July 19, 2010 • 19 mins
Foot binding is an ancient Chinese practice that was popular for centuries before it was outlawed in 1912. Molly and Cristen take a closer look at this extreme practice's history, cultural significance, controversies and side effects in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom never told you?
From House to works dot Com. He and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Today we're
(00:20):
gonna do a subject that has been requested a few
times over the course of of our history during this podcast,
and I hope that eventually we'll get to everyone's suggestions,
because you guys are full of good ones. But the
one we're going to discuss today is footbinding. Yes, Chinese
foot binding. It's something that I think a lot of
people are familiar with. Um, it does not it's a
(00:41):
practice that does not happen anymore. In fact, there are
maybe a couple of hundred women, it's estimated, left in
China who still have bound feet. Yeah. There have actually
been a lot of pieces in the last few years
about these, you know, women that are dying off and
how eventually you know, if you on to see bound feet,
you won't be able to anymore. Um, But it doesn't
(01:04):
seem to be you know, no one's no one's weeping
over it in China. Yeah. And and a lot of
times when we hear about footbinding, it's often in this
very negative sense of symbol of kind of women being subjugated,
having their feet broken at a at a young age,
and being bound and and essentially crippling them. Um. But
(01:24):
the information that Molly and I found painted a much
more complex picture of where footbinding came from and why
it happened even after it was outlawed in nineteen twelve.
So Molly, why don't we travel back in time to
the Song dynasty in China in the Southern Tang Kingdom
(01:47):
around UH nine sixty to a d Yeah, that's when
the first historical records show that there was actually footbinding happening.
And the story goes that the ruler had his heart
captured by a concubine dancer who bound her feet so
that she could do what she called a lotus dance. Yes,
(02:10):
and you might think of this. She wrapped her feet
in silk, and it sounds like it was something similar
to point shoes that ballet dancers were in order to
dence up on the Tipit does, but then uh, it
took a more extreme form as it caught on and
to actually bind feet what you to do as you
would break the toes so that they would go under
(02:32):
the foot, and the goal was to try and curve,
just make this monster arch so that those toes ended
up as close to the heels as possible. Three inches
was what you were aiming for in terms of foot length, right,
And these tiny, tiny feet were considered very attractive on
women back in the day. In fact, a woman would
(02:55):
make herself more marriageable but smaller the bound feet that
she had. Yeah, and that gets into the reasons why
you do it. And we found several conflicting things on this.
For one, because it started off in the kingdoms, uh,
it was seen as a sign of royalty. Then the
upper class kind of took it on as you know,
a sign of wealth and class, sort of the same
(03:16):
way that high heels caught on in that being able
to wear these really tiny shoes show that you didn't
have to go into the fields and work like everyone else.
But then it caught on among the lower classes for
the reason that Kristen mentions and that it made you
It made it possible to marry up essentially, because if
you had bound feet as a peasant, then you know,
if you found some wealthier guy who was willing to
marry you, you you wouldn't all of a sudden look out
(03:37):
of place when you entered his house. But then there
are others who say it was to keep the women
at home so that they wouldn't travel very far. They
had to basically stay home and work in the house
because they couldn't go anywhere. Uh. And then there's you know,
just questions of how erotic the men actually found it. Yes,
if you go back to ancient Chinese text you'll find
(04:02):
books detailing certain things sexual things that men could do
just to women's feet and obviously bound feet. Um, we're
not exactly if you if you unwrapped them. A lot
of times they were smelly, and they were prone to decay,
and they were also you know, the product of broken
bones and almost looked like hoofs, so we we wouldn't
(04:25):
think of them as as conventionally attractive. However, a lot
of times men would only see women's feet, women's bound
feet when they were covered in their special silken lotus
shoes that were often embroidered and lovely patterns and things
like that. And Um, one of the stories that we
found noted that one of the most erotic things that
(04:47):
a man could do in ancient China was too simply
pinch the toe area of a lotus shoe. Just even
touching the outside of the shoe was considered just highly
highly sexual, was going to like third base catching a shoe.
In fact, there was one book that had just forty
eight different ways you could touch a woman's foot. That
(05:08):
was sort of, I guess the kommissutra of of the day. Yeah,
but it wasn't all. Historians and anthropologists today are quick
to point out that it wasn't all about some kind
of cultural foot fetish um. There were also economic drivers
as well and UM. A story we found in the
Wall Street Journal highlights the research of Melissa Brown, who's
an assistant professor of anthropology at Stanford University, and she
(05:32):
said that in the poorer households a lot of these
women would practice foot binding um because of economics, because
the women. It forced the women and girls to work
at home spinning the yawn, processing tea and chucking oysters,
you know, and with their their feet bound, they couldn't necessarily,
(05:52):
you know, they weren't very mobile and couldn't really leave
the home. Um and and trek off on their own.
And there's also want to bring up a cultural element
to it, you know. Basically, I think that we look
at it from very historical perspective and we're like, why
would you want to have your toes broken and your
feet made into these hoofs. But one researcher really emphasized
(06:13):
that this was something that your mother had done, your
grandmother had done. It was a cultural sign that you
were becoming a woman, that you wore a woman, uh,
you know, no different than the things we do maybe
to squeeze into high heels today. Um. In fact, when
it was outlawed, some of women would hide the fact
that they were still doing it because it was such
this you know, status symbol and cultural symbol of womanhood. Yeah,
(06:37):
I mean, and we if we think about things like course,
it's back in the day women were squeezing themselves unnaturally
into these you know, whalebone corsets that even doctors back
then said, we're not very good for for our backs
and for breathing and for our internal organs. So while
foot binding definitely seems even more extreme than that, you know,
(06:59):
it was, and culture we've still practice, you know, our
our own set of kind of bizarre fashion rituals that
symbolize womanhood and you know, an attractive, beautiful woman. So
now footbinding loses its hold on society after the Opium Wars,
when the foreign missionaries came into China, and that's when
(07:21):
people start to say, whoa, if you're binding a woman's feet,
that's that's very oppressive. You really shouldn't be doing that.
And so in you start to see these anti footing
binding societies forming, um telling you know, men that not
to do this, men and women not to do this
to their children's feet, that it was making China look barbaric,
that China was losing face to the rest of the world,
(07:41):
and it was outlawed in nineteen twelve. Yeah, and not
only have scholars suggested that, you know, it was really
you know, these Western missionaries and kind of the injury
lovers coming in and saying, whoa, this is footbinding is
not healthy, need to stop doing that. The Wall Street
Journal also points out that there might have also been
an economic reason behind foot binding losing its prestige, because
(08:06):
also in the early twentieth century, machine made cotton yarn
became more widely available, and also uh tea prices started
to go down, and so with that you have the
demise of these home industries such as spinning yarn and
harvesting tea leaves that initially kept made it necessary to
(08:26):
keep the women and the girls home. So there was
this other component to that. So, like you said, Molly,
in nineteen twelve, we have the official outlawing of foot binding. However,
the practice lingered, especially in remote areas of China, and
in nineteen census in rural Shanxi Province found that eighteen
(08:47):
percent of women still had bound feet. But you know,
when the communist government took power in nineteen forty nine,
they're sort of the ones who really hit home that
you've got to stop doing this no matter where you are,
it's backward. And part of that was just because as
everyone had to go out into the fields and work,
and so these women you couldn't keep up with the
rest of the of the pack, and they were shamed
very harshly for their for their inability to move. Now,
(09:10):
Louisa Limb from NPR points out that the women who
were growing up when the Chinese came in and really
started to enforce the ban on foot binding, uh experienced
shaming by two eras because when they were young foot
binding was already forbidden, so they had to bind their
feet in secret. And then if you know, they go out,
(09:31):
they you know, they aren't very mobile, and they kind
of have to um to hide this thing that that
they're doing, this very painful thing that they're doing. And
then when the communist era rolls around and they have
to go out and start farming again, they're shunned for
the second time because since they're they're unbound feet, are
not able to um carry them as quickly and nimbly
(09:54):
in the fields as people who had unbound feet. So
at first, you know, they were they were kind of
these backward people who still had bound feet, and then
there were these kind of lagging, unproductive workers. Yeah, I
found it really interesting about how those those people hid
the fact they're still doing footbinding when it was first
(10:15):
outlawed in nineteen eleven. I mean, you were you were
subject to find if they found out you were footbinding.
So they would um wrap their feet only at night
and in the day when inspectors might come around and
see you'd unwrap it. And it seems like the process
of wrapping and unwrapping would be more painful than just
like wrapping it and keeping it wrapped right becau since
(10:35):
some of the practices with footbinding, they would intentionally um
start the wrapping process in the winter since it would
be so cold that it would numb the young girls feet.
So I mean imagining doing that process every day or
whenever the the inspectors would come by. I'm sure it
was was not could not have been um pleasant to
(10:57):
say the least. And it wasn't just their feet that
were affected, as you can imagine, kind of like with
with women who bound themselves up in corsets. Um. There
were many physiological implications that came along with foot binding,
including a outside swelling of the abdomen in a line
down the back due to the muscle stress and lumbar
(11:19):
vertebrae that would curve forward. Because binding the feet forced
woman to shift her weight on her lower body, putting
pressure on her pelvis and eventually lowering it, which actually
caused a sacrum to be longer and wider. So this
the feet. The binding of the feet had effects all
(11:40):
over a woman's body. Would literally change a woman's body, which,
as you can imagine, affected women as they aged. Yeah.
In the University of California, San Francisco, did the first
study on the consequences of footbinding, and so at that
time there were all these elderly women who had grown
up having their feet bound, and so they staid long
term health effects. And the study found obviously that the
(12:04):
women had foot deformities, but like Kristen said, it it
just affected their whole body. They couldn't get out of
a chair without assistance compared to women who hadn't had
bound feet, uh, and this made them less able to
do daily acts like going to the bathroom, working around
the house. Uh. They weren't much raad or risk suffering
hip or spine fractures. The women who hadn't had bound feet.
(12:24):
They had lower hip bone density, lower spine bone density.
But the thing they said is that for all the
difficulties uh that the women were subject to, they did
not complain. And so they didn't know if that was
a cultural thing that they were reluctant to do it,
or if they just gotten used to being, you know,
essentially deformed. Right. Because again, um, these these lotus shoes
(12:47):
that they would wear were highly prized. I mean up
until not too long ago, there was still one shoe
factory in China that produced these these special small shoes
for the tiny population of women who still had bound feet,
and um it was also a major part of women's
(13:07):
handicrafts back in the day. As um. There was a
researcher from Barnard College, Dorothy Co who um went into
these villages and really studied, um all of the handicrafts
that went into making lotus shoes and how not only
important they were to the women, but also um important
(13:30):
they were to some of their religious rituals as well.
For instance, Co points out that, UM, some people would
make an offering of even miniature load issues um to
certain gods because they thought that they would be helpful
for praying for sons. And you know, even in these
(13:52):
recent pieces that have come out two thousand sevent nine,
uh about these last women who have these these bound feet,
the reporters seem to pick up on the fact that
they're still pretty proud of their feet. Yeah, they still
look down kind of admiringly, like my feet are so dainty.
My feet are still attractive to my husband. Maybe I
can't dance as well, but but this is you know,
(14:12):
how I was raised to to look. And I think
that it kind of does give you a little bit
of a sense of you know, in a hundred years,
what will we look back on and be like, man,
that was crazy? How did we do that? Will it
be high heels? Would it be you know the type
Jeanes we try and fit into, Like, what's going to
be the thing in a hundred years that we're going
to be like, why did we do that? Well? I mean,
I think the thing too with the foot binding is
(14:32):
that it's so extreme because you are physically altering your body,
breaking bones and tendons and um, you know, from a
very young age in order to kind of reshape the
foot and so so Yeah, I mean I think that
I think that we can't not say that foot binding
is extreme. But it's just one example, maybe on the
(14:55):
extreme end of the spectrum of kind of, like you said, Molly,
the bizarre things that we do in order to make
ourselves conventionally attractive in our cultures. Yeah, I think that
it because it is so extreme, it becomes this symbol
of everything that's wrong with the beauty myth. But you know,
it was kind of striking and when reading this research,
how you know, I think that if these women had
(15:16):
had the choice to do it again, they would have right,
because one thing that Dorothy co from Barnard emphasizes and
her analysis of footbinding is that we shouldn't just look
at these women as victims of this practice. You know,
there are just so many different layers to why footbinding happened,
from you know, kind of the more erotic elements that
we talked about, trickling down to how it was integrated
(15:39):
into more rural communities, um and and looking at it
from a more holistic perspective than just making the snap
judgment of oh my god, what a backward tradition, how
could that it possibly happened? Well, said Kristen. I don't
know if we've got anything else to cover on this,
so let's open it up to listeners. What do you
guys think about footbinding? Any historical fun facts we might
(16:01):
have missed that you'd like to let us and the
listeners know about. We'd love to hear from you guys.
And speaking of a listener, Maile, let's read a little
bit of it. I have an email from Lily who
was writing about the feminist role models and children's book podcasts.
She writes, the ones I thought you missed for the
books Cheaper by the dozen and especially bells on their toes.
(16:24):
Bells on their toes is so fantastic and I can't
wait to share this book with young girls. Uh, these
books are hilarious and so relatable to kids. I laughed
out loud reading these books and really wanted a large family.
They have a great message and focus on family values,
and though they are set back in the day with
super traditional men and women roles, I still think there
are definitely pro feminist messages in the book. Furthermore, there's
a nice arc of the females in the book battling
(16:46):
sexist views, for example and bells on their toes. The
mother is recently widowed and now has sole responsibility but
large family and struggles to keep her family together while
working in a man's field engineering efficiency, but she succeeds
by making a demonstration of efficiency in kitchen designs because
that's the females area of expertise. I think reading this
book was the most girl power book of my youth,
(17:08):
so I definitely recommend it to your listeners. All right, Well,
I've got an email here from Mike and this is
in response for our podcasts on whether or not men
and women can just be friends, and uh, he sent
us a little equation to calculate whether or not platonic
pals may or may not engage in UM a little
(17:31):
hanky panking. So here's what Mike hast to say. He says,
Number one, how much time do the pals spend together
in a given day, week, or month. Let's call this
factor T. Number two, Do they share real stuff like feelings, hopes, streams,
or just super superficial stuff like chatting about entertainment? Let's
call this S. Do they drink alcohol together or do drugs?
(17:54):
Let's call this D. Are they in committed relationships with
other people? Let's call this factor SEE. And do they
find one another at least somewhat attractive? Let's call this A.
He says, if T time together is fifteen hours or
more per month, if they s share real stuff like feelings, hopes,
and dreams. If the answer to D in terms of
(18:16):
drinking alcohol and doing drugs is yes, And if they
SEE are not in committed relationships and A find each
other at least somewhat attractive, then Mike says yes, sex
will happen at some point. So there you have it
for Mike. There's the official UM platonic friends equation five
(18:39):
variable approach. The five variable approach. You guys and girls
do the math out there, So thanks for sending that in.
And again, our email is mom Stuff at how stuff
works dot com and Molly and I would love for
you to all go on Facebook right now, don't hesitate
and like our face page where it's stuff I've Never
(19:01):
told You on Facebook? What could be easier than that?
Just click like so we asked for And you can
also follow us on Twitter where mom Stuff podcasts there.
And of course we have a blog, It's Stuff I've
Never told You and it is found at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, is that how stuff works dot com. Want
(19:24):
more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the
house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to you
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are
you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom never told you?
From House to works dot Com. He and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Today we're
(00:20):
gonna do a subject that has been requested a few
times over the course of of our history during this podcast,
and I hope that eventually we'll get to everyone's suggestions,
because you guys are full of good ones. But the
one we're going to discuss today is footbinding. Yes, Chinese
foot binding. It's something that I think a lot of
people are familiar with. Um, it does not it's a
(00:41):
practice that does not happen anymore. In fact, there are
maybe a couple of hundred women, it's estimated, left in
China who still have bound feet. Yeah. There have actually
been a lot of pieces in the last few years
about these, you know, women that are dying off and
how eventually you know, if you on to see bound feet,
you won't be able to anymore. Um, But it doesn't
(01:04):
seem to be you know, no one's no one's weeping
over it in China. Yeah. And and a lot of
times when we hear about footbinding, it's often in this
very negative sense of symbol of kind of women being subjugated,
having their feet broken at a at a young age,
and being bound and and essentially crippling them. Um. But
(01:24):
the information that Molly and I found painted a much
more complex picture of where footbinding came from and why
it happened even after it was outlawed in nineteen twelve.
So Molly, why don't we travel back in time to
the Song dynasty in China in the Southern Tang Kingdom
(01:47):
around UH nine sixty to a d Yeah, that's when
the first historical records show that there was actually footbinding happening.
And the story goes that the ruler had his heart
captured by a concubine dancer who bound her feet so
that she could do what she called a lotus dance. Yes,
(02:10):
and you might think of this. She wrapped her feet
in silk, and it sounds like it was something similar
to point shoes that ballet dancers were in order to
dence up on the Tipit does, but then uh, it
took a more extreme form as it caught on and
to actually bind feet what you to do as you
would break the toes so that they would go under
(02:32):
the foot, and the goal was to try and curve,
just make this monster arch so that those toes ended
up as close to the heels as possible. Three inches
was what you were aiming for in terms of foot length, right,
And these tiny, tiny feet were considered very attractive on
women back in the day. In fact, a woman would
(02:55):
make herself more marriageable but smaller the bound feet that
she had. Yeah, and that gets into the reasons why
you do it. And we found several conflicting things on this.
For one, because it started off in the kingdoms, uh,
it was seen as a sign of royalty. Then the
upper class kind of took it on as you know,
a sign of wealth and class, sort of the same
(03:16):
way that high heels caught on in that being able
to wear these really tiny shoes show that you didn't
have to go into the fields and work like everyone else.
But then it caught on among the lower classes for
the reason that Kristen mentions and that it made you
It made it possible to marry up essentially, because if
you had bound feet as a peasant, then you know,
if you found some wealthier guy who was willing to
marry you, you you wouldn't all of a sudden look out
(03:37):
of place when you entered his house. But then there
are others who say it was to keep the women
at home so that they wouldn't travel very far. They
had to basically stay home and work in the house
because they couldn't go anywhere. Uh. And then there's you know,
just questions of how erotic the men actually found it. Yes,
if you go back to ancient Chinese text you'll find
(04:02):
books detailing certain things sexual things that men could do
just to women's feet and obviously bound feet. Um, we're
not exactly if you if you unwrapped them. A lot
of times they were smelly, and they were prone to decay,
and they were also you know, the product of broken
bones and almost looked like hoofs, so we we wouldn't
(04:25):
think of them as as conventionally attractive. However, a lot
of times men would only see women's feet, women's bound
feet when they were covered in their special silken lotus
shoes that were often embroidered and lovely patterns and things
like that. And Um, one of the stories that we
found noted that one of the most erotic things that
(04:47):
a man could do in ancient China was too simply
pinch the toe area of a lotus shoe. Just even
touching the outside of the shoe was considered just highly
highly sexual, was going to like third base catching a shoe.
In fact, there was one book that had just forty
eight different ways you could touch a woman's foot. That
(05:08):
was sort of, I guess the kommissutra of of the day. Yeah,
but it wasn't all. Historians and anthropologists today are quick
to point out that it wasn't all about some kind
of cultural foot fetish um. There were also economic drivers
as well and UM. A story we found in the
Wall Street Journal highlights the research of Melissa Brown, who's
an assistant professor of anthropology at Stanford University, and she
(05:32):
said that in the poorer households a lot of these
women would practice foot binding um because of economics, because
the women. It forced the women and girls to work
at home spinning the yawn, processing tea and chucking oysters,
you know, and with their their feet bound, they couldn't necessarily,
(05:52):
you know, they weren't very mobile and couldn't really leave
the home. Um and and trek off on their own.
And there's also want to bring up a cultural element
to it, you know. Basically, I think that we look
at it from very historical perspective and we're like, why
would you want to have your toes broken and your
feet made into these hoofs. But one researcher really emphasized
(06:13):
that this was something that your mother had done, your
grandmother had done. It was a cultural sign that you
were becoming a woman, that you wore a woman, uh,
you know, no different than the things we do maybe
to squeeze into high heels today. Um. In fact, when
it was outlawed, some of women would hide the fact
that they were still doing it because it was such
this you know, status symbol and cultural symbol of womanhood. Yeah,
(06:37):
I mean, and we if we think about things like course,
it's back in the day women were squeezing themselves unnaturally
into these you know, whalebone corsets that even doctors back
then said, we're not very good for for our backs
and for breathing and for our internal organs. So while
foot binding definitely seems even more extreme than that, you know,
(06:59):
it was, and culture we've still practice, you know, our
our own set of kind of bizarre fashion rituals that
symbolize womanhood and you know, an attractive, beautiful woman. So
now footbinding loses its hold on society after the Opium Wars,
when the foreign missionaries came into China, and that's when
(07:21):
people start to say, whoa, if you're binding a woman's feet,
that's that's very oppressive. You really shouldn't be doing that.
And so in you start to see these anti footing
binding societies forming, um telling you know, men that not
to do this, men and women not to do this
to their children's feet, that it was making China look barbaric,
that China was losing face to the rest of the world,
(07:41):
and it was outlawed in nineteen twelve. Yeah, and not
only have scholars suggested that, you know, it was really
you know, these Western missionaries and kind of the injury
lovers coming in and saying, whoa, this is footbinding is
not healthy, need to stop doing that. The Wall Street
Journal also points out that there might have also been
an economic reason behind foot binding losing its prestige, because
(08:06):
also in the early twentieth century, machine made cotton yarn
became more widely available, and also uh tea prices started
to go down, and so with that you have the
demise of these home industries such as spinning yarn and
harvesting tea leaves that initially kept made it necessary to
(08:26):
keep the women and the girls home. So there was
this other component to that. So, like you said, Molly,
in nineteen twelve, we have the official outlawing of foot binding. However,
the practice lingered, especially in remote areas of China, and
in nineteen census in rural Shanxi Province found that eighteen
(08:47):
percent of women still had bound feet. But you know,
when the communist government took power in nineteen forty nine,
they're sort of the ones who really hit home that
you've got to stop doing this no matter where you are,
it's backward. And part of that was just because as
everyone had to go out into the fields and work,
and so these women you couldn't keep up with the
rest of the of the pack, and they were shamed
very harshly for their for their inability to move. Now,
(09:10):
Louisa Limb from NPR points out that the women who
were growing up when the Chinese came in and really
started to enforce the ban on foot binding, uh experienced
shaming by two eras because when they were young foot
binding was already forbidden, so they had to bind their
feet in secret. And then if you know, they go out,
(09:31):
they you know, they aren't very mobile, and they kind
of have to um to hide this thing that that
they're doing, this very painful thing that they're doing. And
then when the communist era rolls around and they have
to go out and start farming again, they're shunned for
the second time because since they're they're unbound feet, are
not able to um carry them as quickly and nimbly
(09:54):
in the fields as people who had unbound feet. So
at first, you know, they were they were kind of
these backward people who still had bound feet, and then
there were these kind of lagging, unproductive workers. Yeah, I
found it really interesting about how those those people hid
the fact they're still doing footbinding when it was first
(10:15):
outlawed in nineteen eleven. I mean, you were you were
subject to find if they found out you were footbinding.
So they would um wrap their feet only at night
and in the day when inspectors might come around and
see you'd unwrap it. And it seems like the process
of wrapping and unwrapping would be more painful than just
like wrapping it and keeping it wrapped right becau since
(10:35):
some of the practices with footbinding, they would intentionally um
start the wrapping process in the winter since it would
be so cold that it would numb the young girls feet.
So I mean imagining doing that process every day or
whenever the the inspectors would come by. I'm sure it
was was not could not have been um pleasant to
(10:57):
say the least. And it wasn't just their feet that
were affected, as you can imagine, kind of like with
with women who bound themselves up in corsets. Um. There
were many physiological implications that came along with foot binding,
including a outside swelling of the abdomen in a line
down the back due to the muscle stress and lumbar
(11:19):
vertebrae that would curve forward. Because binding the feet forced
woman to shift her weight on her lower body, putting
pressure on her pelvis and eventually lowering it, which actually
caused a sacrum to be longer and wider. So this
the feet. The binding of the feet had effects all
(11:40):
over a woman's body. Would literally change a woman's body, which,
as you can imagine, affected women as they aged. Yeah.
In the University of California, San Francisco, did the first
study on the consequences of footbinding, and so at that
time there were all these elderly women who had grown
up having their feet bound, and so they staid long
term health effects. And the study found obviously that the
(12:04):
women had foot deformities, but like Kristen said, it it
just affected their whole body. They couldn't get out of
a chair without assistance compared to women who hadn't had
bound feet, uh, and this made them less able to
do daily acts like going to the bathroom, working around
the house. Uh. They weren't much raad or risk suffering
hip or spine fractures. The women who hadn't had bound feet.
(12:24):
They had lower hip bone density, lower spine bone density.
But the thing they said is that for all the
difficulties uh that the women were subject to, they did
not complain. And so they didn't know if that was
a cultural thing that they were reluctant to do it,
or if they just gotten used to being, you know,
essentially deformed. Right. Because again, um, these these lotus shoes
(12:47):
that they would wear were highly prized. I mean up
until not too long ago, there was still one shoe
factory in China that produced these these special small shoes
for the tiny population of women who still had bound feet,
and um it was also a major part of women's
(13:07):
handicrafts back in the day. As um. There was a
researcher from Barnard College, Dorothy Co who um went into
these villages and really studied, um all of the handicrafts
that went into making lotus shoes and how not only
important they were to the women, but also um important
(13:30):
they were to some of their religious rituals as well.
For instance, Co points out that, UM, some people would
make an offering of even miniature load issues um to
certain gods because they thought that they would be helpful
for praying for sons. And you know, even in these
(13:52):
recent pieces that have come out two thousand sevent nine,
uh about these last women who have these these bound feet,
the reporters seem to pick up on the fact that
they're still pretty proud of their feet. Yeah, they still
look down kind of admiringly, like my feet are so dainty.
My feet are still attractive to my husband. Maybe I
can't dance as well, but but this is you know,
(14:12):
how I was raised to to look. And I think
that it kind of does give you a little bit
of a sense of you know, in a hundred years,
what will we look back on and be like, man,
that was crazy? How did we do that? Will it
be high heels? Would it be you know the type
Jeanes we try and fit into, Like, what's going to
be the thing in a hundred years that we're going
to be like, why did we do that? Well? I mean,
I think the thing too with the foot binding is
(14:32):
that it's so extreme because you are physically altering your body,
breaking bones and tendons and um, you know, from a
very young age in order to kind of reshape the
foot and so so Yeah, I mean I think that
I think that we can't not say that foot binding
is extreme. But it's just one example, maybe on the
(14:55):
extreme end of the spectrum of kind of, like you said, Molly,
the bizarre things that we do in order to make
ourselves conventionally attractive in our cultures. Yeah, I think that
it because it is so extreme, it becomes this symbol
of everything that's wrong with the beauty myth. But you know,
it was kind of striking and when reading this research,
how you know, I think that if these women had
(15:16):
had the choice to do it again, they would have right,
because one thing that Dorothy co from Barnard emphasizes and
her analysis of footbinding is that we shouldn't just look
at these women as victims of this practice. You know,
there are just so many different layers to why footbinding happened,
from you know, kind of the more erotic elements that
we talked about, trickling down to how it was integrated
(15:39):
into more rural communities, um and and looking at it
from a more holistic perspective than just making the snap
judgment of oh my god, what a backward tradition, how
could that it possibly happened? Well, said Kristen. I don't
know if we've got anything else to cover on this,
so let's open it up to listeners. What do you
guys think about footbinding? Any historical fun facts we might
(16:01):
have missed that you'd like to let us and the
listeners know about. We'd love to hear from you guys.
And speaking of a listener, Maile, let's read a little
bit of it. I have an email from Lily who
was writing about the feminist role models and children's book podcasts.
She writes, the ones I thought you missed for the
books Cheaper by the dozen and especially bells on their toes.
(16:24):
Bells on their toes is so fantastic and I can't
wait to share this book with young girls. Uh, these
books are hilarious and so relatable to kids. I laughed
out loud reading these books and really wanted a large family.
They have a great message and focus on family values,
and though they are set back in the day with
super traditional men and women roles, I still think there
are definitely pro feminist messages in the book. Furthermore, there's
a nice arc of the females in the book battling
(16:46):
sexist views, for example and bells on their toes. The
mother is recently widowed and now has sole responsibility but
large family and struggles to keep her family together while
working in a man's field engineering efficiency, but she succeeds
by making a demonstration of efficiency in kitchen designs because
that's the females area of expertise. I think reading this
book was the most girl power book of my youth,
(17:08):
so I definitely recommend it to your listeners. All right, Well,
I've got an email here from Mike and this is
in response for our podcasts on whether or not men
and women can just be friends, and uh, he sent
us a little equation to calculate whether or not platonic
pals may or may not engage in UM a little
(17:31):
hanky panking. So here's what Mike hast to say. He says,
Number one, how much time do the pals spend together
in a given day, week, or month. Let's call this
factor T. Number two, Do they share real stuff like feelings, hopes, streams,
or just super superficial stuff like chatting about entertainment? Let's
call this S. Do they drink alcohol together or do drugs?
(17:54):
Let's call this D. Are they in committed relationships with
other people? Let's call this factor SEE. And do they
find one another at least somewhat attractive? Let's call this A.
He says, if T time together is fifteen hours or
more per month, if they s share real stuff like feelings, hopes,
and dreams. If the answer to D in terms of
(18:16):
drinking alcohol and doing drugs is yes, And if they
SEE are not in committed relationships and A find each
other at least somewhat attractive, then Mike says yes, sex
will happen at some point. So there you have it
for Mike. There's the official UM platonic friends equation five
(18:39):
variable approach. The five variable approach. You guys and girls
do the math out there, So thanks for sending that in.
And again, our email is mom Stuff at how stuff
works dot com and Molly and I would love for
you to all go on Facebook right now, don't hesitate
and like our face page where it's stuff I've Never
(19:01):
told You on Facebook? What could be easier than that?
Just click like so we asked for And you can
also follow us on Twitter where mom Stuff podcasts there.
And of course we have a blog, It's Stuff I've
Never told You and it is found at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, is that how stuff works dot com. Want
(19:24):
more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the
house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to you
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