An onlooker at the presidential review held November 13, 1918, in celebration of Armistice Day, this lady is seated on a large copper incense burner. She appears to be a wealthy dowager, her tiny bound feet encased in embroidered silk slippers. The woman standing nearby, also with bound feet, is probably her maid, carrying her mistress’s handwarmer. Photograph courtesy of Catherine Gamble Curran ‘47, the Sidney D. Gamble Foundation for China Studies, New York City, and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.

In conjunction with the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum’s “micro exhibition” titled The Golden Lotus: Footbinding in China, Jonathan Lipman, MHC professor of history, will deliver a gallery talk titled “Pretty in Pain: The Politics and Aesthetics of Chinese Footbinding” Thursday, December 7. After a brief introduction at the site of the exhibition, the Williston Library courtyard, at 4 pm, the talk will continue in the library’s Stimson Room. The exhibition will be on view in the courtyard through January.

In 1892, an inventory was made of the items kept in a display cabinet that had been received by the College over the years from Mount Holyoke missions around the world. Included in the so-called “Missionary Cabinet” was a group of tiny embroidered silk shoes made for Chinese women with bound feet. Some of these shoes are included in the exhibition, along with photographs, documents, and texts that illustrate and comment upon the controversial custom of footbinding in China.

The Chinese custom of footbinding originated among court dancers in the Song/Sung period (tenth–thirteenth century C.E.), who bound their feet in order to make them appear smaller and more shapely. The practice slowly spread to courtiers and the upper classes. This evolution coincided with a gradual transformation of the roles, physical limitations, and legal status of women in Chinese society, a process which left them far more restricted in their movements and options.

Footbinding was consistent with this change, and by the fifteenth century, it was widespread throughout China, though more concentrated in the north than in the south. One explanation for this, according to Lipman, “lies in the necessity for southern women to work in muddy rice paddies, while northern women could hobble or crawl in their dry fields.” All classes of society practiced this mutilation, though some groups (such as the hill-country Hakkas of the south and some Chinese-speaking Muslim communities) rejected it.

Says Lipman, “Scholars regard footbinding as meeting two different, but unfortunately intersecting purposes—the radical limitation of women’s physical movement, and the erotic desires of Chinese men for women with tiny feet. Both were served, ironically, through the actions of a girl child’s mother and aunts, who undertook the excruciating process of footbinding in order to make their young one marriageable. The matchmaker and potential in-laws would see the feet of a bridal prospect as measures not only of her beauty but also of her family’s discipline, their single-mindedness, their willingness to put their daughter through agony in order to achieve their goal of a good match. Tiny feet marked a reliable, well-ordered family; large, ungainly feet could only indicate a lenient, indulgent family and a daughter who would not be a hard worker for her mother-in-law.”

Footbinding was first opposed by missionary-educated mid-nineteenth-century Chinese men and (a few) women who shared the Euro-Americans’ horror at the practice and organized against it. By the early twentieth century some elite families had begun to allow their daughters to grow “big” (that is, normal) feet, and the custom had virtually disappeared by the 1930s.