Liliana C. Melo
Professor Janet Storti
English 101.5767
Paper No. 3, Draft No. 1
October 26, 2006
Footbinding … The Path towards Beauty and Pain
"If you love your daughter, bind her feet; if you love your son, let him study,"
- Old Chinese Saying Throughout time women have deformed, mutilated, bounded, changed, manipulated,
damaged, and altered their bodies not only to survive in the society, but also to satisfy the men
sexually. Footbinding was just one of the many ways in which Chinese women participated in and
became bound to patriarchy. Chinese footbinding was implemented in the Chinese cultural values
and traditions and wasn’t just about alluring a man with the “Golden Lotus.” The little girls of
wealthy Chinese families had their feet bent double, sometimes with bones broken, and bound that
way making them barely able to walk so the pain was lovely. In addition, footbinding symbolized
the Chinese nation, civilized man, and the patriarchal power. However, it was the manner to
introduce a young girl to the patriarchal power that would exist and dictate a woman throughout her
entire life. In the chapter III “Footbinding and the Cult of the Exemplary Woman” of the book Aching
for Beauty by Wang Ping describes the footbinding as a duality due to not only its beauty and
charm, but also its deformity and foul odor. The oscillation between moral restriction and great
expenditure not only affected women, but also affected the economy, culture, as well as language.
“The rise of footbinding, together with the rise of the cult of the exemplary woman, symbolizes the
social, political, and cultural predicaments in the late imperial period” (Ping 55).
Footbinding was the tool to threaten the peasants and foreign invasions. In order to deal
with the political and economic problems, the system imposed heavy taxes, secret police, strict
laws, and stringent punishment. Footbinding was also the way to confine women to their inner
chambers and keep them chaste. However, footbinding was the way for royalty, officials, and rich
merchants to turn around pleasures (food, drink, sex, art, and the construction of grand gardens
and monuments.) For example, noble and rich men could spread his idleness through wasting of
resources as a synonym of his wealth and social power. While women become one of the most
important valuable goods that men owned and enjoyed. That is how women transmitted the
meaning of womanhood through their talent, virtue, and beauty bringing a new concept of ideal
femininity. As a result, footbinding was considered as an aesthetic fashion to safeguard of morality
and to make boundaries between gender and hierarchy. Ping suggests:
China oscillated between the high moral restriction and purification of neo-Confucianism and the
corrupting of the flesh; between the urge to make boundaries for gender and hierarchy, to hold
things in their fixed places through languages; and the blur of all divisions, the flow of the contents
out of their containment, and the destruction of all barriers (56)
Footbinding served social purposes such as style and status marker for the elite marriage,
for if gender definitions among the elite were served, so were moral prescriptions of the social
conservative. Ping establishes the ways moral advocates exploited the custom of footbinding in
times of significant social upheaval, using this violent regimentation of the feminine to stifle the
subversion of the established domestic construct (58). In Late Imperial China, from the Song era
through the Qing, Neo-Confucians were concerned with the disruptions brought by urbanization,
anonymity and social change; for example, the reversal of hierarchies among family members and
between sexes or women refusing to marry. However, in the Qing era, “there was no moral,
religious or legal prohibition against men seeking pleasure, adultery held great attraction, because
sleeping with other people’s wives was the greatest transgression in every sense”(Ping 63).
Footbinding enforced strict sexual and social roles—sexual definitions were writ large, and the
defiance of custom seen in Southern cities among the prosperous had a natural enemy in the
bound foot. Ancient forms of domesticity were preserved per force. Despite the fact that footbinding
was considered as the essential symbol of female sexuality, it was deeply conserving of social and
domestic hierarchies.
Footbinding was a painful process that allowed women to be thought of as beautiful and a
good future wife. The cult of the exemplary woman in the Ming and Qing dynasties reached the
most terrible self-mutilations and the most shocking methods of suicide (Ping 69). For example,
some women cut of their noses, ears, hair, or arms; they also destroyed their faces – all in order to
show their determination not to remarry or were raped by soldiers or bandits. Also, some of them
committed suicide in order to keep their chastity. In the present of this situation, Ming and Qing
scholars decided to collect and record these stories with great fervor and passion in order to help
to spread the cult to wide-reaching areas of China. Ping confirms:
The cultural fetishization of the female body through footbinding an the cult of the exemplary
woman was not a mere coincidental or isolated phenomenon, but was connected to the political,
economic, and social situations of late imperial China (69).
In fact, China was ruled by foreign emperors, the more urgent was to need to tighten the
rein on the female body. Footbinding and the cult of the exemplary woman were the manners to
maintain the Chinese culture, customs, identity, and traditions; to keep the boundaries of hierarchy,
gender, and sex; and to rectify language. However, women’s bodies were the sites for both
commercial and sexual consumption. Chinese female bodies had been used successfully by men
to perform the task often impossible crisis in order to idealize loyalty and integrity. As a result,
footbinding and the desirable female body were publicized, visible, and fetishized in order to push
the nation into a further spending passion (Ping 70).
In conclusion, the women in China, lived a slow and difficult life, bound by tradition and
obedience. Women had to bind their feet at birth or face adversity throughout their entire lives.
Footbinding was a painful process that allowed women to be thought of as beautiful and a good
future wife (Ping, 69). Women are bound to patriarchy in the state society. Women are destined to
be mother, wife, lover and friend. Footbinding in the Chinese culture served to teach a young girl
just how much she would be bounded by the patriarchal state. Binding her feet represented the
binding she had to her womanly body. Because of her womanhood she was destined to withhold
herself, to restrain, and to painfully resume her inner struggle. In the same way, man made
patriarchy and within patriarchy man made woman the slave to her body. By binding her feet he
legally told her what she was to become and who she was to act. Footbinding passed down from
mother to daughter providing a way for women to find their place in the world. Not only did it teach
admirable qualities such as discipline and responsibility to girls, this tradition also affected the
economy, culture, as well as language of China during 1000 years ago.
Works Cited
Ping, Wang. Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China. New York: Anchor Books, a Division of
Random House, Inc., 2000