Beautiful Shoes

For centuries, before the communist revolution, the custom was to bind little girls' feet at the age of 5. A mother would be forced to dip strips of cloth into a hardening mixture, and wrap their daughter's feet with just enough room inside to wiggle the toes. She would wrap the foot from the ankle down. The little girl would walk around in her new shoes with no pain for about six months. Then the pain would start in -- small at first, then to the point of the little girl crying from excruciating pain roughly 9 months after binding. This pain would come and go, depending on if she was in a growth spurt, until the girl was 18 years old. The binding would be removed, which would expose her deformed 6" long feet. The toes would be curled underneath, and they would be the shape of an ostrich egg.

Why was this done? For beauty and control. To keep women under control -- they could not run from an abusive husband. Houses would have a 12" high board across all the doors. It was a way of keeping women in the house; it would be painful to step over the boards. The way the women would walk around the house was to shuffle their feet (sorta like walking on ice). The beauty -- the feet binding was a status symbol; done in the houses of nobility. The belief was that the bigger the feet, the uglier the girl. The only way a girl could escape this torture is if she were born into a poor family (i.e., needed to work in the fields). Feet binding was abolished at the beginning of the communist revolution. Mao's wife escaped the binding when she was 6 years old; she cut off the bindings and ran away from home.