Jul 22, 2024
Why Footbinding Persisted in China for a Millennium
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Why Footbinding Persisted in China for a Millennium
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Hi, can I ask you something about the gŭojiăo/chánzú practice? I have examined the topic recently, but I didn’t understand if this tradition has involved all the women in China. Anyway, your blog is really interesting 👌🏻
Hi! Thanks for the question, and sorry for taking ages to reply!
I addressed the history of chanzu/缠足, aka guojiao/裹脚 (footbinding) in my post here. I also have a footbinding tag with more information.
Hope this helps! (image via)
Today's subject: footbinding! Or more specifically, the myth about the dumbass that started it!
For those who don't know, footbinding is the old Chinese practice of taking young girls and physically restraining their feet in their growth period to keep them small and 'delicate.' It is a very painful process that causes severe complications with mobility that only get worse as you get older. Thankfully, footbinding has been banned in China since 1912, but centuries of girls and women had to suffer through it.
So what kind of psychotic bastard would go out and create it?
By the time I was forty, the rigidity of my footbinding had moved from my golden lilies to my heart, which held on to injustices and grievances so strongly that I could no longer forgive those I loved and who loved me.
Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
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Every Step a Lotus
Shoes for Bound Feet
Dorothy Ko
Univ of California Press, Berkeley 2001, 184 pages,ISBN 978-0520232846 A Copublication with the Bata Shoe Museum
euro 35,00
email if you want to buy :[email protected]
In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its origins, purpose, and spread before the nineteenth century. She uses women's own voices to reconstruct the inner chambers of a Chinese house where women with bound feet lived and worked. Focusing on the material aspects of footbinding and shoemaking--the tools needed, the procedures, the wealth of symbolism in the shoes, and the amazing regional variations in style--she contends that footbinding was a reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity, motherhood, and handwork. Her absorbing, superbly detailed, and beautifully written book demonstrates that in the women's eyes, footbinding had less to do with the exotic or the sublime than with the mundane business of having to live in a woman's body in a man's world. Footbinding was likely to have started in the tenth century among palace dancers. Ironically, it was meant not to cripple but to enhance their grace. Its meaning shifted dramatically as it became domesticated in the subsequent centuries, though the original hint of sensuality did not entirely disappear. This contradictory image of footbinding as at once degenerate and virtuous, grotesque and refined, is embodied in the key symbol for the practice--the lotus blossom, being both a Buddhist sign of piety and a poetic allusion to sensory pleasures. Every Step a Lotus includes almost one hundred illustrations of shoes from different regions of China, material paraphernalia associated with the customs and rituals of footbinding, and historical images that contextualize the narrative. Most of the shoes, from the collection of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, have not been exhibited before. Readers will come away from the book with a richer understanding of why footbinding carries such force as a symbol and why, long after its demise, it continues to exercise a powerful grip on our imaginations. A Copublication with the Bata Shoe Museum
orders to: [email protected]
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More dumbass history memes
My latest comic about my grandmother is up at #muthamagazine I hope it makes you want to go out and buy some #tigerbalm #comics #illustration #badassgrandma #footbinding #squirrelskeepyouwarminwinter Many thanks to Meg for sharing my storytelling. Link in bio