Bound Feet, Young Hands

Abstract

This book examines the once widespread practice of footbinding from the perspective of China’s gendered labor system. In contrast to the common belief that footbinding was motivated by the quest for beauty and was practiced primarily to attract a husband, this book emphasizes that footbinding was extremely widespread, not limited to the elite, and must be understood in the context of girls’ and women’s labor. In preindustrial China, rural women and girls produced vast amounts of cloth and other handcraft goods at home for local use and for market networks with a global reach. Up to the early twentieth century, footbinding coincided with and corresponded to a household labor regime in which small girls were required to help their mothers by performing tedious sedentary work with their hands. Drawing on interviews and surveys with thousands of rural women who grew up in the era when footbinding was being abandoned, this book reconnects footbinding to the intensive hand labor expected of young girls and women. Examining the decline of footbinding in early twentieth-century China, the book argues that in the aggregate, industrialization and the disruption of traditional handcraft occupations that used the labor of young girls, particularly in textiles, hastened the demise of footbinding.