“If you love your son, you don’t go easy on his studies. If you love your daughter, you don’t go easy on her footbinding.”

We have all heard our parents tell us they are doing something for “our own good”, but this is ridiculous. A practice started hundreds of years ago and was popular ’till the 1930’s was chinese foot binding.

Basically, it was a procedure started on a small female child to keep her feet from growing. The feet did grow, but became deformed as a result. The would bind the feet for years to make them as close to 3″ as possible. What caused the deformation was that the foot ended up curved with the toes curled under.

It is a practice that weakened the women, made it difficult for them to walk, thus keeping the men in the position of power over them. You can’t run away from the fool on 3″ feet no can ya?

A pair of small feet three inch golden lilies were once the male designated yardstick for feminine beauty in China. A young girl’s feet were broken and bound inwards along the instep, a process that caused excruciating pain. Systematically bound, day after day, the stunted feet began to take on the coveted look of that profoundly sensuous image, the lotus bulb.

Foot Binding started in the Tang Dynasty (618-906), under the emperor Li Yu. He had ordered one of his slave girls to bind her feet and then dance for him. From that day on, foot binding began to become a regular tradition. It became increasingly popular to the upper class in the Song Dynasty (960-1297). Having tiny feet was a sign of beauty and wealth and men were attracted to women with small feet.

another quote

“that the connection between beauty rituals and pain is not accidental: The pain, of course, teaches an important lesson: no price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation too painful for the woman who would be beautiful. The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerance begins . . . in preadolescence, in socialization, and serves to prepare women for lives of childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing.”

The physical process which created this foot is described by Howard S. Levy in Chinese Footibinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom:
“The success or failure of footbinding depended on the skillful application of a bandage around each foot. The bandage, about two inches wide and ten feet long, was wrapped in the following way. One end was placed on the inside of the instep, and from there it was carried over the small toes so as to force the toes in and towards the sole. The large toe was left unbound. The bandage was then wrapped around the heel so forcefully that the heel and toes were drawn closer together. The process was then repeated from the beginning until the entire bandage had been applied. The foot of the young child was subjected to a coercive and unremitting pressure, for the object was not merely to confine the foot but to make the toes bend under and into the sole and bring the heel and sole as close together as physically possible.

Another observer reports:
“The flesh often became putrescent during the binding and portions sloughed off from the sole; sometimes one or more toes dropped off.”

Alum was used to absorb swelling and pus, and one victim describes it this way:
“Every two weeks, I changed to new shoes. Each new pair was one to two tenths of an inch smaller than the previous one. The shoes were unyielding, and it took pressure to get into them…After changing more than ten pairs of shoes, my feet were reduced to a little over four inches. I had been in binding for a month when my younger sister started; when no one was around, we would weep together. In summer, my feet smelled of pus and blood; in winter, my feet felt cold because of lack of circulation… Four of the toes were curled in like dead caterpillars; no outsider would have believed they belonged to a human being. If you wanna read more about chinese footbinding try here

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