Footbinding lasted for more than a thousand years. Is this a proof that Chinese society was stagnant? A look into the origin and development of the custom shows that it has undergone many changes. In the beginning, as far as we know, it was a fashion developed by court dancers who performed on carved lotus flowers or carpets with lotus flower designs much in the way that ballerinas dance in the West. Court circles and the upper class at large imitated the fashion, and it soon became a status symbol. In the course of the following centuries, the middle and even the lower classes imitated the upperclass fashion—a process well known still today in all societies, even in the socalled “classless societies.” This process has always been one of the main agents of change: the social leaders wanting to stay aloof from the masses tend to give up a statussymbol custom for a new status symbol as soon as it is used by everybody. Therefore, as the custom of footbinding spread, its meaning changed. It became a convenient way to express and enforce the new concepts of female chastity which China developed in the twelfth century. A chaste wife had to stay in the house and was not to be seen in the fields or streets. Bound feet made walking painful and difficult. At the same time, bound feet indicated economic status. A man who had a wife with bound feet proved to the world that he was rich enough to feed a wife with his earnings and did not need her help in the fields or in the shop.
The Manchu conquerors of China in the seventeenth century were the first to turn against the now all-pervasive custom. They again took pride in the large, natural feet of their women, thus setting them apart from the conquered Chinese. With the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, long before Western ideas of the equality of sexes came to China, Chinese leaders began to fight for women’s rights, and soon this also included a fight against bound feet. The famous novel Chinghua yuan, written 1810 to 1820, contained a whole program for the emancipation of women and decried footbinding as degrading. Later, foreign missionaries and their wives took up the fight, not so much for equality of women as against “unnatural” customs. The Chinese learned from them new techniques of influencing public opinion and of organization which finally led to the first step toward abolishing footbinding, an imperial decree of 1902.
But footbinding was more than just a custom. Howard S. Levy shows in this book that footbinding belongs together with many other elements centering around the sexual psychology of the Chinese. Until the researches done by R. H. van Gulick, almost nothing was known about sexual psychology in China. However, van Gulick’s work does not cover the last three hundred years of Chinese history. Here, Levy’s work, of which this book is only a small part, will help. He worked for many years in Taiwan and Japan and is eminent in both Chinese and Japanese studies. Naturally he cannot give us “hard facts” in the form of tests and statistics, but he has succeeded in bringing together essays and documents concerned with footbinding which, at the same time, allow us insights into a part of Chinese social life which an outsider hardly ever can observe and about which few writers dare to write directly. Even if we know Nocial and political structure, painting, and philosophy, our knowledge of Chinese society, old and new, is incomplete unless we know something of the way Chinese men and women lived together and what they felt in the most intimate field of human relations. By his thorough familiarity with a type of Chinese literature well known to many Chinese, but, significantly, rarely if ever read by Americans, Howard Levy has been able to present texts which give us this very insight. He has studied the erotic literature of traditional China together with the sentimental novels of the time. But he has also delved into modern magazines, journals, and the literature which is sold on the newsstands. These are, like some of our American magazines and bestsellers, not of the highest literary quality, but they are full of lively and realistic detail about private life in presentday China.
Wolfram Eberhard
University of California
Berkeley, California
PART ONE
HISTORY
Chapter One
Introductory Remarks
Footbinding, a vivid symbol of the subjection of woman, survived countless dynastic changes and flourished for centuries. It was an integral part of a man’s society which taught women to obey a strict and comprehensive moral code hallowed by time and tradition. A lady of virtue passively accepted her role as an intellectual inferior and remained ignorant of the outside world. Her reading was restricted to the orthodox canon, and she learned only household tasks and approved hobbies. She was inaccessible to view and safe from the dangers of flirtation, since she spent most of the day modestly concealed within the women’s apartments. It was considered laudable for her to submit to the dreaded pain of footbinding in early childhood with stoical endurance, fighting back the tears in order to please her mother by achieving the criterion of beauty sanctioned through the ages.
The success or failure of footbinding depended on 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 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 sole and heel as close together as was physically possible. “The flesh often became putrescent during the binding, and portions sloughed off from the sole; sometimes one or more toes dropped off. The pain continued for about a year and then diminished, until at the end of two years the feet were practically dead and painless.”
A. Bind the four toes once around.
B. Then pull the binding toward the outside; turn it toward the plantar, tightly binding the four toes.
C. From the inside of the foot, pull the binding toward the front point and turn it tightly around the big toe.
D. Wrap the heel from the outer side of the foot, and pull the binding toward the front point. Wrap the front, except for the big toe.
E. Wrap over the instep, go around the ankle, and return to the instep.
F. Turn toward the heel, and wrap the binding from the inner side of the foot to the front point.
G. Wrap from the inner side and over the instep to the outer side. Wrap around the heel and pull the binding back towards the part of the binding cloth on the instep.
A French doctor who lived in Peking before the turn of the century described footbinding there in similar terms. The foot was first massaged, and then all toes but the big toe were bent under and maintained in position by a bandage which came to resemble a figure 8. The bandage was fashioned either of cotton or silk; to keep it from unraveling, a second and smaller bandage might be placed on top of it, to be sewn at several points. “Binding resulted in flexion of the last four toes and torsion, under the plantar, of the corresponding metatarsus. There was anteriorposterior compression of the foot through its point of support on the heelbone, and already perhaps, to a slight degree, exaggeration of the plantar cavity.”