Cinderella's sisters : a revisionist history of footbinding /

Ko's Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet (CH, Jul'02, 39-6598) explained Chinese women's footbinding to general audiences as a centuries-old tradition supported by both women and men. This complementary/scholarly volume based on literary and archaeological evidence in Chinese museums demonstrates there were many types of footbinding, depending on regions, villages, rituals, and styles. This study--the most extensive in English--proceeds backwards from the 20th-century disappearance to earlier eradication via "natural feet" campaigns and anti-footbinding critiques, 17th- to 19th-century philological treatises regarding poetic merits for men and cultural identifications for women, and footbinding as material culture and its relationship to footwear fashions. Ko (Barnard College) accepts multiple explanations: Freud's psychological-sexual interpretation of fetishism; Veblen's "conspicuous consumption" with upward mobility paralleling Western "constricted waist" fashions; and Gates/Bosser's Marxist-feminist approach that footbinding changed according to social and economic evolution. Summarizing its existence over a millennium, Ko concludes that "Footbinding began as an act of embodied lyricism ... and ended as a ridiculous exercise of excess and folly." She provides intriguing insights into a hidden but vital facet of social and fashion history, revealing that unbound feet became symbols of modern women's equality and even of Chinese nationalism. Bibliography; 62 pages of endnotes; English/Chinese glossary. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. B. B. Chico Regis University

?Slender, small, pointy, arched, fragrant, soft and straight.? This mantra, allegedly muttered in the early 20th century by a male professor amongst friends, is said to summarize the mystery of bound feet. Meanwhile, sexual fetishism, oppression and godless contrivance are said to characterize the reality. Ko distrusts both, however, in this dense and impressive social history, best read as an expanded sibling to her previous work, Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet. Readers are reminded that footbinding was ?central to the mechanisms of Chinese society and gender relations? for roughly 1,000 years, and none of those years are adequately explained by ?envy, cruelty, violence, objectification? and other accusations against the Chinese male. As a professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University, Ko frets her contemporaries ?are accustomed to viewing footbinding only from an anti-footbinding perspective.? So she avoids those goggles, and reaches instead for the female perspective. Working backwards through time and drawing on women?s diaries, poetry and material artifacts, she writes a complex history that respects the energy and self-esteem Chinese women invested in what, to outsiders, seems a senseless deformation. To be sure, Ko does not defend footbinding, nor does she make a case for cultural relativism; her concern is only to ?understand the powerful forces that made binding feet a conventional practice. ? By her own account, she fails (?the history of footbinding does not add up?). But aside from some fibrous jargon (?multiple tonalities,? ?episteme of the functionalist body,? ?ontological status?), Ko?s peerless work will be relished by scholars and enjoyed by layreaders interested in Chinese history. (Dec.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.