Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet

by Dorothy Ko

In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its origins, purpose, and spread before the nineteenth century. She uses women's own voices to reconstruct the inner chambers of a Chinese house where women with bound feet lived and worked. Focusing on the material aspects of footbinding and shoemaking--the tools needed, the procedures, the wealth of symbolism in the shoes, and the amazing regional variations in style--she contends that footbinding was a reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity, motherhood, and handwork. Her absorbing, superbly detailed, and beautifully written book demonstrates that in the women's eyes, footbinding had less to do with the exotic or the sublime than with the mundane business of having to live in a woman's body in a man's world.

Footbinding was likely to have started in the tenth century among palace dancers. Ironically, it was meant not to cripple but to enhance their grace. Its meaning shifted dramatically as it became domesticated in the subsequent centuries, though the original hint of sensuality did not entirely disappear. This contradictory image of footbinding as at once degenerate and virtuous, grotesque and refined, is embodied in the key symbol for the practice--the lotus blossom, being both a Buddhist sign of piety and a poetic allusion to sensory pleasures.

Every Step a Lotus includes almost one hundred illustrations of shoes from different regions of China, material paraphernalia associated with the customs and rituals of footbinding, and historical images that contextualize the narrative. Most of the shoes, from the collection of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, have not been exhibited before. Readers will come away from the book with a richer understanding of why footbinding carries such force as a symbol and why, long after its demise, it continues to exercise a powerful grip on our imaginations.

A Copublication with the Bata Shoe Museum

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction, Fashion, Asia, Historical, Cultural

200 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2001

About the author

Dorothy Ko (Chinese 高彦頤) is a Professor of History and Women's Studies at the Barnard College of Columbia University. She is a historian of early modern China, known for her multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional research. As a historian of early modern China, she has endeavored to engage with the field of modern China studies; as a China scholar, she has always positioned herself within the study of women and gender and applied feminist approaches in her work; as a historian, she has ventured across disciplinary boundaries, into fields that include literature, visual and material culture, science and technology, as well as studies of fashion, the body and sexuality.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Margery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dorothy Ko does a wonderful job discussing the history of shoes for bound feet, but she avoids much comment about the torturous aspect of millions of young Chinese girls having had their feet mutilated for fashion and male pleasure. I checked online and saw a lot of disturbing photos, including x-rays of bound feet. I read this after finishing Lisa See's "Peony in Love" because See recommended it for further study.

[Ruby Scupp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once there was a doe who left imprints of the lotus blossom as she walked. She became the second wife of the Fanyu king and gave birth to a thousand-leaf lotus; on each leaf was a baby boy. Thus she received a thousand sons, who became the Thousand Buddhas of the Good Kalpa.
- "The Story of the Doe," The Sutra on the Storehouse of Sundry Valuables

- "Simply put, my thesis is that the binding of feet is similar to the making of shoes in one important aspect: both display a woman's efforts and pride; they are testimonies to a woman's status in a society that valued domesticity and women's handwork. When these values came to be attacked as 'feudal' at the dawn of the modern age, around the same time when daughters of the lower classes vied to imitate the practice, foot-binding went into irrevocable decline."

She is dimly descried like the moon obscured by light clouds,
She dries airily like whirling snow in streaming wind.
Gaze at her from afar,
And she glistens like the sun rising over morning mists,
Examine her close up,
And she is dazzling as lotus emerging from limpid ripples...
She drapes herself in the shimmering glitter of a gossamer gown,
Wears in her ears ornate gems of carnelian and jade,
Bedecks her hair with head ornaments of gold and halcyon plumes,
Adorns herself with shining pearls that illuminate her body.
She treads in patterned Distant Roaming slippers,
Trails a light skirt of misty gauze.
Obscured by the fragrant lushness of thoroughwort,
She paces hesitantly in a mountain nook.
- Cao Zijian

- "For a woman, the body was her only gateway to a better future. To do textile work and to give birth - to attain value and meaning for herself, she could not do without the body. As a mother readied the training shoes and cloth binders for her daughter, both fruits of female labor, these thoughts might have raced through her head. Our bodies and labor makes us women, she might have said to her daughter, and our bodies and labor are the ties that bind us in a female kinship that no men can undo."

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful and insightful look into the material culture of foot-binding. Ko masterfully presents foot-binding not just as a physical and painful experience, but one which had great emotional meaning and significance in the eyes of the women who perpetuated it. The book itself originates from a museum exhibition Ko arranged, and that inheritance is evident in the clear and beginner-friendly presentation.

To quote from the book: ‘For a woman, the body was her only gateway to a better future. To do textile work and to give birth – to attain value and meaning for herself, she could not do without the body. As a mother readied the training shoes and cloth binders for her daughter, both fruits of female labour, these thoughts might have raced through her head. Our bodies and labour make us women, she might have said to her daughter, and our bodies and labour are the ties that bind us in a female kinship that no men can undo’

[Claire Binkley · Rating 5 out of 5]

THERE IS NOTHING GORY ABOUT THIS BOOK. I think it is fitting that I finished looking at it the day before my recently-departed Mother's birthday (she loved shoes of all kinds!) since its pictures were primarily of different footwear from different regions of China.

This book describes what footbinding was supposed to mean in this part of the world therefore why so many women wanted to make their children go through the motions. It describes its origin and significance, and also how it no longer exists.

What might be most useful from this book is the sketch of how binding affects the foot physically, but I think I saw that online when I read in high school Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Otherwise, it is mostly the origin story about why bound feet were a big deal for so long.

[Asiah g · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this after taking a family & gender in ancient Korea and China class and man. Completely changed the way I perceive footbinding. There is so much power in the practice when you look beyond the initial "oppression" lens of our present time. These women were so powerful and innovative. The images of the lotus shoes were both shocking but beautiful to see. A must read if you are interested in women's studies.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This illustrated guide to bound feet explores the material and social aspects of the practice. Like other users, I recommend reading this along with Cinderella's Sisters A Revisionist History of Footbinding, which traces the development of footbinding in more depth.

[Loretta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent chronicle of the history of footbinding in China. It includes many excellent illustrations of shoe designs as well as real life photos of girls and women who had bound feet.

After reading this I could not help but feel how so many of women's shoes here in the United States resemble the shoes these women wore; particularly the clog sandals so many women/girls wear.

A must read for any female, I believe.

[June · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unique cultural references, clear explanations for the need. Easy to compare this with the Western designs we squeeze & brutalize ourselves into also for the sake of beauty

[Yan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A semi-scholarly coffee table book on the history and significance of this thousand-year-old tradition. Dorothy Ko does not sensationalise or patronize the practice or the women but rather, situates this in the context of female empowerment and decision making. Fascinating and insightful.

[Chanin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The shoes pictured in this book are gorgeous. I can't imagine making some of the detail on them. However, I can't imagine sitting all my life because my feet are so deformed either. Interesting read, but altogether sad and strang.

[André · Rating 4 out of 5]

今まで、靴は面白いと思ったことはありませんでしたが、纏足の靴の歴史とその靴が物資文化として果たした役割について読むととても興味深いです。しかし、著者が文化相対主義な論説で纏足の実践を正当化させようとしたところには賛成できません。もちろん、現代の価値観を違う時代に押し付けることは時代錯誤のほかないですが、それにしても纏足の非人道的な側面をも認めざるをえないと思います。著者と賛成しなくても、非常に面白い本なので、中国文化に興味のある方にオススメです。

[amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I was in China in 1986 I saw a very old woman with bound feet. I wanted to learn more about it.

[Daniel Burton-Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

The illustrated companion to Ko's revisionist history of foot binding.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A description of the pain and limitations that foot binding represented would have made this book whole and worth five stars.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating...

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up because I'm writing an essay on footbinding for a class on Chinese History, and I found it both informative and interesting. One of Ko's purposes in writing this book is the challenge the widely held narrative of footbinding being a horrendous, sexist, oppressive act that presents women with bound feet as weak victims to a patriarchal society. Going into this book, that was my perception of the practice as well, but, as Ko mentions, looking at footbinding solely from this perspective does not explain why women for centuries chose to have their daughter's feet bound, their own feet bound, and why many women refused to stretch out their feet when social pressure eased and eventually turned again it. Rather than being powerless victims, Ko looks at how women expressed their influence in their domestic lives and connected with other women and girls through the culture of footbinding. Ko does not shy away from the pain these women went through or any sexist/oppressive aspects of the practice, but if we truly want to give women from the past a voice in their history we need to acknowledge their thoughts and beliefs on customs of their time even if such customs appear oppressive to our modern mindsets.