NPR has a piece in this Monday’s (3/19) Morning Edition about the last few women in China with bound feet. The practice was first banned in 1912. Several other attempts to eradicate the custom followed. In the wake of the both the 1927 Northern Expedition and the 1949 establishment of the PRC, officials and cadres would go to villages and unbind women’s feet. (A process nearly as painful as the initial binding.)
There is a curious fascination in the West with footbinding in China. Certainly the fixation by the missionaries with this custom bordered on unhealthy obsession in some cases. Whatever the reason, the idea of footbinding seems to fit well into the exoticized “Orientalist” view of China popularized in film, still lingering in the Western press, and despaired of in the academy.
For those seeking the “last word” on bound feet, the brilliant historian, Dorothy Ko, has a recent (long anticipated) book on the subject: Cinderalla’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding.
3 responses so far ↓
1 jim james // Sep 8, 2008 at 7:01 am
footbinding is barbaric, don’t you think? i am doing an assignment on it and what i am finding is not nice. The women of China and Japan could hardly walk, what pain they must have gone through.
2 jamie smith // Sep 8, 2008 at 7:03 am
One of my closest friends grandmother had their feet bound and from what i have heard it is not human. I mean really what is ‘delicate’ or ‘pretty’ about rotting flesh and broken toes?
3 Tom // Sep 11, 2008 at 10:49 am
What was “delicate” about footbinding was not the foot per se, but the very unusual and limited gait that it forced the women to use when (barely) walking. Also, many of the positive attributes associated with footbinding were less real than psychological — footbinding was fetishized and thus became thought of sexually rather than rationally.
As for the “curious fascination in the West with footbinding,” many an amateur psychoanalyst has noted the connection between footbinding and high heels. Indeed, the NPR story brings up high heels in the introduction. “Il faut souffrir pour être belle.”
Since Westerners are foot fetishists at heart, they are therefore intrigued by the practices of co-fetishists in China.
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