Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China
264
Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China
264eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Footbinding was common in China until the early twentieth century, when most Chinese were family farmers. Why did these families bind young girls' feet? And why did footbinding stop? In this groundbreaking work, Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates upend the popular view of footbinding as a status, or even sexual, symbol by showing that it was an undeniably effective way to get even very young girls to sit still and work with their hands.
Interviews with 1,800 elderly women, many with bound feet, reveal the reality of girls' hand labor across the North China Plain, Northwest China, and Southwest China. As binding reshaped their feet, mothers disciplined girls to spin, weave, and do other handwork because many village families depended on selling such goods. When factories eliminated the economic value of handwork, footbinding died out. As the last generation of footbound women passes away, Bound Feet, Young Hands presents a data-driven examination of the social and economic aspects of this misunderstood custom.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503601079 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/25/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Bound Feet, Young Hands
Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China
By Laurel Bossen, Hill Gates
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0107-9
CHAPTER 1
Questions About Footbinding
I was seven years old when my mother took me out to the fields. There, while the buckwheat was in bloom, Mother bound my feet, tightly winding the cloth around them. She used a binding cloth to bind them tightly; it would [eventually] break the bones. When I cried, my mother just hit me. Ma said that my feet were too big; no one would want me, and I would not find a pojia [literally, mother-in-law family]. In the buckwheat fields, after she had bound them well, she made me walk back to the house. I did not rest. When we got back to the house, she just made me sit down and spin thread. At that time, they did not let girls go outside. When I was smaller, I could still go outside to run around, but when I grew, then I could not go out; I had to stay at home and work, spinning thread and weaving cloth. The yarn that I spun was very good. I also spun yarn for other people, earning money. Other people brought cotton to me, and when I had finished spinning, they came to take the cotton thread that I had spun. They gave me money or gave me mantou [steamed bread]. When I was young, I also wove straw hats. My father took them to market to sell.
— "Lovely Flower" (eighty years old), interview by the authors and team, Luochuan, Shaanxi, October 19, 2008
In the recent past, the debilitating custom of footbinding affected millions of Chinese girls and women. Footbinding forcibly compressed growing girls' foot bones, toes, and arches so that the foot bones could not grow forward or outward. In its most extreme form, the binding permanently and painfully deformed girls' feet and hindered their mobility throughout their life. Reaching this fixed shape took years. These "lotus feet" were essentially irreversible. When political movements required that women remove their binding tapes and allow the feet to spread beyond their previous confines, walking on these "let out" feet was painful or even impossible without rebinding. The bony architecture had been destroyed. Less demanding traditions of binding only narrowed the foot by bending the four lesser toes beneath the sole. These "cucumber" or "half-sloped" feet were easier to let out, although for many who removed their bindings, the toes remained embedded in the sole. Footbinding was widespread within the Chinese empire for centuries, lasting into the Republican period (1912–1949). Although binding young girls' feet came to an end in the mid-twentieth century, many grown women with bound feet survived into the twenty-first. During this same era, ending at the Republican period, most Chinese practiced labor-intensive family farming. But how did rural Chinese women work with bound feet? Were they merely idle consumers — surplus labor in an overpopulated agrarian empire — or did they mainly raise children? This seems extremely unlikely for most poor families. This puzzle piqued our interest and motivated our research.
China scholars, missionaries, historians, and novelists have offered many perspectives on Chinese women's bound feet. Questions about life and work with bound feet, however, have been either ignored or given superficial treatment. Few researchers asked the women themselves. The reasons for this may spring from old assumptions about women — for example, that peasant women rarely had bound feet, and if they did, they were merely housewives who did not contribute to the commercial economy. Additional reasons may be that the women's limited mobility proved both a physical and a language barrier to interacting with researchers, mainly unrelated men, since women were kept so close to home. Finally, because most women's work took place within the household's private spaces of home and courtyard, women's lives and labor were simply less visible to outsiders, even to the men in their own community. Our research instead focuses on the ways that the labor of women and girls is related to footbinding. We ask whether footbinding and its demise can be better understood by taking the changing patterns of girls' and women's labor into account.
The political instability of the late imperial and early Republican periods (1850–1949) produced radical disruptions of daily life across wide swaths of China's territory. Disasters, natural and human made, and chronic warfare punctuated the lives of most ordinary people. Migrations and invasions, international and civil wars, and monstrous upwellings of popular dissent in the form of millenarian movements reshuffled people, possessions, and cosmologies. Among the major nineteenth-century political conflicts were the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion, and numerous, lengthy regional rebellions. The early twentieth century was marked by the 1911 revolution, the Anti-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War that brought the Communists to power. Ecological disasters compounded political and military conflicts. North China in particular experienced extended droughts, famines, and floods that killed many millions. These dreadful events caused masses of villagers to uproot themselves and flee natural disasters, banditry, and warfare. Despite the rebellions and displacements, the dissolution of the empire, and rise of competing regional warlords, women continued to bind their daughters' feet. Footbinding survived an enormous amount of disruption up to the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century.
While many writers have portrayed footbinding as an urban, elite practice in pursuit of beauty, historians of footbinding find that reliable records concerning its distribution and spread are scarce. The historian Dorothy Ko notes that from the twelfth century on, when Chinese male scholars mentioned footbinding, they did so in the form of fragmentary "jottings," generally "origin discourses" in which "myths, hearsay, and history share the same page." Up to the nineteenth century, footbinding was "taboo in such official genres as public history, local gazetteers, and didactic texts" (Ko 2005, 2, 110–111). Separating trustworthy eyewitness evidence from armchair speculation is extremely difficult. As a result, contemporary historians glean little specific information on the timing, regions, or social and economic associations of the practice. Nonetheless, Chinese scholars who mentioned it, whether admiringly or critically, contributed to the belief that early on it was an elite practice, particularly in cities and towns where elites tended to live and where agricultural work was uncommon. Elite Chinese women writers sometimes referred to their own bound feet, but female farmers, servants, and artisans were rarely authors. Nineteenth-century Western observers' comments on footbinding were largely based on sightings of women working outdoors, usually commoners. The prevalence of footbinding among urban women, elite or commoner, who labored invisibly indoors is difficult to assess. The written record has produced few observations linked to specific places and socioeconomic situations. Despite impressions and generalizations made in good faith, the limited information currently available does not allow any confident assertions about the prevalence of footbinding among elites or lower classes in China's cities and towns before the end of the nineteenth century.
Our study differs in important respects from most writing about footbinding. First, we write about villagers. We interviewed thousands of rural women in disparate parts of China, from the northeast to southwest. Second, we focus on footbinding in relation to the work performed by girls in the household economies in which they were raised and trained. Third, we provide firsthand, large-scale comparative information on the decline of footbinding, offering new insights into the forces that propelled families to reject a practice that had spread and stubbornly persisted for centuries. This project has taken us across China to uncover the scope of this painful and enduring custom that so constrained the bodies of young Chinese girls. Our intention is to correct current beliefs about footbinding and to reconnect girls' and women's lives to their livelihoods.
We interpret Chinese women's homebound labor and footbinding by exploring their links to China's changing rural economy. By examining how footbinding coexisted with heavy demands for female labor and how footbinding came to an end, we contribute to larger discussions concerning China's economic transition. Our findings challenge current renderings of China's economic history by reassessing assumptions about the productivity of labor in the preindustrial era. They also dispute current explanations for the end of footbinding that fail to consider the economic underpinnings of this change.
THE EMERGENCE AND SPREAD OF FOOTBINDING
To examine the economic aspects of footbinding, we would ideally sketch out its origins, identifying the regions and populations in which it first took hold. Yet footbinding originated and expanded within China's empire along paths we cannot trace with confidence. Its original purpose and the patterns of its spread are essentially unknown, although most scholars believe it started among the elite in the heartland of the Song dynasty and diffused to other regions over the centuries. According to Dorothy Ko, drawing on the mid-Qing historian Zhao Yi, the eighteenth century was the zenith for footbinding, which was "practiced all over the empire," although less in the four "peripheral" southern provinces (2005, 131). Zhao Yi's example of footbound women within the walls of Suzhou City and barefoot women working in the field beyond the city gates points to the variability within a region (131). Contrary to the impression Zhao Yi gives, footbinding was not then confined to urban or elite populations. Evidence from nineteenth- and twentieth-century eyewitness and literary sources shows footbinding occurring across China in rural as well as urban areas, among the wealthy and the poor. China scholars have proposed that it spread to lower classes and rural communities by emulation of elite practices, much as any elite fashion may be copied by other classes. In actuality, there is no reliable documentary evidence about when or where footbinding began or how it spread. Agreeing that downward diffusion is possible, even likely, other motivations for its spread must also be considered.
In an effort to determine the geographic extent of footbinding, sociologist Christena Turner uses anecdotal evidence from travel writings and diaries to create a map or "rough sketch" of the distribution of footbinding in China's old core (1997, 447). Although many large rural areas lacked sufficient information to generalize reliably, she suggests that footbinding was present but uncommon south of the Yangzi River and common between the Yangzi and the Yellow Rivers. It was nearly universal north of the Yellow River except for Hebei and, perhaps counterintuitively, in the southwestern province of Yunnan. Yet within a region where footbinding was common, pockets of nonbinding existed, and vice versa. Juxtaposing the footbinding regions with China's agricultural regions, Turner shows that footbinding tapers off in environments where cold winters, deserts, or mountains were less hospitable to settled agriculture (448). The environments where footbinding flourished and persisted were predominantly the agricultural zones occupied by the Han, the dominant ethnic group within China. Ke Jisheng, a Taiwan connoisseur of footbinding, has also concluded that the custom followed sinification or, more precisely, the spread of Han culture (Ke 2003, 15–16).
The Han account for 92 percent of the population. Through the expansion of imperial control, Han Chinese colonized and intermarried with other groups on the frontiers, with the result that in many regions Han and local cultural practices are blended. Despite considerable variation among the customs across a vast territory with differing regional ecologies, languages, and subcultures, Han Chinese culture is strongly associated with an economy that Burton Pasternak and Janet Salaff describe as based on "dense settlement and intensive farming" by smallholders who provided taxes and tribute to support an imperial state and its administrative cities and towns (1993, 3–4). Consolidated by a long sequence of Chinese states, the Han found "an adaptation that worked most of the time" — one Pasternak and Salaff label the "Chinese Way" (3–4). Historically, the limits to the spread of the Chinese Way were found in the environments of China's frontier regions where settled, intensive agriculture did not flourish and where neither the state taxation/distribution system nor a dense local marketing system was an important shaper of local custom and identity (Gates 1996, 72–75).
Footbinding was adopted by some of China's ethnic minorities, especially those living in close proximity to the Han and with similar lifestyles. In general, footbinding came late or not at all to border peoples, and its meaning has become entangled with larger questions of hanhua (sinicization). In ethnically mixed regions women in culturally distinctive groups (e.g., Hui, Tujia, Bai, Yi, and the typically nonbinding Hakka) practiced footbinding in varying degrees. Consequently, footbinding was not always a definitive ethnic marker. An important exception to this generalization occurred among the Manchu people who founded the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). These northern rulers firmly identified footbinding as a Han ethnic custom. Although Qing rulers failed to squelch it in the population at large (Ko 1998; Elliott 2001; Shepherd 2012), they were mostly successful in prohibiting it among the Manchu. Suggesting that Han Chinese maintained bound feet as an identity marker to distinguish themselves from other ethnic groups may have explanatory value in some contexts other than Manchu, but it would have been a rather severe measure compared to other methods of marking identity, such as different clothing, hairstyles, or body tattoos. The argument does not explain why footbinding was widely adopted and maintained in central regions where Han people had little contact with non-Han. Sorting out how a recent or distant non-Han past may have affected rates of footbinding is beyond the scope of this study. We can say with confidence that the environments where footbinding flourished and persisted were predominantly the agricultural zones and cities occupied by the Han.
The distribution of footbinding also changed with time. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries and Chinese reformers initiated anti-footbinding media campaigns, peppering their speeches and articles with claims that it was painful, ugly, unhealthy, unproductive, sexually indulgent, humiliating, and crippling and it weakened the nation (Broadwin 1997, 422, 426–427, 435). They founded anti-footbinding societies such as the Natural Feet Society (Tianzu hui) in Shanghai in 1895, the Chinese-run Anti-footbinding Society (Bu chanzu hui) in Guangzhou in 1896, and the Letting Out Feet Society (Fangzuhui) in Hangzhou in 1903. Anti-footbinders argued that footbound women were lazy and unproductive; they spent their time "either sitting and eating all day or embroidering or doing some other utterly useless thing. Even for those who work they are weak. ... Five of them cannot match the work of one woman without bound feet" (Broadwin 1997, 426, quoting Zhang Zhidong, a late Qing reformer). Notably, these critics did not consider whether footbound women performed gainful economic activity with their skilled hands. Most anti-footbinding societies were short-lived and encountered stiff resistance, as suggested by a quotation from an American missionary's letter of the 1910s: "I've talked myself hoarse to these freakish, foggish, old-time, undentable, unbendable ... women, & I simply can't cajole them into the unbinding of their pesky daughters' blooming bound feet" (418, citing Graham 1994, 39). Nonetheless, Julie Broadwin gives them credit: "Collectively they brought down the custom very rapidly in China's urban centers" (420).
According to Turner, "That the demise of footbinding followed a class hierarchy in its early phases is no surprise given the importance of foreign pressure and concern on the part of China's most powerful and wealthy men to create a modern nation" (1997, 465). Noting that footbinding was declining in urban areas along the coast, reformers were eager to claim credit (456–457). "By the 1910s the binding of a daughter's feet virtually disappeared among the urban upper-classes" (Broadwin 1997, 419). Ironically, as Turner noted, "observers not commenting on anti-footbinding efforts usually report that elites bind more universally and to greater extremes than did the lower classes. On the other hand, those commenting on anti-footbinding efforts usually mention that its greatest success was with the elites and that footbinding was still practiced by the lower classes and in rural areas" (1997, 456–457).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bound Feet, Young Hands by Laurel Bossen, Hill Gates. Copyright © 2017 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1. Questions About Footbinding2. Seeking Answers: Research Methods and Fieldwork
3. North China Plain
4. Northwest China
5. Southwest China
6. Bound Feet Across China.