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Example research essay topic: Foot Binding Ming Dynasty - 1,882 words

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In the beginning of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, the heroine, Scarlet O'Hara grips a bedpost while her maid squeezes her torso into a corset, so that her waist will be 17 inches. During the late Nineteenth century, in the United States, it was the fashion for women to have tiny waists. Unfortunately, this fashion came at the cost of broken ribs and damaged internal organs. The corset compresses the stomach, as well as dislocating the kidneys, crushing the liver, squeezing the heart and hampering healthy children. Throughout history, fashion and style has come at great costs to many women. However, there are few modes of attaining the prescribed image of beauty at any particular time that have been as entrenched in culture and as detrimental to a woman's health as foot binding.

From the young age of 6, girls had to endure the torturous process of breaking the arch and curling the toes under so that their feet would fit the ideal "golden lotus. " (See Appendix C). The term golden lotus is a euphemism for the three to four inch, painful and mutilated foot that was so revered in China from the tenth-century up until the twentieth-century. Although foot binding is a terrible custom, it is unfair to judge it with modern eyes. Many cultures in the past and presently have customs that could be considered barbaric.

Even in the United States in the Twenty-first-century, women and men mutilate their bodies with copious piercing and tattoos. Yet, unlike the passing fad of modern day piercing, foot binding lasted for hundreds of years, through shifting times and dynasties, and could not be eradicated until the communist revolution regardless of previous legislation. Clearly, foot binding was a cultural manifestation representing something more than the fickle whims of fashion. Foot binding has a rich history.

Foot binding's social implications go far beyond its physical pain, into the role of women in Chinese society, and the male fetish. It became more than just a fashion but a necessity to achieve a good life and even a good after life. Women of all social standings bound their feet, whether they were court ladies or prostitutes. Some of the peasants would even bind their feet, only in a looser fashion so that they could achieve the upper-class look but still work in the fields. Even, on occasion, men would bind their feet for various reasons.

Before modern, western thinkers can judge this custom, its history and implications must be fully explored and understood. When a girl turned six or seven she would have to endure two pains. In the first month of her sixth or seventh years she would have her ears pierced, soon after she would have her feet bound. Her mother would consult the lunar calendar to make certain it was an auspicious day for her daughter's feet to be bound. If the girl's feet were bound on the wrong day it was thought that the process would be more painful or that the foot would not come to the desired shape.

The date was usually in the autumn so that the cold winter would numb the foot during the painful formation period. When the chosen day came about the mother would soak the daughter's feet in warm water with herbs or warm animal blood. After they were thoroughly dried, all of the dead skin and flesh was rubbed off. The toenails would be clipped so that they would not dig into the foot after it was bound and thus cause infection. Then the foot was massaged with alum to keep it from sweating. After that, bandages two inches wide and ten feet long of white (or dark blue in poorer areas) cotton were used to wrap the feet.

One end was placed on the inside of the instep. It was pulled across the small toes in order to force them in towards the sole. The big toe was left unbound, so that the finished foot would come to a point. The wrapping was then brought around her heel to force the heel and the toes together. This process was repeated until the entire bandage was applied (see appendix A).

Directly afterward the mother would force her child to walk on the newly bound and painful feet. The foot was bathed and rebound frequently. It was put into progressively smaller shoes. The entire process took about two years.

However, even after the foot had achieved the desired shape and size, it had to remain bound for the entirety of the girl's life so that it would not try to heal. The result was a three to four inch foot. The cleft between the toes and the heels should be two to three inches deep. The foot should be narrow, fleshy and smooth, and come to a point at the toe of the shoe. (See Appendix B). Foot binding had many physiological effects. It created an outside swelling of the abdomen; a line down the back due to the muscle stress and the lumbar vertebrae would curve forward.

Foot binding forced a woman to focus her weight on her lower body putting a lot of pressure on the pelvis, which caused it to expand in diameter and to lower the height of the pelvis. It also caused the sacrum to be longer and wider. This practice not only effected a woman with pain but it also effected her entire body causing it to become deformed as well. The exact origin of foot binding is unknown. There are several legends about the source of foot binding. One story is that a fox bound his feet to conceal his paws so that he could impersonate the last empress of the Shang dynasty.

This fox began a palace fashion. Another story says that the last Shang empress had a clubbed foot. She did not want to be seen as deformed so she made her husband make foot binding obligatory for all girls. This way her deformity was the model of beauty. Most scholars believe that foot binding could be attributed to later dynasties. In the T'ang dynasty, women were encouraged to be athletic and bound feet would have prevented that.

The general consensus is that Prince Li Yu, the last monarch of the Southern Tang, had a favorite concubine who was a very good dancer. She danced on a platform shaped like a lotus, and also toe-danced within a six-foot high golden lotus flower. She would bind her feet by wearing silk socks that she would gently bind with narrow bands of silk that would make her dancing look more seductive. At the time of the late Tang many women took part in a popular form of artistic dance and the effect was achieved by binding feet. Over time the binds became tighter and tighter and dancing became impossible. Once foot binding began it spread throughout China.

At first only the court dancers practiced it, but soon it became customary for all of the court ladies to bind their feet. Soon after it proliferated to the wealthy and eventually even those people who lived in poverty bound their feet. The custom started in northern China but eventually expanded to the south. During the Sung there was a change in masculine points of view. Contrary to the Tang there was now a conservative attitude towards remarriage and chastity. There was also less liberty and intellectual freedom given to women.

In the Sung dynasty, the qualities defining a woman as virtuous changed; she should have little talent, and no education. By 1273 the Mongols had overturned the Sung dynasty and created the Yuan dynasty. The Mongols encouraged foot binding probably because it weakened the Chinese by impairing their women. The Mongol Empire began to crumble in the next century, and when it fell in the mid- 1300 s, the Ming dynasty took its place.

The Ming proved to be the dynasty that would bring foot binding to its most popular point. During the Ming, foot binding received official and popular sanction. Women with natural feet were considered ridiculous and clownish. Bound feet were referred to in poetry, literature and novels. The foot represented a sense of mystery since it was so rarely seen by anyone, not even a woman's husband. Foot binding was so popular in the Ming dynasty because of the heavy stress of virtue, like that of the Sung dynasty, on the Ming women.

Foot binding went along with virtue because it immobilized women, preventing them from committing acts that would be seen as inappropriate for women. The close of the Ming period was also the pinnacle of foot binding, when it was at its most popular. In the mid- 1600 s the Manchus invaded and created the Qing Empire. They were strongly opposed to foot binding. The Manchus saw foot binding as a barbaric custom that proved that they were superior to the Chinese and legitimized their rule.

To prove their superiority the Qing set up laws prohibiting foot binding, threatening families with fines if they bound their daughters' feet. Women with bound feet were barred from the imperial harem. The father of a child with bound feet would not only be fined, but if he were an official he would be fired, and if he was a commoner he was flogged forty times and exiled. However, people continued to secretly practice it in defiance of the governmental decree.

The practice had become such a strong part of Chinese culture and tradition that it was impossible for a government to end it with law and punishments. People would give false birth dates, so that the government would think that a girl's feet had been bound before the law had begun and would therefore not punish the family. The Qing did not try to change the people philosophically so the Chinese still saw the tiny foot as desirable even if it was illegal. As the eighteenth-century came to a close, anti-foot binding began to get support from many liberal scholars like Yuan Mei. He argued that admiring small feet was inappropriate because it caused people to ignore other important features. Authors like Li Ju-Chen and Kung Tzu-Chen also opposed the practice.

The Christian missionaries also had a strong influence against it. As they converted women, they encouraged them to unbind their feet because they were changing part of god's creation. Women who did not unbind their feet were not allowed in the church or in the Christian boarding schools. Many anti-foot binding societies were erected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. Yet people born as late as 1900 still faced foot binding. "Anti-foot binding and the granting of women's rights were indivisible" and these rights did not fully come about until the Communist revolution. The nationalist revolution helped to perpetuate the decline of foot binding, but the entirety of equal rights from the communists was necessary to finally stop the practice.

Once the communists took over in 1949, women began to be treated equally. Foot binding had to be outlawed because it prevented women from working, and all the people of China had to work for the government. The Communist takeover marked the official end to foot binding, because women finally became equal and were n...


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