Another observer described how Ta-t’ung ladies displayed their feet when plays were given there. They sat along three sides of the theater, heavily adorned and formally posed, their feet stretched out in a row like scales as they tried to gain each onlooker’s praise. The shoes were meticulously embellished. Some had small bells attached to the heel to attract the audience’s attention with each foot motion. Others placed thin silk butterflies with movable wings on top of the shoes, so that the wings trembled as if in flight. Admirers walked back and forth in groups; if the feet were especially small they inspected them closely but were not allowed to touch them with their hands. “It was just like going to a department store to see an exhibition!” On the evening of the sixth lunar day and month, after the competition, some wealthy families liked to dye the feet red. They spread a dye which turned the feet the color of a red chestnut, feeling that this innovation added to their beauty and charm.
Let us briefly recapitulate views concerning the origin and presence of footbinding in China for the past millennium. It arose either at the end of the T’ang dynasty or in the decades which preceded the Sung, an innovation of palace dancers which slowly set the fashion for the rest of the empire. The binding of the foot gradually became more severe, and the fashionable foot became smaller. Thinkers of the Southern Sung dynasty, such as Chu Hsi, made it part of an ideology of feminine suppression and elevated the practice as a convenient device to ensure the separation of the sexes and prevent woman from leaving the confines of the home. The bound foot also became a symbol of aristocratic gentility and a proof of affluence on the part of the master, for it was a demonstrably incapacitating feminine appendage. The Yuan and Ming dynasties made a love fetish of the tiny foot, and the shoes became symbols of passionate love and an integral part of drinking games in which amusement with courtesans provided the main attraction. To lovers of the lotus, a woman’s sexual attraction came to center in the mystery of her bound feet, which were almost never bared to view. The caressing of the diminutive foot in innumerable ways became part of the prelude to the sex act. The rationale came about that binding the foot resulted in a heavier thigh and that the genital region tightened and became much better developed. These scientifically invalid ideas were, nevertheless, widely believed.
The abolition of footbinding by imperial decree, attempted by the Manchus as early as the seventeenth century, was doomed to failure because it was attempted unilaterally in a male-dictated society which relegated woman to the role of an ignorant and fettered plaything. It was not until the present century, when anti-footbinding came to be regarded as part of a larger movement to emancipate the Chinese woman from her age-old inheritance of social inequality, that progressive headway was finally made. The fervent pleas of revolutionary leaders to free woman from her spiritual and physical bondage made an increasing psychological impact on China’s masses. This liberal dissemination of thought, combined with positive action by local officials, gradually brought to an end this unique contribution by Chinese culture to the history of feminine suffering.
A WORK DESCRIBED AS THE EARLIEST ANTI-FOOTBINDING PUBLICATION (ca. 1894)
Translation: “The custom of footbinding by women proves, upon investigation, to have been unknown in antiquity. Later Ruler Li of the Southern T’ang dynasty originated it as a means of amusing himself in the palace. Palace concubine Lovely Maiden was slender and skilled in dancing; he had her bind her feet tightly with layers of cloth until they resembled a curved bow. And that is why embroidered sandals are now called bowed shoes. What arose at amusing fancy was transmitted until it became a custom. Binding started in the palace and came to be imitated by the masses; this is the popular account of its origin. But the imparting of this lewdness has involved our nation in harmful ways to the present day. And until there is no awakening. How pitiful!” (from TFL 1.)
Chapter Three
Emancipation Movements
Footbinding was part of a set of mores which insisted on coercing women and treating them as intellectual inferiors, but widespread opposition did not make itself felt until the start of the twentieth century. It was then that revolutionary demands for the education of woman and her treatment as a social equal began to be increasingly heard. Throughout the centuries, enlightened and liberal thinkers criticized footbinding, but they failed to change or even slightly modify the traditional view. The earliest anti-footbinding spokesman on record was a Sung dynasty (960-1279) literatus named Ch’e Jo-shui, who was quoted as having said:
I don’t know when footbinding began. Children not yet four or five years old, innocent and without crime, are caused to suffer limitless pain. What is the use of binding and restraining [the feet in this way]?
The Manchus who conquered China in the seventeenth century tried in vain to abolish footbinding by fiat, making this effort in an era when the tiny foot was universally admired by the Chinese male. Another reason for failure during their reign was the unchanging view of woman as an unlettered and sheltered plaything. The Manchus at first strove to abolish footbinding because they looked down upon it as being culturally backward. They circulated a saying about a “. . . large-footed wife, but a tiny-footed servant.” They taught this to their young daughters, telling them that a natural-footed girl would one day become the wife of a great official, but that a girl with tiny bound feet would never amount to anything more than the servant of a great official’s wife.
The constant failure of official Manchu attempts to prohibit footbinding seems to indicate that it could not be effectively combatted unless it were regarded as only one aspect of the struggle to liberate woman. The futile attempts at prohibition are listed in Chinese sources. As early as 1642, heavy penalties were threatened for those who bound their feet. This proved fruitless, and in 1645 and 1664 bound-foot women were barred from the imperial harem. However, it is doubtful that even this part of the decree was fully effective. The objective of enforcement was the natural-footed child; footbinding of any daughter born after 1662 was strictly enjoined, with penalties to be meted out to the father. He was to be relieved from office if an official, and flogged forty times and exiled if a commoner. If the head of a household pleaded that he had merely been remiss and unaware that his daughter’s feet had been bound, he was to be flogged forty times and forced to wear the cangue, a square wooden device confining the neck, for one month. Civil and military officials who proved recalcitrant in carrying out the edict were to be investigated and punished according to the individual circumstances. The edict tried to prevent evasion by setting forth punishments for those who sought to avoid compliance by falsely reporting that daughters had been born prior to 1662, the year when feet could no longer be bound. But this was still an age in China when the tiny foot as a sign of beauty, gentility, and desirability was philosophically unchallenged. Opposition to reform was discreet but influential. Soon after the edict was issued, a story was circulated about the foolish official who sent up a memorial to the emperor to the effect that he had been the first to let out his wife’s big feet.