Foot Binding Part 3: Economic, Cultural, and Societal Impact
When I tap into the collective consciousness, I’m given the message that Footbinding is one of the critical topics for Chinese women to be aware of.
This practice is a transgression on the souls and bodies of women for over 1000 years of Chinese history. Source wishes me to include that this practice has created an energetic harm for women and created energetic harm towards the whole Chinese society.
As footbinding has already been abolished, the purpose of this article is not to move you to action. Rather, it is for awareness on all holistic levels, how this practice has impacted you through your ancestry and epigenetics.
Violence is not over when the act is abolished. Violence ends when the current inheritors and victims can name what occurred and produce the conviction to refuse the energetic current to carry on further.
If you are moved or impacted by this article, please share your thoughts in the comments or send me a message through my contact page. Bringing awareness to this deep generational pain is like pulling out a deeply embedded thorn. I expect it to hurt.
I also don’t want everyone walking about with thorns stuck inside them, and so, I am pulling them out through this article.
This topic is Part 3 in a three-part series on Foot binding. You can read Part one and Part two here.
Our final part in this series focuses on the emotional and psychological, and thus cultural, ramifications that footbinding has had. These ramifications remain painfully evident today—whether you spend time among Chinese people or are Chinese yourself.
Economic and Productivity Exploitation of Chinese Women
It’s an entrenched cultural pattern to this day that Chinese men are raised with a silver spoon in their mouth, growing up having domestic chores handled for them without the expectation that they would be expected to do the actual labor to take care of themselves. Whereas, Chinese women are conditioned from childhood that although they are not the most important – and thus, because they are not the most important- they are expected to learn and practice the arts of domestic labor so that once day they can take care of not only themselves, but also their children and any other man or elder that happens to be in their future designated in-law family.
This is the conditioning of slavery. It’s a social education that never hints at a women’s individuation - a community and classroom that centers every bit of morality on arranging yourself to please and benefit a man as your highest potentiality. Within the Chinese population specifically, we have historical evidence as to why this mentality stuck in the cultural landscape for 900 years, echoing down to the present day.
In addition to families being incentivized to bind their daughter’s feet for better marriage prospects, families also found that their daughters were more productive at sedentary domestic tasks like spinning and weaving when their feet were bound¹,². In a world before automated looms and spinning machines, every fabric and the threads comprising the fabric had to be processed by hand. These are skills that take time to master and immense time to produce the output needed for a society to run. Every civilization relied heavily on textile production for clothes in daily life, sails for trade and military ships, uniforms and medical supplies for the army, etc. One girl’s spinning output could impact the success of Chinese imperial military campaigns.
Melissa Brown, co-author of the study Economic correlates of footbinding: Implications for the importance of Chinese daughters’ labor notes:
“The fact is that Chinese daughters contributed a whole lot more economically than they’ve ever been given credit for. They were feeding themselves and more than one family member in addition. In doing so, they contributed enormously to their households”.¹
This is a textbook example of child abuse AND exploitation. Chinese families recognized that their underage daughters possessed an ability to produce significant income for their family and instead of treating their daughters with respect, families instead recognized that if their daughters could be kept producing for longer periods of time, even against their will, the family would gain economically². Brown and Satterthwaite-Phillips’s study demonstrates that a girl doing any kind of handicraft production was a significant predictor of having been foot bound². They write that “families held onto girls with commercially valuable handicraft skills longer, suggesting that the economic contributions from their higher daily production were important to women’s premarital households”².
Brown and Satterthwaite-Phillips also had another fascinating finding that puts this level of abuse into perspective for Western readers.
“We also compared the Chinese spinners with African-American girls and women enslaved at Thomas Jefferson’s plantations, using similar technology. In some counties, foot-bound Chinese commercial spinners spun more cotton than the average amount spun by the enslaved Americans, who were pushed to produce as much as possible.”¹
We can very much directly categorize footbinding in the same box of human injustice as slavery.
What makes this heartbreaking for me, is that Chinese footbound daughter didn’t have White overseers whipping them to work. Instead of White overseers, Chinese girls had their parents, which apparently is equivalent. Chinese parents broke their daughterss feet, which disabled them and physically prevented them from stopping their labor, taking breaks, or even running away from the circumstances they were in. This dynamic, which we should rightly understand as inhumane abuse, became warped and embedded over the course of 900 years as the definition of what love should look like for a Chinese daughter.
The Transgenerational Trap
Why is it hard for Chinese women to break out of the patriarchy? It’s hard for many reasons. But one of them is that epigenetically and culturally experiencing physical deformation to your primary form of mobility for nine centuries will teach Chinese women for perpetuity that they are trapped and that nothing can change. Being forcibly rendered dependent and vulnerable by footbinding exposes Chinese women to always being on the receiving end for any physical abuse and emotional abuse that Chinese men might feel like committing on a given day. In the modern day, it’s still hard to say “No” and set boundaries with people because your cellular memories remember the absolute state of subjugation of footbinding and the reality of living as a Chinese woman.
A few other ways I see the legacy of Footbinding still directly impacting Chinese society are:
A brutal desensitization of physical torture amongst the whole Chinese population. If households are used to breaking the bones of their daughter and calling it love, they will do something much worse to an enemy they actually hate. The dearth of compassion witnessed in the household will be scaled up to create a nation of ruthlessness.
A centuries-learned violation of privacy boundaries amongst parents to children or in the society in general. Chinese parents are notorious for giving no privacy to their children. In my therapy practice, I constantly hear of Chinese adult clients whose parents call their phones nonstop. My first order of interventions is just to give permission that it’s ok for the Chinese adult to dislike having their privacy invaded and to dislike being expected to ignore their own life’s demands to accommodate the incessant calls of their parents.
Looking back to 1,000 years ago, we see that there is no concept of boundaries if mothers can break their young daughter’s foot and do it again and again for years. The child’s screams of pain don’t matter, their preferences certainly don’t. And that becomes the default relational interaction, not just for the child’s life, but for Chinese cultural life for the next 1000 years. We’ve learned in Chinese culture that our own preferences and protests don’t matter, and if parents violate our boundaries, it was done out of love, and so we should accept the boundary violation.
Here’s another thing I frequently encounter with my Chinese adult clients. They report that it is virtually impossible to communicate with their parents to establish boundaries or rewrite the rules of relationship conduct to be healthier. That makes total sense and here’s why. Well, this three part series on Footbinding is why.
You are not going to be readily able to convince people who have been epigenetically wired for chronic pain, neuroticism, and anxiety that the ways that Chinese parents have been treating children for a millennium is wrong. Their somatic memory dictates that giving obedience when you’re a child is the only way for survival and that obedience from a child is your natural due for a lifetime of being subjugated by outside circumstances.
Accountability and the Work of Remembrance
The main takeaway from this series, might not actually be about Footbinding. It might actually be about recognizing how deeply entrenched, perverted, and stuck these abusive, oppressive, and exploitative behaviors are in the Chinese psychological landscape. Healing from patterns that began 900 years ago is NOT as easy as saying a positive affirmation.
Chinese people love to participate in cultural amnesia, especially from the doozy of the last century of Chinese revolutions, cultural revolutions, communist revolutions, etc. But if you cannot see the root of your problem, you will have a very tough time healing it.
Each person in the Chinese lineage has a responsibility to recognize that it’s their job to witness and support the healing of these patterns so we don’t perpetuate them for the future generations. But as well, every elder we’ve ever had had that same responsibility. And they didn’t do it. There’s no ifs and or buts. We are collectively in this situation because so many elders chose to either perpetuate this really ugly form of patriarchal oppression or chose to stay a victim and make their daughter the next victim.
Ignoring all of this is easier than fighting through 900 years of abuse and cultural propaganda. I know it. And yet, it was never ok for a young Chinese girl in the Song dynasty to feel permanently trapped in a state of disability and abuse. And it’s not ok for any of us to still feel trapped in our Chinese families and societies. Unless we do the work of witnessing and changing as a society, we are still those girls.
References & Sources
Reuell, P. (2018). Uncovering the economics of foot-binding. The Harvard Gazette. Read Online
Brown, M. J., & Satterthwaite-Phillips, D. (2018). Economic correlates of footbinding: Implications for the importance of Chinese daughters’ labor. PLOS ONE, 13(9), e0201337. Read Online
