Foot Binding In Ancient China

Tears stream down a young Chinese girl’s face as her feet are literally folded in half and bound in place with cotton bandages by her mother and grandmother. Foot binding has a cloudy origin dating to ancient times, with the aristocrats binding their feet for beauty. It is done to girls at a very young age because it was perceived as beautiful in the time and women were practically unmarriable without it. Today it is only seen in elderly women that were alive at the time of foot binding prime.
First, why is foot binding performed? Many people wondered this same question when witnessing women in China with bound feet. To answer, it is because ancient Chinese beauty standards were very strict and much different than what is seen today. Chinese women back in the day were supposed to be very small and dainty, hence the three-inch feet. It was also done for courtship, women were not seen to be desirable when their feet were not bound, so men would often not even talk to women without bound feet. The third reason was it became so rooted as the social norm so people become outcasts because they could not afford it or their parents did not accept the health risks and decided to …show more content…
Foot binding originated in the song dynasty in ancient China, where foot binding became mainstream after wealthy women began to initiate this practice. They were supposedly doing this to mimic Emperor Li Yu’s Concubine; Yao Niang who “bound her feet in white silk into the shape of the crescent moon, and performed a ballet-like dance on the points of her feet” (Zo 1) in her beautiful grace other Chinese noblewomen found envy and began to mimic her in bounding their feet. But this may not be the true origin, in the year 1100, there are poems that allude to the practice of foot binding in China. Which show how common and ancient of a practice this was until around the 19th century when the permanent disfigurement of children lost its roots in Chinese