The natural-foot movement in the eighteen-nineties was identified with liberal reformers and champions of women’s rights. By the early twentieth century, powerful officials and influential statesmen were giving it increasingly open support. A major factor in bringing the evils of footbinding before a larger audience was the missionary community, which worked devotedly for this cause and gradually influenced public opinion against it. To reach the illiterate masses, simple and popular refrains were devised with a graphic and unmistakable message:
The French doctor Matignon, serving in a Peking hospital near the turn of the century, remarked that footbinding, while widespread, was more frequent in the town than in the countryside. Women living north of Peking all had this deformity, he added, with the exception of Christians. Missionaries were generally able to get their adherents to renounce it, but in certain communities in the south religious directors of orphanages were obliged to sanction the footbinding of young girls in their care to make sure that they could later get married.
A few years before the Revolution, enthusiasm for the anti-footbinding cause began to develop in urban centers and in rural areas which were near cities or easily accessible to communications. The common sayings of earlier decades had exalted the manifold charms of the three-inch golden lotus, but these were now replaced by the critical catchword:
The anti-footbinding movement in China was part of a larger movement to emancipate woman and elevate her status. Progress was achieved in stages. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, natural-foot societies organized followers and distributed propaganda in town and village. This led the way to greater popular enthusiasm and participation in the years shortly preceding the Revolution. Before 1894 anti-footbinding was officially sponsored, but after that liberal intellectuals and enlightened missionaries took the lead. There came to be a widespread awareness that China could not go forward as a modern nation as long as vestiges of its outmoded past remained. The anti-footbinding movement, which achieved success only gradually, pressed forward unremittingly for several decades.
A satirical essay ostensibly written in defense of the custom appeared in 1915 in the New Republic, entitled, “In Praise of Footbinding.” The Chinese writer reminded his Western readers that, contrary to assertion, footbinding was not a barbarous custom, since it prevailed in the oldest and most mature of the world’s civilizations. It was painful, he admitted, but then pain was one of the measures of civilization. It was only the so-called barbarians who allowed men and women to dress alike and to share equally. (Here he implied that the earliest stage of development in China and elsewhere was a primitive communism.) With the emergence of civilized nations, however, the status of women was lowered and they could no longer dress like men or participate in their councils. Footbinding therefore became an ultimate goal in the civilizing process, he asserted.
He spoke as a Chinese husband of the pains of footbinding and told of the experiences of his own daughter. In his family girls had always started binding at the age of three, but he delayed it as long as he could in deference to the pleading of his wife. He cited a saying—“A barrel of tears for each pair of bound feet”—and remarked that it was exaggerated, for his little girl wept bitterly at first but soon dropped into silent despair. Perhaps the most original and revealing passage in his essay was one in which he described the psychological advantages accruing to the Chinese male:
The bound foot is the condition of a life of dignity for man, of contentment for woman. Let me make this clear. I am a Chinese fairly typical of my class. I pored too much over classic texts in my youth and dimmed my eyes, narrowed my chest, crooked my back. My memory is not strong, and in an old civilization there is a vast deal to learn before you can know anything. Accordingly among scholars I cut a poor figure. I am timid, and my voice plays me false in gatherings of men. But to my footbound wife, confined for life to her house except when I bear her in my arms to her palanquin, my stride is heroic, my voice is that of a roaring lion, my wisdom is of the sages. To her I am the world; I am life itself.
Implying that footbinding and the spiritual bondage of women were synonymous, he caustically remarked that Western man was on the right track, since he denied woman the ballot, handicapped her in professional life, belittled her intellectual accomplishments, and minimized the value of her personality. But, he reminded his Western readers, there was still the danger of woman’s rebelling against these artificial barriers in order to assert her independence. “What you need for the civilizing of women is a simple and radical strategy. Bind their feet.”
The revolutionaries who overthrew the Manchu government were determined to eliminate footbinding from the Chinese scene, and from their seizure of power onward a series of decrees were issued which reached into every provincial town, hamlet, and village. The degree of success varied according to the ability of local officials and the degree of resistance to them; details on enforcement are given in Chapter Nine. Some idea of the effectiveness of the abolition movement can be gotten by analyzing statistical surveys and scholarly observations.