There's a pretty intense slideshow on Yahoo News with photographs of the feet of women with bound feet (you see naked, morphed feet, outside of the tiny shoes).
Description for the image at left: "Chinese author Yang Yang shows one of the smallest shoes worn by women with traditionally bound feet, in Liuyi village in China's southern Yunnan Province, February 2007. Villages in China where women with bound feet survive are increasingly rare but the millennium-old practice nevertheless took almost four decades to eradicate after it was initially banned in 1911.(AFP/File/Mark Ralston)."
Link.
Reader comments: monkey (small, terry cloth, has a nice personality) says:
thanks for the link on boingboing about foot binding in china today. it sparked my memory to go back and search for the feature i caught the end of on the world this past monday. very interesting feature by louisa lim about foot binding and interview with a survivor of this eastern form of body modification. Link.
Anonymous says:
Readers should be aware of Emily Praeger's poignant short story, "A Visit from the Footbinder", with its cover's shocking Western-equiv. illustration: (Amazon link)
Doyle Stevick, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policies at the University of South Carolina, says:
Thanks for this article–since I taught human rights, I need to note one aspect of it.
The remark that "the millennium-old practice nevertheless took almost four decades to eradicate after it was initially banned in 1911" gives the impression that this took a long time. In fact, it is one of the great accomplishments in the history of human rights to transform this practice so quickly. People working on female genital cutting, for example, aspire to this success story as a model.
Further, while it was 40 years after the law passed, the actual transformation happened in only about a decade, an astonishingly brief time for an ingrained and widespread cultural practice. Laws alone don't generate transformations like this, social movements do.
Marie Vento posted One Thousand Years of Chinese Footbinding: Its Origins, Popularity and Demise, a paper which explains it in more detail:
"The work of the anti-footbinding reformers had three aspects. First, they carried out a modern education campaign, which explained that the rest of the world did not bind women's feet and that China was losing face in the world, making it subject to international ridicule. Second, their education campaign explained the advantages of natural feet and the disadvantages of bound feet. Third, they formed natural-foot societies, whose members pledged not to bind their daughter's feet nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet.[34] These three tactics effectively succeeded in bringing footbinding to a quick end, eradicating in a single generation a practice which had survived for a thousand years. Young girls were thereafter spared the tortures of footbinding, although older women with bound feet may still be seen in China and Taiwan."
