Page 368 - Wordsmith A Guide to College Writing

a young girl who wept each time her feet were bound, it
dawned on me for the first time that preventing the

growth of a body part involved pain. Though some

modern practices may seem strangely similar—torturing

our feet into four-inch-high heels or starving ourselves to

pencil thinness, for example—at least we have a choice.

An upper-class Chinese girl of that era had no
alternative. Custom decreed that her feet be bound, and

so her toes were folded under and her feet tightly

wrapped in soaked bandages that shrank as they dried.

The girl’s parents believed they were ensuring her

future, for no young man of good family could be

expected to marry a woman with large peasant’s feet.

Bound feet were also testament to a woman’s

aristocracy and marriageability. They served as public

evidence that she was from a good and wealthy family.

But there was a darker, more private reason that men
liked bound feet: They were considered erotic. The

bound foot was kept under wraps for the husband alone,

to be admired behind closed doors. Well those doors

might be closed, for the bindings concealed what to

modern eyes would seem a shameful secret. Foot
binding did not simply make feet small; it deformed

them. The toes were folded permanently underneath the

foot, making it misshapen and difficult to walk on. But at

that time and in that place, the bound foot was