Speaker Talks on Footbinding

Footbinding and similar social customs were important in defining women's roles in pre-modern Chinese society, said a Women's History Week speaker yesterday.

Dorothy Ko, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, called footbinding "central to the experience of women" in China until the late 19th century.

Before an audience of 40, Ko said that to bind a child's foot a mother would break the toes of her six-year old daughter, bend them forward and bind them beneath the heel with a long piece of cloth.

Members of the Emerson Hall audience winced as Ko demonstrated with her hand and a scarf how the daughter's feet were kept bound for years, until they stopped growing.

'Blatant Misogyny'

Ko said that the procedure, performed on almost every upper-class woman in pre-modern China, crippled its victims for life.

But Ko took issue with traditional views of footbinding as "male sadism" and "the most blatant misogyny."

"This view is not wrong, but too simplistic," Ko said.

The professor said that footbinding unquestionably caused pain, however. "There is nothing ambiguous about the amount of pain and suffering involved in the traditional practice of footbinding," Ko said.

The practice was clearly "an activity by which men imposed an oppressive order" on women, Ko said.

In addition, she noted that a Chinese woman of any social standing was expected to conform to the Confucian ideal of submissiveness Bound feet were symbols of this ideal in the traditional culture, she said.

"Footbinding indicated qualities of shame and domestic diligence."