Women in China have a long history of experiencing bindings of various kinds. Most famous are the “golden lotuses” or “golden lilies,” as bound feet were euphemistically called. Lately, I’ve been reading The Great Chinese Revolution by John King Fairbank, a frustrating book full of insights and interesting details but written in a style that makes it feel like penance to read. However, even cumbersome prose has the power occasionally to give one pause, if not steal one’s breath. Fairbank’s five-page overview of the history of footbinding had such an effect on me. Fairbank describes in excruciating detail the painful process of footbinding as well as its cultural impact in China generally and on women in particular. But it is a sentence noting the scale of the practice that left the deepest impression on me: “First and last one may guess that at least a billion Chinese girls during the thousand-year currency of this social custom suffered the agony of footbinding and reaped its rewards of pride and ecstasy, such as they were” (Fairbank 71).
At least a billion Chinese girls. Just the size of the number is sobering enough. A billion Chinese girls. That’s something akin to the entire population of China today hobbling about on bound feet. A billion Chinese girls. A haunting figure, but human suffering, for me, is measured best not in sums but instead in the lived experiences of individuals. That’s when it really gets to me—when I think of the individual pain of those billion Chinese girls. To comprehend this, we must reflect for a moment on what it meant to have one’s feet bound.
Typically, the process of footbinding began when a girl was somewhere between four and seven. The earlier the binding was initiated, the less severe the pain, but the pain was severe in every instance:
A girl’s foot was made small, preferably only three inches long, by pressing the four smaller toes under the sole or ball of the foot in order to make it narrower. At the same time it was made shorter by forcing the big toe and heel closer together so that the arch rose in a bowed shape. As a result the arch was broken and the foot could bear no weight except on the heel. (Fairbank 71)
Each of the girl’s small toes was broken in the process and forced by the increasingly tight wrappings to bend down under the foot, driving the broken arch up into the desired lotus shape. I can scarcely imagine the pain this must have entailed, but the initial deformation of the foot was just the opening act of a lifetime of suffering for a woman with bound feet:
After the first two years, the pain lessened. But constricting the feet to a three-inch size was only the beginning of trouble. By this time they were very private parts indeed and required daily care, washing and manicuring at the same time that they had to be kept constantly bound and shod night and day. Unmanicured nails could cut into the instep, bindings could destroy circulation, blood poisoning or gangrene could result. (Fairbank 72)
Like most oppressive practices, footbinding was supported by an ideology that infiltrated the minds of the empowered and the disempowered alike. In fact, it sometimes made them hard to distinguish. Ironically, the actual binder of a girl’s foot was a trusted female relative, typically her mother or grandmother. And in the late-19th and early 20th century, when efforts to abolish footbinding gathered force in China, women with bound feet sometimes were the reformers’ staunchest foes. Perhaps this should not be surprising, as no one had more invested in footbinding than they—few people will immediately embrace a view that requires them to conclude that their own suffering has all been for naught.
While women may have been responsible for the literal binding of a girl’s foot, the figurative binders were men, and the custom could have evolved into a norm only in a culture that was already deeply patriarchal. Classical Chinese erotic manuals suggest that women with bound feet gained sexual hypersensitivity, but such manuals were written by men for men, and the source of the purported “advantages” for women was likely the male imagination rather than the experience of any real women. Ultimately, footbinding revealed far more about the interconnection between male desire and power than anything else. A woman with bound feet was a housebound woman, a nearly immobile woman, a dependent woman, a woman who would always be small and something akin to a child. Footbinding, then, was an extreme form of eroticizing the subordination of women.
Footbinding disempowered women in terms that are easy to see and—from our vantage today—almost a reflex to oppose. The binding power of illiteracy is more insidious because it is hidden, more difficult to drive out because it is more difficult to see. Yet the binding of women’s minds in China shares a common cultural origin with the binding of their feet. The old Chinese saying, “A talentless woman is a virtuous women,” points toward the connection. Denying education to women, like binding their feet, immobilized women and inhibited their potential for growth.
The founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 offered the promise of change for Chinese women. In the early years of the PRC, Mao asserted that “women hold up half the sky” and instilled laws in support of gender equality—measures that ran counter to the patriarchal currents of traditional Chinese culture. To a large extent, the PRC has delivered on that promise, and the opportunities available to women in China today are unprecedented and would have been difficult to imagine a half-century ago. Even so, the promise has not been completely fulfilled, for the currents of tradition are strong, especially in rural areas. Only in the large cities has China come close to meeting its goal of universal literary, and a gender gap in the literacy rates of men and women has been present throughout the sixty-year history of the PRC. Even today, about fourteen percent of Chinese women are illiterate, compared with five percent of men. Granted, fourteen percent is a striking improvement over ninety, but the nearly ten-point gap between men and women is telling.
Highly educated Chinese women confront their own barriers as well. If women in the West still come up against the glass ceiling, women in China face something similar, though the glass here is tinted red. In both the governmental bureaucracy and the growing private sector, men continue to dominate high-level positions of power and influence. And the exceptional woman who rises to such heights pays a cultural price for her success. Women perceived as choosing career over family are disparagingly called “dragon women.” Perhaps such labels do the greatest harm not to the women so labeled but instead to girls and young women who’ve yet to choose their course in life. The phrase “dragon woman” is as much a warning as an indictment, an assertion that a woman ought not set her sights so high. Not surprisingly, no one ever speaks of dragon men.
Despite these constraints, I feel hopeful about the future for women in China, and my students surely contribute a great deal to this hope. At the beginning of the semester last fall, I asked the students to fill out information cards that included a question about career goals. The young women in my classes expressed a wide range of aspirations. They want to become translators, executives, educators, officials. Many also noted they wish to travel the world. That’s quite a shift in a culture where bound feet once prevented a billion women from aspiring to leave their own homes. Calling bound feet “golden lotuses” was always a misnomer, for the practice stunted growth and nipped lives in the bud. This is what I think about when I look at my students’ feet: in China, the lotuses are only just now beginning to bloom.
Work Cited
Fairbank, John King. The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985. Singapore: Harper Perennial, 1987.
1 comment:
"few people will immediately embrace a view that requires them to conclude that their own suffering has all been for naught."
Such an eloquent condensation of one of the basic problems of human social behavior -- hazing!
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