Spitting Into the Wind

For some unknown reason, I always imagined the tiny feet of these Chinese women to be minatures of normal feet. I just thought that the binding stopped them from growing. It was with some horror that I veiwed these images and realised the true extent of the torture these females endured, and to think that these feet were viewed as beautiful and desirable is beyond comprehension.

In the past, Chinese women’s feet were bound with metres of cloth to stop them from growing so that they would resemble a “three-inch golden lotus” at a time when normal big feet were considered alien to feudal virtues. The practice originated in the palace of the last king of the Latter Tang Dynasty (923-936 AD) and continued even when it was banned by the Manchuria who established the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In remote mountainous areas, women still had their feet bound even when the New China was founded in 1949.

By the time a girl turned three years old, all her toes but the first were broken. The practice would cause the soles of feet to bend in extreme concavity.

Foot binding was more than a fashion statement, it was a way of life for about one billion women as well as the men around them. It took much more than laws and protests to bring foot binding to an end. Foot binding had higher consequences, greater appeal, and is more desirable than any other practice women implemented to be beautiful in history. It cannot be seen as a simple fashion statement. It was part of the society, the roots being buried under many parts of Chinese culture. It had roots in making a woman more desirable, marriageability, and higher social status. Foot binding not only crippled the women who went through the process but as well, crippled women in China for centuries. Being crippled by foot binding, they had such a little role in the government. It was a custom that started out to define beauty but ended up defining the way the society was.