Topic: Opinion
This, and other body-modification schemes humanity has heaped upon our women over the centuries and across the continents, were never about 'beauty'. They were always about control.
In spirit, foot-binding is no different from the European corsets that broke the ribs, crushed the organs, and stunted the growth of women for hundreds of years; no different than the burkhas hard-line modern Islamists use to cover and anonymitize their women; a woman with a bound foot cannot walk far out of the family home, and a woman in a burkha can hardly go anywhere at all. These were measures put in to control women's movements and consequently subjugate their lives. Sure, you read literature about how 'golden lillies' were considered beautiful in old-time China, but such literature were always written by men, who determined a woman's worth through a standard that can only be achieved through artifice. Pallid, weakened women with artificial (not to say dangerous) 18" waists were also considered beautiful in old-time Western societies, but who determines these standards of beauty anyways, and why do we women perpetually fall for it? Why do I wear spiky high heels and think I look fantastic when barely able to hobble perilously from the curb to a restaurant door?
Speaking as a Chinese-American woman, I can tell you that foot-binding is no longer done (note the extreme age of the woman in the pictures) in China. My grandmother had feet that were bound by her mother, but she came of age shortly after the revolution in 1911 and her feet were 'liberated' and allowed to return to a more natural form. They did straighten back out, but never grew to normal adult size, instead remained small enough to wear child-size shoes all her life. Feet on Chinese girls were bound starting at about age 6-7, and were ostensibly a sign of affluence (the whole reason of 'control' notwithsanding and certainly unspoken) - a girl with bound feet will do no hard work, and certainly no peasant work like farming. In this, food-binding shares another commonality with European corsets - a corseted woman can't bend at the waist, run fast, or even turn around quickly; thus only ladies wore corsets, starting with 'training corsets' when pre-adolescents, and their servants did not. In modern ages, our equivalent might be tanning, or eating disorders; they are beauty-regimens of the affluent, and just as the olden days, such beauty can kill us so easily, much more galling because we do it to ourselves.
NPR Story on footbinding in China: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8966942&sc=emaf
