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Foot Binding

carole

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Something that has both fascinated and horrified me is the old Chinese custom of binding women's feet. The 'lotus foot' was considered both desirable and erotic. There are only a few elderly Chinese women who still have bound feet - horribly deformed to our Western eyes, with the heel touching the ball of the foot and the toes forming a point. I caught the tail end of a documentary on Discovery (?) about this and apparently there is only one, very old, shoemaker who can still make shoes to accommodate these ladies' tiny feet.

Carole
 
I've seen that documentary Carole. Made me cry. The worst bi was during the cultural revolution when the communists made them take off the bindings and work in the fields all day. Apparently having the bindings removed was even more painfull than having them put on in the first place.
 
I'm glad I didn't see that, I'd have cried my eyes out and got really angry, like I do when I read about female circumcision.

Sorry to hijack the thread a little, but isn't it strange how female beauty seems to entail pain? Even in these liberated times, "being a woman" consists of one long round of plucking, shaving, waxing, starving yourself, not to mention wobbling round on heels you can't walk in properly and those horrible "tummy sculp" knickers and stuff. Then there's the whole business of face lifts and boob jobs.

I've got no problem with self-adornment (I love piling on the slap and perfume) but I refuse to do anything that hurts.

And you boys needn't look so smug. Capitalism abhors a vacuum, they've already made billions from making women feel shit, its your turn now. I predict a huge upturn in pec implants and penis extentions in the next few decades.
 
That foot binding documentary totally missed that angle Aunty P. IMO all these things are started by men to control women, and the worse thing is, once the ball gets rolling so to speak, it's the women who take over and carry the torture on, like with female circumcision.
(I'll never forget the day when, at dinner, my father asked what female circumcision was, and my sister told him. The first and last time the word "clitoris" was mentioned in our house) :p
 
carole said:
There are only a few elderly Chinese women who still have bound feet - horribly deformed to our Western eyes, with the heel touching the ball of the foot and the toes forming a point

How do they get the ball of the foot to touch the heel, did they all have their feet broken?
 
Red Dalek said:
How do they get the ball of the foot to touch the heel, did they all have their feet broken?
Pretty much, though the bones are much softer and more malleable in a child I suppose. :(
 
As regards footbinding and female circumcision - do you think these women had/have a choice? Spinsterhood in pre-revolutionary China (or modern day Somalia) wasn't the relatively pleasant experience it is in UK 2002. No torture - no husband. No husband - no life/status/children/money. Somalian women mutilating their daughters' and nieces' genitals think they are doing the right thing, they don't know any different. Things are changing though, there are campaigns against it.

Red Dalek - the feet were bound from infancy when the foot bones are soft. Hideous.
 
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I can't locate any substantive posts - much less a thread - on this practice, so I'm starting a dedicated thread.

Foot binding was the custom of applying tight binding to the feet of young girls to modify the shape and size of their feet. It was practiced in China from the Tang dynasty until the early 20th century, and bound feet were considered a status symbol as well as a mark of beauty. Foot binding was a painful practice and significantly limited the mobility of women, resulting in lifelong disabilities for most of its subjects. Feet altered by binding were called lotus feet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding

Foot-Bind-ca-1900.jpg

See Also:

Why Footbinding Persisted in China for a Millennium
Despite the pain, millions of Chinese women stood firm in their devotion to the tradition

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-footbinding-persisted-china-millennium-180953971/
 
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The study of the practice's skeletal evidence and effects is a relatively recent development.

Ming Dynasty Skeletons Reveal Secrets of Foot-Binding
Foot-binding was practiced for about 1,000 years in China. The memory of this practice is preserved in historical documents, shoes found in graves of the elite and the testimonies of a dwindling number of women with bound feet who survive today.

But only in recent years have archaeologists looked at skeletons with bound feet to learn more about the women who experienced this extreme form of body modification.

Elizabeth Berger, a postdoctoral fellow in Chinese studies at the University of Michigan, had been working on an archaeological excavation at the site of Yangguanzhai near Xi'an in China's Shaanxi Province. The archaeological team, led by Liping Yang of the Shaanxi Archaeological Academy, was primarily interested in a Neolithic village buried there; they unexpectedly found an overlaying cemetery from a much later era, the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), and they salvaged the graves. ...

"I was looking at the bones and I noticed that there was something very strange about the feet," Berger told Live Science. "My first thought was that it might be foot-binding, and I started to look into it and found that at that point there hadn't been many publications on what the bones of foot-bound feet actually look like, although there was a lot of research on the history of it." ...

FULL STORY: https://www.livescience.com/64849-foot-bound-skeletons-china.html
 
(Transplanted from head binding thread ... )

... just musing here, but are there any examples of footbinding in cultures unrelated to Ancient China?
 
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(Transplanted from head binding thread ... )
... just musing here, but are there any examples of footbinding in cultures unrelated to Ancient China?

I don't recall ever seeing any reference to foot binding being done anywhere but China. As far as I know, the practice was peculiar to China.
 
This 2013 Atlantic article provides an overview of the practice's history and includes an interview with a scholar and author of a book on the subject:

https://www.theatlantic.com/china/a...liar-history-of-foot-binding-in-china/279718/

The scholar (Wang Ping) seems to have been personally familiar with the practice in her family, and even attempted to undertake herself as a child. The book is:

Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China
2002
by Wang Ping

https://www.amazon.com/Aching-Beaut...UTF8&qid=1379357448&sr=8-3&keywords=wang+ping
 
I don't recall ever seeing any reference to foot binding being done anywhere but China. As far as I know, the practice was peculiar to China.

Was foot binding performed for reasons connected to head binding? Were there Chinese Ancients with tiny feet and conical heads?
 
Was foot binding performed for reasons connected to head binding? Were there Chinese Ancients with tiny feet and conical heads?

No, or at least not to my knowledge. The foot binding only dates back to the 10th century (AD; CE). If there were any Chinese subjected to both forms of binding they wouldn't be ancient.
 
Were any other body parts bound, do you know?
 
Were any other body parts bound, do you know?

Depending on how liberal an interpretation of "binding" one accepts, the Kayan Lahwi women of Myanmar (the ones who wear brass rings to yield the appearance of elongated necks*) come to mind.

This is similar in the senses that the procedure starts in childhood, it involves attaching restrictive apparatus encircling the body part being shaped, it continues into or through adulthood, and it results in a permanent body modification.

*NOTE: As I understand it, this procedure doesn't actually lengthen the neck. Instead, it compresses the collar bones and ribcage downward to give the illusion the neck is abnormally long. Assuming this is true, it provides another parallel with head and foot binding - i.e., the compressive distortion of bone structures.

Off the top of my (unbound ... ) head, that's the closest analogue I can nominate.
 

That crossed my mind, but ...

My understanding was that the corset-induced permanent ribcage distortions / injuries were an unintended (or at least unacknowledged) side effect from discontinuous short-term periods of binding, whereas foot / head distortions were the planned outcome of long-term continuous binding tactics.
 
nice differentiation :)
 
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