Why the chinese bounded feet

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Last living women in China with bound feet — Zhang Yun Ying was the first woman with bound feet that Jo Farrell photographed.

Several of the women documented by Farrell have since passed away. Last living women with bound feet — "She took her shoes off and I held her foot in my hand and it was just so soft. It just felt beautiful. She had really suffered for this. It touched me — what we as women will go through to have a better life," says Farrell about Zhang Yun Ying. Last living women in China with bound feet — Portrait of Yang Jinge.

The year-old woman told Farrell: "Bound feet was a disrespect for the body, sometimes it was too painful and I couldn't go away to another village or to school. Bound feet is blind faith -- it was believed it would help us have a better marriage but when I had my feet bound it was already such an old tradition and was not a part of modern China.

Last living women in China with bound feet — Yang Jinge's feet. A lot of the feet became disfigured and did not achieve the desired shape. Last living women in China with bound feet — Farrell says: "Most books out there cover the eroticism of bound feet or the history of it. They don't really discuss the woman as a human being. I want to humanize the phenomenon.

These women had incredible lives, even though they were peasants. Not only did they have bound feet, they lived through famine and the Cultural Revolution, and now they have to deal with the break-up of the traditional family structure and village life as young people move away to cities for jobs. Last living women in China with bound feet — "Su Xi Rong had the most beautiful feet in her village.

Literary critics in later dynasties struggled to reconcile the woman with the poetry, finding her remarriage and subsequent divorce an affront to Neo-Confucian morals. Ironically, between Li and her near-contemporary Liang Hongyu, the former was regarded as the more transgressive. Liang was an ex-courtesan who had followed her soldier-husband from camp to camp.

Already beyond the pale of respectability, she was not subjected to the usual censure reserved for women who stepped beyond the nei —the female sphere of domestic skills and household management—to enter the wei , the so-called male realm of literary learning and public service.

Liang grew up at a military base commanded by her father. Her education included military drills and learning the martial arts. In , she met her husband, a junior officer named Han Shizhong. With her assistance he rose to become a general, and together they formed a unique military partnership, defending northern and central China against incursions by the Jurchen confederation known as the Jin kingdom. In , Jin forces captured the Song capital at Bianjing, forcing the Chinese to establish a new capital in the southern part of the country.

Three years later, Liang achieved immortality for her part in a naval engagement on the Yangtze River known as the Battle of Huangtiandang. Using a combination of drums and flags, she was able to signal the position of the Jin fleet to her husband. The general cornered the fleet and held it for 48 days.

Liang and Han lie buried together in a tomb at the foot of Lingyan Mountain. Though it may not seem obvious, the reasons that the Neo-Confucians classed Liang as laudable, but not Shangguan or Li, were part of the same societal impulses that led to the widespread acceptance of foot-binding.

As such, Liang fulfilled her duty of obedience to the proper male order of society. The Song dynasty was a time of tremendous economic growth, but also great social insecurity. In contrast to medieval Europe, under the Song emperors, class status was no longer something inherited but earned through open competition.

The old Chinese aristocratic families found themselves displaced by a meritocratic class called the literati. Entrance was gained via a rigorous set of civil service exams that measured mastery of the Confucian canon. Not surprisingly, as intellectual prowess came to be valued more highly than brute strength, cultural attitudes regarding masculine and feminine norms shifted toward more rarefied ideals.

Foot-binding, which started out as a fashionable impulse, became an expression of Han identity after the Mongols invaded China in During those travels, he had never once seen a woman with her feet in the same condition as those of the second study participant. Read: The peculiar history of foot-binding in China. Soon after, another woman came in with a crutch and an odd kind of shoe. Then more women with bound feet started coming in.

The women he met spent much of their life in or very close to their home, their disability preventing them from venturing farther out. He was seeing them in the lab only because transportation to the hospital was provided. That amounted to millions of women stuck at home, unable to engage in everyday activities such as grocery shopping, because they had such difficulty walking—never mind squatting while waiting for the bus or carrying shopping bags while managing canes and crutches.

In his study, Cummings concluded that older Chinese women were less prone to hip fractures than American women in part because the former squatted much more often, which builds bone density and strengthens hips. Older Chinese women with bound feet, though, had a completely different story.