The Neglected Consequences of Foot-Binding

For several hundred years, millions of Chinese girls had their bodies painfully misshapen to conform to a prevailing social expectation. Intact feet, girls were told, would damage their marriage prospects. To achieve a more suitable size and shape, young girls’ feet were crushed repeatedly over years. Each excruciating procedure forced the girls to learn to walk anew, rereading the ground from an unfamiliar position and through unimaginable pain.

The tiny “lotus foot” in its delicate silken shoe was seen as one of the ; the smaller the foot, the more sexually pleasing the girl was. have shown that foot-binding was likely practiced not purely for the sake of marriage, but also to keep girls at home and engaged in handicrafts, such as spinning cotton, in order to contribute to their family’s income. The end result, no matter the motivation, was severe physical impairment. Yet despite foot-binding’s brutality, and hundreds of anthropological studies addressing it, the long-term medical consequences of the