For centuries, patriarchal society demands too much from women without ever considering that it destroys them psychologically and physically. Cultures change from country to country, but female abuse does not, and an example of this is the 10th century Chinese practice of foot binding, also known as “foot binding”. .
Beginning during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, spreading through the lower social classes in the Qing reign, from 1635 to 1912, the practice began because women were taught that their feet needed to be very small, emphasizing feminine delicacy, if they were to appear more attractive to men for a possible marriage.
In a painful procedure, they repeatedly crushed their feet over the years to that fit in micro silk shoes, having to relearn to walk, firming the feet on the floor in an unknown position that caused excruciating pain, causing definitive health problems.
This is the history of women popularly known as “lotus feet”.
Victims of society
(Source: History of Yesterday /Play)
But that was not all, of course. Thousands of Chinese girls haven’t undergone the procedure over the centuries just to look more attractive to a man – all that really mattered back then, after all, a single woman was the same as a dead woman – it was a society tactic to keep them at home and away from matters that did not belong to them, that is, everything that did not involve handicrafts, such as spinning cotton and housework. One more mechanism to repress their freedom.
Hundreds of anthropological studies on the condition and its social impacts, in addition to the victims still alive in isolated corners of China, are all that currently exist, as the medical consequences were deliberately neglected even after the practice fell.
It is believed that the lotus foot condition arose with Lady Huang Sheng, wife of a member of the imperial clan. , who died in mid-1243, according to archaeologists who discovered tiny, deformed feet wrapped in fabric and placed in shoes resembling a lotus.
The shape of the feet would have been inspired by a 10th-century court dancer named Yao Niang, who bound her feet in the shape of a moon so she could tiptoe to Emperor Li Yu, inside a six-foot golden lotus, bedecked with ribbons and gemstones .
( Source: The Independent/Reproduction)
For some reason, the excess of delicacy, which ended up strengthening other muscles of the dancer’s body due to the constant weight on tiptoe, like the muscles of the buttocks, provoked a kind of erotic connotation that caught the attention of men, who were incessantly looking for women with the same attributes. Faced with this, the ladies of the court began to tie their feet to try to acquire a similar body. In the end, a small foot in China was to a narrow waist in Victorian England.
The years have taken care of making a mandatory four-inch foot, known as a golden lotus, the most respected in the lotus feet category. Feet below average, those over 15 centimeters in length, were called iron lotuses, the ones that would be discarded by men. A woman with a foot in those dimensions didn’t have a future.
Years of suffering
(Source: ThoughtCo./Reproduction)
A project about lotus feet published in 2015 by photographer Jo Farrell, titled Farrell Living History: Bound Feet Women of China, focused on documenting disappeared cultural practices, began in 2005 in Shandong Province, with an elderly woman named Zang Yun Ying, grandmother of a taxi driver from Shanghai who ended up mentioning to the professional about her having her feet bandaged, a remnant of a practice so old that there were almost no living witnesses left.
Over 9 years of searching and developing the project across China, Farrell managed to track down 50 women of different advanced ages, of which the oldest was 103 years old. When interviewing them, he reported to The Guardian that the first year of mooring the feet is considered “the most painful” because the girls, usually 7 years old, had to walk on their feet glued together in triangular points until their toes broke. The feet were also beaten to break them completely, then bathed with herbs and oils to loosen the bruised skin, and tied in the lotus shoes.
“After that, the toes feet would go numb, and 50 or 60 years later, they would stop feeling pain, or feeling their feet. It made everything numb,” Farrell reported.
In the mid-1950s, footbinding was banned by Mao Zedong, who ordered anti-footbinding inspectors to publicly shame a woman with lotus feet, since the ancient tradition did not represent the modern future that the country was aiming for.
