut than I had ever seen; her feet were unbound and in little clumping, square, black-leather foreign shoes. She was evidently very proud of them; they looked like shoes for a very rough little American boy, and had steel taps on the heels.
They stuck out most oddly from her exquisite brocaded skirt. After we had exchanged polite remarks, and had taken our first sip of tea, she was so evidently conscious of her feet that I could not but comment on her unusual footgear.
My feet are still too small, but I stuff cotton in the toes. What exactly are bound feet, and why did they become such an enduring part of the Chinese world? Below is an edited transcript of our conversation:. When—and why—did the practice of foot binding begin? The first recorded binding occurred in the Five Dynasties and Ten States period in the 10th century.
According to the story, an emperor had a favorite concubine, a dancer who built a gilded stage in the shape of a lotus flower. When she bound her feet into a hoof-like shape and danced on the lotus, the practice became very fashionable; after all, she was the emperor's favorite concubine and the other concubines attempted to imitate her in order to gain the emperor's favor.
So foot binding started with the royal court and then spread throughout China, beginning in the south of the country and soon reaching the north. In the 12th century, foot binding had become much more widespread, and by the early Qing Dynasty in the midth century , every girl who wished to marry had her feet bound.
The only people who didn't bind their feet were the very poor, ethnic Hakka people, and women who worked in fishing because they had needed to have normal feet in order to balance themselves on boats. Shangguan is considered by some scholars to be one of the forebears of the High Tang, a golden age in Chinese poetry. Li lived during one of the more chaotic times of the Song era, when the country was divided into northern China under the Jin dynasty and southern China under the Song.
Her husband was a mid-ranking official in the Song government. They shared an intense passion for art and poetry and were avid collectors of ancient texts. Li was in her 40s when her husband died, consigning her to an increasingly fraught and penurious widowhood that lasted for another two decades. At one point she made a disastrous marriage to a man whom she divorced after a few months. An exponent of ci poetry—lyric verse written to popular tunes, Li poured out her feelings about her husband, her widowhood and her subsequent unhappiness.
But her earlier works are full of joie de vivre and erotic desire. Like this one attributed to her:. I finish tuning the pipes face the floral mirror thinly dressed crimson silken shift translucent over icelike flesh lustrous in snowpale cream glistening scented oils and laugh to my sweet friend tonight you are within my silken curtains your pillow, your mat will grow cold.
Literary critics in later dynasties struggled to reconcile the woman with the poetry, finding her remarriage and subsequent divorce an affront to Neo-Confucian morals. Ironically, between Li and her near-contemporary Liang Hongyu, the former was regarded as the more transgressive.
Liang was an ex-courtesan who had followed her soldier-husband from camp to camp. Already beyond the pale of respectability, she was not subjected to the usual censure reserved for women who stepped beyond the nei —the female sphere of domestic skills and household management—to enter the wei , the so-called male realm of literary learning and public service.
Liang grew up at a military base commanded by her father. Her education included military drills and learning the martial arts.
In , she met her husband, a junior officer named Han Shizhong. With her assistance he rose to become a general, and together they formed a unique military partnership, defending northern and central China against incursions by the Jurchen confederation known as the Jin kingdom.
In , Jin forces captured the Song capital at Bianjing, forcing the Chinese to establish a new capital in the southern part of the country. Three years later, Liang achieved immortality for her part in a naval engagement on the Yangtze River known as the Battle of Huangtiandang. Using a combination of drums and flags, she was able to signal the position of the Jin fleet to her husband. The general cornered the fleet and held it for 48 days.
Liang and Han lie buried together in a tomb at the foot of Lingyan Mountain. Though it may not seem obvious, the reasons that the Neo-Confucians classed Liang as laudable, but not Shangguan or Li, were part of the same societal impulses that led to the widespread acceptance of foot-binding.
As such, Liang fulfilled her duty of obedience to the proper male order of society. The Song dynasty was a time of tremendous economic growth, but also great social insecurity. In contrast to medieval Europe, under the Song emperors, class status was no longer something inherited but earned through open competition.
The old Chinese aristocratic families found themselves displaced by a meritocratic class called the literati.
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.
Bossen said she spoke to women born as late as the s whose feet had been bound for a short time. An elderly woman with bound feet sits by a basket in Yunnan, China. Lessons for fight against genital cutting? Bossen said her research offers lessons for the modern fight against other customs that are damaging to women and girls -- such as female genital mutilation, or FGM. Some academics like Gerry Mackie and Kwame Anthony Appiah have drawn lessons about the eradication of foot-binding and tried to apply them to genital cutting.
They believe FGM could be eradicated by educational campaigns and forming groups to explain the damage done by the practice. But Bossen said they might be drawn to the wrong course of action. Her research suggests it was economic factors not campaigns waged by religious groups and reformers that ultimately sounded the death knell for bound feet.
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