Chapter 7 China 293good match that impelled a woman to inflict such pain on her daughter. It
was not overtly the eroticism of the bound foot but the virtue of a disciplined
daughter that Neo-Confucianism valued. Women were so severely crippled by
foot binding that they could barely walk; it served much the same function as
purdah in India, keeping women invisible inside the family compound and
their virtue incontestable.
The practice that began as a trademark of dancers, something like the
Western ballerina’s painfully acquired grace on a single point, was by 1900
practiced among all classes of Chinese, even spreading among farm families
where, although women’s labor was needed, her feet were bound anyway as a
sign of beauty and virtue and in the hopes of improving her marriage pros-
pects, forcing her to a lifetime of painful hobbling as she swept her courtyard,
carried rice and babies, spun, embroidered, and wove. In one study of 1,736
women in 515 families in a network of rural villages north of the Yellow River,
99.2 percent of women born before 1890 had bound feet. In Southern China,
on the other hand, foot binding was actively resisted by peasants as impractical
and pretentious. Further, non-Han women, including Mongols, Manchus, and
the migratory Hakka (kejia), never adopted the practice.
However, it would be misleading to focus so heavily on these customs that
we miss other aspects of women’s lives in traditional China. While it may be
true that obedience, self-sacrifice, and purity were emphasized by neo-Confu-
cians and that submission to male authority was both idealized and demanded,
recent scholars have looked beyond these restricting social structures to the
accomplishments of women artists, poets, and writers within them. The Con-
fucian literati were not guilty of ignoring women’s contributions, either, but
praised them among themselves and included them in their many voluminous
catalogs of poetry and art.
Members of the literati who served in the government or at least prepared
for official careers often did educate their daughters, even though those youngIn the fourteenth or fifteenth century,
a military officer died and was buried
in his uniform. His concubine was
strangled, her forehead was bashed in,
and she was buried with him in the
same coffin. He was in his 60s and
she in her 20s. She had “golden
lotuses,” and this unusual photograph
allows a view of the skeletal changes
wrought by the binding of feet.