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"Footbinding China."
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Cinderella's Sisters
The history of footbinding is full of contradictions and unexpected turns. The practice originated in the dance culture of China's medieval court and spread to gentry families, brothels, maid's quarters, and peasant households. Conventional views of footbinding as patriarchal oppression often neglect its complex history and the incentives of the women involved. This revisionist history, elegantly written and meticulously researched, presents a fascinating new picture of the practice from its beginnings in the tenth century to its demise in the twentieth century. Neither condemning nor defending foot-binding, Dorothy Ko debunks many myths and misconceptions about its origins, development, and eventual end, exploring in the process the entanglements of male power and female desires during the practice's thousand-year history.Cinderella's Sistersargues that rather than stemming from sexual perversion, men's desire for bound feet was connected to larger concerns such as cultural nostalgia, regional rivalries, and claims of male privilege. Nor were women hapless victims, the author contends. Ko describes how women-those who could afford it-bound their own and their daughters' feet to signal their high status and self-respect. Femininity, like the binding of feet, was associated with bodily labor and domestic work, and properly bound feet and beautifully made shoes both required exquisite skills and technical knowledge passed from generation to generation. Throughout her narrative, Ko deftly wields methods of social history, literary criticism, material culture studies, and the history of the body and fashion to illustrate how a practice that began as embodied lyricism-as a way to live as the poets imagined-ended up being an exercise in excess and folly.
eBook
Aching for Beauty
Even though footbinding was not practiced by every woman in late Imperial China, the aesthetic, financial, and erotic advantages of footbinding permeated all aspects of language. In Aching for Beauty, Wang interprets the mystery of footbinding as part of a womanly heritage-\"a roaring ocean current of female language and culture.\"_x000B_
eBook
The lotus shoes
Love and loss. Sisterhood and betrayal. Little Flower and Linjing's fates are bound together. As a child, Little Flower is sold to Linjing's wealthy family to become a muizai. In a fit of childish jealousy over her new handmaiden's ladylike bound feet and talent for embroidery, Linjing ensures Little Flower can never leave her to ascend in society. Despite their starkly different places in the Fong household, over the years the two girls must work together to secure both their futures through Linjing's marriage. As the two grow up, they are by turns bitter rivals and tentative friends. Until scandal strikes the family, and Linjing and Little Flower's lives are unexpectedly thrown into chaos. Linjing's fall from grace could be an opportunity for Little Flower - but will their intertwined fates lead to triumph, or tragedy for them both?
BOOK
Book Review; Beauty in China: Bound Up in Pain; ACHING FOR BEAUTY Footbinding in China By Wang Ping University of Minnesota Press 268 pages, $27.95
Many years later after immigrating to the United States, [Wang Ping] saw a pair of beautifully embroidered lotus shoes at a friend's apartment and began to wonder if beauty was innate or cultural, socially imposed or self-imposed by a personal concept of beauty. What began as a doctoral thesis evolved into \"Aching for Beauty,\" which examines through history and literature the tradition of foot binding and its ideals of femininity, beauty, class and eroticism. In time, lily feet would become not only a symbol for feminine beauty but also a way for young women to move from the servant class upward to the marriage and service markets. Although foot binding left women barely mobile, the feet were immune to the aging process. As Wang points out, \"A beautiful face may wrinkle, a slender body may become fat and saggy, whereas a pair of lotus feet keep their charm as long as a woman lives.\" While Wang confines herself primarily to the history and implications of this horrific Chinese tradition, it would be a mistake to place value judgments on the practice without looking at some of the things Western women do to make themselves \"beautiful.\" Liposuction, silicon injections and implants, chemical peels, nose jobs, breast enlargements and reductions are not only common but are now often given as graduation, Christmas, bat mitzvah, sweet 16 or pre-wedding gifts in an effort to make us more desirable (read marriageable) or economically viable (read thinner, younger, less ethnic-looking).
Book Review
Footbinding, Industrialization, and Evolutionary Explanation
The incorporation of niche construction theory (NCT) and epigenetics into an extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) increases the explanatory power of evolutionary analyses of human history. NCT allows identification of distinct social inheritance and cultural inheritance and can thereby account for how an existing-but-dynamic social system yields variable influences across individuals and also how these individuals’ microlevel actions can feed back to alter the dynamic heterogeneously across time and space. An analysis of Chinese footbinding, as it was ending during the first half of the twentieth century and China was industrializing, illustrates the evolutionary dynamics of niche construction across inheritance tracks and explains regional heterogeneity as well as the persistence of a cultural belief that was socially inaccurate. Incorporating anthropological and sociological insights into an EES with NCT has the potential to proffer source laws for relationships between individual actions and macro-patterns in beliefs, structures, climate, and demography.
Journal Article
Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: A Convention Account
Female genital mutilation in Africa persists despite modernization, public education, and legal prohibition. Female footbinding in China lasted for 1,000 years but ended in a single generation. I show that each practice is a self-enforcing convention, in Schelling's (1960) sense, maintained by interdependent expectations on the marriage market. Each practice originated under conditions of extreme resource polygyny as a means of enforcing the imperial male's exclusive sexual access to his female consorts. Extreme polygyny also caused a competitive upward flow of women and a downward flow of conjugal practices, accounting for diffusion of the practices. A Schelling coordination diagram explains how the three methods of the Chinese campaign to abolish footbinding succeeded in bringing it to a quick end. The pivotal innovation was to form associations of parents who pledged not to footbind their daughters nor let their sons marry footbound women. The \"convention\" hypothesis predicts that promotion of such pledge associations would help bring female genital mutilation to an end.
Journal Article
Cinderella's Sisters
The history of footbinding is full of contradictions and unexpected turns. The practice originated in the dance culture of China's medieval court and spread to gentry families, brothels, maid's quarters, and peasant households. Conventional views of footbinding as patriarchal oppression often neglect its complex history and the incentives of the women involved. This revisionist history, elegantly written and meticulously researched, presents a fascinating new picture of the practice from its beginnings in the tenth century to its demise in the twentieth century. Neither condemning nor defending foot-binding, Dorothy Ko debunks many myths and misconceptions about its origins, development, and eventual end, exploring in the process the entanglements of male power and female desires during the practice's thousand-year history. Cinderella's Sisters argues that rather than stemming from sexual perversion, men's desire for bound feet was connected to larger concerns such as cultural nostalgia, regional rivalries, and claims of male privilege. Nor were women hapless victims, the author contends. Ko describes how women—those who could afford it—bound their own and their daughters' feet to signal their high status and self-respect. Femininity, like the binding of feet, was associated with bodily labor and domestic work, and properly bound feet and beautifully made shoes both required exquisite skills and technical knowledge passed from generation to generation. Throughout her narrative, Ko deftly wields methods of social history, literary criticism, material culture studies, and the history of the body and fashion to illustrate how a practice that began as embodied lyricism—as a way to live as the poets imagined—ended up being an exercise in excess and folly.
eBook
Marriage Mobility and Footbinding in Pre-1949 Rural China: A Reconsideration of Gender, Economics, and Meaning in Social Causation
We provide evidence contrary to long-standing general expectations that before 1949 most Chinese women married up the social hierarchy and that footbinding facilitated this hypergamy. In our sample of 7,314 rural women living in Sichuan, Northern, Central, and Southwestern China in the first half of the twentieth century, two-thirds of women did not marry up. In fact, 22 percent of all women, across regions, married down. In most regions, more women married up than down, but in all regions, the majority did not marry hypergamously. Moreover, for most regions, we found no statistically significant difference between the chances of a footbound girl versus a not-bound girl in marrying into a wealthier household, despite a common cultural belief that footbinding would improve girls' marital prospects. We do find regional variation: Sichuan showed a significant relation between footbinding and marital mobility. Nevertheless, our evidence of the basic economic circumstances of rural women's marriages from several of China's regions, including Sichuan, supports a different cultural belief as relevant to the lives of most women: marriage among equals. These results have implications for understanding pre-1949 Chinese gender relations and rural life as well as for theorizing social causation.
Journal Article