Foot binding was the custom of binding the feet of young girls painfully tight to prevent their feet from growing. Back then if a women had big feet ( size 7 which is average in the states) they were considered ugly. Having small feet was a must! If they didn't bind their feet then they wouldn't find a husband. If you had small feet it also meant you had class back then this was very important. They banded binding of the feet in 1912 although some women still practiced it in secret.  |
| Picture by Louisa Lim |
I was reading an article written by Louisa Lim called ""Painful Memories for China's Footbinding Survivors". This article has so much information and I loved it because we get to here it from women who went through this. One of the women's is named Zhou Guizhen and she is 86 years old. She says that she regrets binding her feet, but back then it was her only option. "Because I bound my own feet, I could manipulate them more gently until the bones were broken. Young bones are soft, and break more easily," she says.
Imagine you had to do this to your feet? Sounds extremely painful to me. It is crazy the things that we will do in order to be accepted and considered beautiful. This sounds more like a brutal punishment.
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| Picture by Louisa Lim |
In the South of China there are still some women with "tiny feet". They have formed a community together and they talk about their personal experiences.
Another women named Wang Lifen also talks about her experience. She says that her mother began to bind her feet when she was 7 years old. These woman can no longer dance or walk for a long time.
"The bandages that women used for footbinding were about 10 feet long, so it was difficult for them to wash their feet," Yang says. "They only washed once every two weeks, so it was very, very stinky. But when I was young I was very free, because when I was naughty my mother couldn't run fast enough with her bound feet to catch me and beat me."- Yang
When I read this I was shocked! They wouldn't wash their feet for 2 weeks? oh my! It is interesting because a man wanted a women with these freaky tiny feet but then again they didn't mind the horrible smell? Their feet look very weird...I honestly don't know why anyone would think this was attractive? It's just one of those things where we would have had to be there to understand.
Beauty does hurt.
Down below is a link to the interview...
An interview with a couple women talking about their "tiny feet"
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