Adding To Women's History: First-Person Stories Of Chinese Foot Binding

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Walking down a street in Hong Kong five years ago, Northwestern University Professor Pamela Cooper spied a pair of bound-feet shoes scarcely 3-1/2 inches long in the window of an antique shop. Intrigued, she purchased the tiny, intricately embroidered shoes and asked her colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she was a visiting professor, what they could tell her about the centuries-old custom of foot binding.

There was nothing to tell, Cooper was emphatically told. When she informed her Chinese colleagues that she wanted to interview women whose feet had been bound, she was told that none still lived, that each and every one had died. But Cooper persisted in her inquiries because she had seen more than one elderly woman hobbling down the streets of Beijing on feet which she suspected had once been bound.

On Nov. 23, Cooper will present "Narratives of Chinese Foot Binding" at the annual meeting of the Speech Communication Association in San Diego. After five years of doggedly chasing down tips leading to some of the few remaining women whose arches were broken as young girls and whose physical mobility was sacrificed as adults in the name of beauty, Cooper has recorded their remarkable stories.

"These narratives of foot binding not only tell us something about the objectification of women and the roles women have played in male-dominated cultures, they also illustrate how easily even the most dramatic of women's stories are lost forever," said Cooper.

"No one had ever before thought to ask these women to recount their stories. One told me she was afraid she would die before anyone inquired about her bound feet," Cooper said. In documenting their stories, Cooper hopes to ensure that the kinds of painful experiences that women have endured worldwide and over the ages in the name of beauty will never again be repeated.

Finding and appealing to these women to tell their stories, however, was not easy. After five years of, in the Chinese custom, "guanxi" or "making connections," Cooper located seven women between the ages of 77 and 96 that were willing to share their stories. Another four initially agreed but had sons or husbands who refused to allow them to cooperate in Cooper's research. Cooper interviewed five women in 1995 and another two this year.

In trying to preserve their stories and to learn more about the practice of foot binding, Cooper quickly discovered that bound feet is a topic that Chinese authorities are unwilling to discuss and prefer be forgotten. Little either has been written or remains available on the subject. Recent Chinese history books rarely make reference to the practice dating back to the 10th century and few older books, written when the practice was culturally acceptable, remain.

According to Cooper, the lack of information or discussion about the custom of foot binding is the result of the sexual nature of bound feet as well as foot binding's association with decidedly "unmodern" practices. When Mao Tse-Tung first came into power, for example, he denounced the leadership who failed to share his blueprint for revolution as "old women with bound feet."

When Mao later condemned the practice of foot binding , "pillow books" that described the use of bound feet in sexual activity still were commonplace. These books and other significant books and materials evoking China's pre-revolution past were destroyed in the cultural revolution. Today, despite the fact that an estimated 4.5 billion Chinese women over a period of 1,000 years are believed to have been subject to the pain of foot binding, Cooper has found no evidence of even a single pair of bound feet shoes on view in a Chinese museum.

At the 1995 Non-Government Organizations (NGO) Conference held simultaneously in Beijing with the U.N. Conference on Women, Cooper found that young Chinese women expressed no interest or curiosity in exploring the topic of bound feet and often advised her to pursue a different area of study.

But Cooper -- a specialist in story telling, women's studies and intercultural communication --insists that recording these women's extraordinary stories is essential and that to forever lose them would represent a monumental loss. Too few stories -- whether social, historical, psychological or fiction -- are written by women, Cooper said. "If these women's stories were buried with them when they died, they would be but another example of the kinds of important stories that are missing or lost forever from women's history."

Although she did not ask the women to describe the way in which their feet were bound, each voluntarily described the process that began when their mothers first bound their feet between the ages of five and seven. Each had been told by her mother that she was obliged to have bound feet if she was to be considered beautiful by men and ever to marry.

Failure to marry, they understood, was to have no life, since a woman had no purpose in Chinese society except as a wife and mother of sons. Perhaps worse still, according to Chinese belief, without a husband or children to tend their graves, these women could become "hungry ghosts" forced to wander the earth for eternity, Cooper learned.

What surprised the professor of communications after conducting interviews with these women was not that their mothers conducted the process that physically disabled their daughters. "Had I been a mother of a young girl in that culture, I would have felt forced to do the same," said Cooper. "What amazed me was the fact that these women never before had discussed the event or fact of their foot binding with their women friends, husbands or children."

Of the women she interviewed, none reported being told in advance by her mother that she was to have her feet bound until the first day of binding was upon her. "And though the process was painful and the results crippling, none expressed bitterness toward their mothers or others about having had their feet bound. It was simply to be expected," said Cooper.

An 85-year-old woman interviewed in a Hong Kong retirement facility told Cooper that if she had refused to have her feet bound, her mother would have beaten her. "All lived their lives the best they could within their physical limitations," Cooper added.

Each woman spoke of the pain of tightening the bindings (which they eventually performed themselves) and the difficulties of walking on bound feet. Many also spoke of the subsequent pain of walking on unbound feet. Their feet were unbound when the Chinese government began to enforce a 1915 law declaring the practice of foot binding illegal and sent state inspectors around the country to issue substantial monetary fines to any women who continued the custom.

Cooper learned that the practice was limited to the Han people primarily of Northern China and that, although it was most likely to be practiced by women of the wealthier classes, that was not always the case. One interviewee spoke to Cooper of walking ten miles to the fields, working all day there and returning home on bound feet. "She told me that she could outwork any man then and any man now," Cooper recalled.

During all interviews but one Cooper was permitted to take handwritten notes. Three of the seven women allowed her to photograph them and one allowed her to photograph her painfully misshapen feet. An interpreter accompanied Cooper on all the interviews.

Cooper is currently at work on a book comparing historical and contemporary beauty practices and how and by whom these practices are communicated to women worldwide. She likens the mutilation of these women's feet with other practices worldwide in which women endure or have endured pain for the sake of what is deemed to be sexually attractive.

Cooper often would tell these women about my own grandmother "who cinched her waist to 16 inches as that was the style considered beautiful in her day." And she warns that while the practice of foot binding has come to an end in China, she recently learned of a San Francisco-based guru who has invented a gadget called Fakir's Foot Bender which contorts the metatarsus to create "a pretty foot."

11/15/96