The young girl was subjected to this process by her mother, who bound the foot initially and prevented loosening of the bandages. Evidence that the child suffered intensely during the early stages is overwhelming:
Born into an oldfashioned family at P’inghsi, I was inflicted with the pain of footbinding when I was seven years old. I was an active child who liked to jump about, but from then on my free and optimistic nature vanished. Elder sister endured the process from six to eight years of age. It was in the first lunar month of my seventh year that my ears were pierced and fitted with gold earrings. I was told that a girl had to suffer twice, through ear piercing and footbinding. Binding started in the second lunar month; mother consulted references in order to select an auspicious day for it. I wept and hid in a neighbor’s home, but mother found me, scolded me, and dragged me home. She shut the bedroom door, boiled water, and from a box withdrew binding, shoes, knife, needle, and thread. I begged for a oneday postponement, but mother refused: “Today is a lucky day,” she said. “If bound today, your feet will never hurt; if bound tomorrow, they will.” She washed and placed alum on my feet and cut the toenails. She then bent my toes toward the plantar with a binding cloth ten feet long and two inches wide, doing the right foot first and then the left. She finished binding and ordered me to walk, but when I did the pain proved unbearable.
That night, mother wouldn’t let me remove the shoes. My feet felt on fire and I couldn’t sleep; mother struck me for crying. On the following days, I tried to hide but was forced to walk on my feet. Mother hit me on my hands and feet for resisting. Beatings and curses were my lot for covertly loosening the wrappings. The feet were washed and rebound after three or four days, with alum added. After several months, all toes but the big one were pressed against the inner surface. Whenever I ate fish or freshly killed meat, my feet would swell, and the pus would drip. Mother criticized me for placing pressure on the heel in walking, saying that my feet would never assume a pretty shape. Mother would remove the bindings and wipe the blood and pus which dripped from my feet. She told me that only with removal of the flesh could my feet become slender. If I mistakenly punctured a sore, the blood gushed like a stream. My somewhat-fleshy big toes were bound with small pieces of cloth and forced upwards, to assume a new moon shape.
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. Though I wanted to sit passively by the k’ang, Mother forced me to move around. After changing more than ten pairs of shoes, my feet were reduced to a little over four inches. I had been binding for a month when my younger sister started; when no one was around, we would weep together. In summer, my feet smelled offensively because of pus and blood; in winter, my feet felt cold because of lack of circulation and hurt if they got too near the k’ang and were struck by warm air currents. Four of the toes were curled in like so many dead caterpillars; no outsider would ever have believed that they belonged to a human being. It took two years to achieve the three-inch model. My toenails pressed against the flesh like thin paper. The heavily-creased plantar couldn’t be scratched when it itched or soothed when it ached. My shanks were thin, my feet became humped, ugly, and odoriferous; how I envied the natural-footed!
Foreign visitors in China about the turn of the century were appalled by the crippling effect of footbinding and the untold suffering which it caused. They denounced the practice as barbaric and, in the larger cities, were especially effective in organizing public sentiment against it. After the Manchus were overthrown, these foreign efforts were overwhelmingly supported by leaders of the new Republic, who made a determined effort to eradicate the practice once and for all. Footbinding was denounced as a reactionary and anti-democratic vestige of an autocratic age, and articulate opposition to it became widespread. The rationale behind footbinding in earlier times was gradually forgotten. Prior to the Revolution, however, there were many reasons for its perpetuation in China.
The preference for small feet by the Chinese went back to remote antiquity and was poetically expressed before the age of Confucius. The ancient admiration of women who took small and measured steps was part of an over-all code of feminine behavior which stressed the cultivation of gracefulness and poise. Large feet belonging to either sex were associated with lower class background. Even in the twentieth century, a concerned mother might confine the feet of a young son in tight linen socks to inhibit growth. A Chinese friend from Peking once remarked to me that residents there always wore socks and shoes and had small feet; by way of contrast he derided the Taiwanese, who usually wore wooden clogs or went about barefoot, for having large, wide feet.
X RAY COMPARISON OF BOUND AND NORMAL FOOT (PROVIDED BY A CHINESE AND AN ANNAMESE WOMAN OF THE SAME HEIGHT)
a. Small protuberance of the heel bone.
b. Cuboid.
c. Insertion of the Achilles tendon.
d. Top of the anklebone.
(from Vincent, La Medicine en Chine au XX Siecle)
Palace dancers probably originated footbinding in about the tenth century, which suggests that compression at first was only slight and not severe enough to seriously hamper movement. But as time went on and the practice spread beyond the palace, the foot became so compressed that the woman usually hobbled about with difficulty or had to lean on a wall, cane, or another person for support. One result of this virtual crippling, especially severe among upper-class ladies, was to confine women to the boudoir. They were thus physically prevented from moving about freely and unchaperoned and were rendered immune from the social disease of conjugal infidelity. A Chinese manual for women reasoned that footbinding was a restraining device: “Why are feet bound? It is not because they are good looking with their bowed arch, but rather because men feared that women might easily leave their quarters and therefore had their feet bound tightly in order to prevent this.” The same point of view was expressed in a folk ditty of Hopei Province: “Bound feet, bound feet, past the gate can’t retreat.” The possibility of improper behavior was sharply reduced by making it inconvenient for women to get about on tiny feet, in a nation where feminine chastity was to become a vital part of the moral standard: “It is a trifling matter to die of starvation, but a grave matter to lose one’s chastity.” A Yuan dynasty work laid further stress on this viewpoint:
Pen-shou asked her mother: “Why do women of upper-class families have to bind their feet?” Her mother replied: “I understand that the sages looked upon women with gravity and did not permit them to flit about. For this reason, they bound their feet. Their sphere of operation therefore did not extend beyond the women’s quarters. If they wanted to go out, they had to do so in sedan chairs which were concealed by screens. There was, then, no need for them to use their feet.”
Traditional apologists asserted that footbinding, by making the woman’s foot much smaller than the man’s, more clearly defined visual points of difference between the sexes. They criticized the natural-footed female because her feet lacked diminutiveness and were therefore unfeminine and referred to her by such derisive names as Duck-foot and Lotus Boat. To rebel against footbinding was as unthinkable as to oppose traditional Chinese mores, with their insistence on maintaining a sharp cleavage between men and women. In order to ensure separation of the sexes, girls seven or older were forbidden to sit together with boys. Young ladies were even instructed to avoid speaking with brothers-in-law, as this might be interpreted as a presumption of intimacy. Conservative thinkers of the past alleged that applying rouge, putting on make up, piercing the ears, and binding the feet were all necessary practices which enabled women to conform to the social dictum that they had to differ from men in every visible physical aspect.