Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding

by Dorothy Ko

The history of footbinding is full of contradictions and unexpected turns. The practice originated in the dance culture of China's medieval court and spread to gentry families, brothels, maid's quarters, and peasant households. Conventional views of footbinding as patriarchal oppression often neglect its complex history and the incentives of the women involved. This revisionist history, elegantly written and meticulously researched, presents a fascinating new picture of the practice from its beginnings in the tenth century to its demise in the twentieth century. Neither condemning nor defending foot-binding, Dorothy Ko debunks many myths and misconceptions about its origins, development, and eventual end, exploring in the process the entanglements of male power and female desires during the practice's thousand-year history.

Cinderella's Sisters argues that rather than stemming from sexual perversion, men's desire for bound feet was connected to larger concerns such as cultural nostalgia, regional rivalries, and claims of male privilege. Nor were women hapless victims, the author contends. Ko describes how women—those who could afford it—bound their own and their daughters' feet to signal their high status and self-respect. Femininity, like the binding of feet, was associated with bodily labor and domestic work, and properly bound feet and beautifully made shoes both required exquisite skills and technical knowledge passed from generation to generation. Throughout her narrative, Ko deftly wields methods of social history, literary criticism, material culture studies, and the history of the body and fashion to illustrate how a practice that began as embodied lyricism—as a way to live as the poets imagined—ended up being an exercise in excess and folly.

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction, Asia, Feminism, Gender, Grad School

351 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

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

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.9/5

Narratives of female suffering conferred power onto those who publicized them, be they male nationalist reformers or urban educated women, who occupied a male subject position. One woman's pride and freedom was predicated on another woman's shame and bondage.

The majority of writing that is deemed 'nonfiction' isn't actually such, but is instead a menagerie of fairy tales, self-help books, and project proposals for video games. In the first, you have your heroes, your villains, your perfect princes, your prettily pitiful princesses, your honorable kings, your rapacious queens, your demon hoards, your evil dragons (all of the Eurocentric gender dichotomy implied by every previous category except for, conveniently, the latter two), etc, etc, etc, all leading to the likes of genocidal Winston Churchill being known as "the last lion" or whatever such nonsense. In the second, you have the result of a people living in a misogynistic, capitalistic, and white supremacist society, which is that they need to be told what to think. All the time. Bonus points if you can transform it into a witch hunt manual à la movie-glutted and sadism-apologist The Sociopath Next Door, which could well be greatly enhanced in this country of mine by the passage of the underreported Murphy Bills which basically state no, actually, mentally unwell people aren't human beings, and we need to help their families take control of them for the good of society. In the third, you have the passage of time as a twist on the first person shooter/politician/liberal do-gooder. Fifteenth century? Level up to the End of the Dark Ages! Nineteenth? Bonus end of slavery in the only country that currently matters at the moment! Twentieth? All women can vote (the ones can count, at any rate)! All that is great if you want to feel good about yourself, horrible if you actually want to read something that doesn't try so hard to resemble narrative fiction that it undermines itself before the first sentence has even begun.

Envy, cruelty, violence, objectification: these horrible things that men do to others are also a part of the story, but they are inadequate explanations for the longevity of the practice and the stubbornness with which women embraced and perpetuated it.

For women, footbinding amounted to the achievement of Confucian goals (modesty and civility) using an anti-Confucian means (maiming the body).

You can tell that this work isn't any of those sorts by how pissy most of the top reviews are. What they wanted was something that looked like the footbinding tag on tumblr, full of shock tropes and condemnation and Orientalist twittering. What they got was nonfiction that took what evidence it could get from esteemed classics, experimental compiling powered by collective fetish, philosophy, history, theory, cultural critique, colonialist tracks, (archae/anthrop)ology, and so much else that gave the slightest hint of this thing known as "footbinding". Much like my concurrent read The History of White People, the closest description you can get is an idea that managed over centuries to encompass enough bodies to constitute a culture, albeit this work, instead of chugging along from the Greeks to US anthropology, went backwards. This made for reading that resembled ripples on a globed body of water more than the A + B = C / D = E = F ? [Solution] the typical representative of nonfiction will do its best to shove itself into, especially when the words of white-savior types are found to have occurred a century or more earlier in Chinese prose, inherently more aware and less drowned in imperial agenda.

A new view of the machine-like body created in the image of the Christian god had taken hold. Regardless of the women's subjective wishes, both the utopian and the mundane manners of improving upon one's body had become hopelessly dated.

To be honest, my interest in this book was born in titillation. The subject was a vague mysticism from my early years, the cover intrigued in a manner bordering on erotic fascination, and as a woman still coming to terms with her bisexuality, I'll never be able to fall in line with the men have the sexual incentive, women have the sexual incentive thrust upon them ever again. I knew all of this going into the work, and bore it in mind throughout, for a free will that has no regard for others compromises the very definition of "free" with a facile dichotomy that can only define itself via scapegoat. Does that mean I read this as erotica? Maybe in part, albeit mixed with all the other things I'm turned on by, like well founded analysis and novel instances of insight and motivation to read the works venerated as opus magnum by cultures that are not by own. The reviewers who were sickened by the chapters spent on Chinese men writing voyeur morality tales about golden lotuses will probably pass me by because of this, but that's okay. I don't trust anyone who takes themselves that seriously. Or is it that they don't take themselves in conjunction with others seriously enough? Whatever the case, from one white woman to another, if you're thinking of saving the nonwhite women from the nonwhite men: don't.

Antiquity, we may recall, is as inaccessible as the splendors of the capital for the scholar in exile. Instead of riding on the historicist faith that the distance between past and present can be bridged by painstaking archival research, factual verification, and logical deduction, Yang Shen dispensed with the pretension altogether that one can return to the distant capital.
Instead of despair, however, Yang rode into the unknown with optimism and a sense of freedom, even mischief. In invading the integrity of the archives as a repository of knowledge and in insisting on a playful reading strategy, he alerted his readers to the lack of one-on-one correspondence between text and meaning. In so doing, he changed the reader's expectations of the kind of cultural work performed by a text. Subsequent scholars, too busy to correct his mistakes, seem oblivious to Yang's main message: that there is life beyond the search for certainty and authenticity.

Isn't that a great passage? I doubt I'll remember Yang Shen's context or even his name for very long, but I'll always adore Machado de Assis (a black man, fyi) types, nonfiction or otherwise. This text is more contemplative than fun for the most part, but it has that sense of wonder that the best scholars always have. This wonder is necessarily muted as the subject of footbinding demands, but true to the introduction's proposal and the conclusion's reiteration, this is not a fairy tale chock full of awful dragons and beleaguered princesses, nor a self-help guide to how one should think, nor a progressive linearity wherein footbinding is the final boss. Neither is this an easy read, what with the academic tone and the end notes encompassing nearly a third of the pages and borderline requirement of fluency in Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese and even some Japanese. I spoke of titillation earlier, but if the annals of analysis of cultural history are where you look for your porn, you're going to have to try really, really, really hard.

Toward the end of this book, I harbor a lasting regret. The crux of the matter—the bodily sensations of premodern women with bound feet—is ultimately unknowable. My quixotic goal in this chapter is to get as close to their bodies as possible. These bodies once occupied a temporal and cultural space, leaving behind material imprints and traces which rarely took literary forms. However fragmentary, shoes, socks, binding cloths, foot powder, medicinal recipes, and embroidery patterns provide clues to the vanished body, its subjective experiences, and the histories of which they were a part.

I'll be over by The Plum in the Golden Vase in a few months or so if anyone needs me.

P.S. If you think there's any fundamental differences between footbinding and breastbinding in all its contemporary and Eurosanctioned forms, you've got a lot to learn about human physiology and socialized aesthetics.

[二六 侯 · Rating 4 out of 5]

開頭到中段算倒敘，最後又順序，敘事策略相當有意思。除了傳統小腳論著，還廣為徵引類書、俗曲、小說、筆記或日記，企圖從更廣的視野綜觀小腳並不是從頭到尾都無變化的歷史，但因為女性自身說法幾不可見，所有的證據中最有趣的還是二十世紀下半出土文物。

當然身為女性，最主要的讀後感還是：我的腳那麼大，那一部分不幸纏了腳的祖先，到底經歷了什麼？

筆記數則：

p.218
「我們可以大膽推測，要不是椅子的普及，纏足可能就不會從文學想像發展成具體作為。」
「以固定的牆壁取代屏風分隔家戶空間的結果，或許強化了家室的封閉感，從而助長了『婦女深閨』此一理想。」

p.220
「錢泳提到女兒裹足年齡延遲的情況，間接地佐證了江南婦女的經濟貢獻。」
→依此推論，客家婦女應當有更大的經濟貢獻……
→錢泳的時代雲貴、兩湖、兩廣不裹腳者大有人在，但一個世紀以後似乎裹腳之風也蔓延到這些區域？（可能如p.324雲南最後小腳村所示，流行的傳播總是最後才道編區，而在風俗消逝之後也保留在邊區。）

p.222
「就修辭與行動發案的提出而言，錢泳彷彿已經預見了現代反纏足運動的出現。」

p.270
文化人類學式探討包含繡鞋的婆媳禮物交換；「客家老婆子，在地主家幫傭的佃戶妻子」。

p.284
「狀似獨木舟的鞋子，則可能伴隨腳尖向上纏裹的方式」p.280的江蘇永樂年間女墓二十一公分長的鞋子，固然從這個理論來詮釋合理（以古人矮於現代人的身高而言，如果150公分左右長個二十一公分長的腳很OK），但此處以南宋福州黃昇陪葬品與德安周氏遺體來論證，我印象中黃昇的鞋非常小，只有十三、四公分長，如果只是把腳束緊會長那麼小嗎？（作者在插頁說黃昇死時年僅十七腳才那麼小，但華人女性差不多十五六歲就發育完成不會再長了，而黃昇的身高有矮於145公分嗎？）


p.288
「田藝蘅與汪景祺有關南北差異的相反描述，部分或許歸因於兩人之間超過一世紀的時間距離」，就引文讀來（田：若夫昔人所詠弓鞋，乃北方婦人之態，南人笑之為翻頭腳，亦曰揣船頭；汪：秦晉燕趙間，女子二三歲即纏足，天然纖小，并不似弓形。其弓形者，嗤為鵝頭腳），似乎不是相反，而是他們對「弓」的看法不一致？如果翻頭的意思是早期腳尖上翹的樣式呢？


p.290
「不過那時（20世紀）已經太遲了。依基督教的上帝形上而產生的新式機械論身體觀，已成為顯學。」
雖然中國的現代化與基督教／西方勢力的進入不無關係，但放棄纏足也是暗合儒家的「身體髮膚，受之父母，不敢毀傷」吧？

p.291
南宋《居家必用事類》「宮內縮蓮步捷法」、《事林廣記》「西施脫骨湯」，但如果最初是腳尖像上纏裹成尖翹形，雞眼還會那麼嚴重嗎？

p.299
由《新刻說唱包龍圖段曹國舅公案傳》推論「纏足的牽制，象徵著社會地位下降的苦楚」。

p.313
引用《三台萬用正宗》類書及《十六世中國南部紀行》中的葡萄牙傳教士廣州行，來談鞋業。
「當他（沈復）的妻子陳芸欲扮男裝復燈會參觀，沈復提議道：『坊間有蝴蝶履，大小由之，購亦極易，且早晚可代撒鞋之用，不亦善乎？』」

p.315
蝴蝶履這種前面有蝴蝶圖案的鞋子竟然是男人穿的，Ballet flat也是男裝出身啊，二十世紀男裝的陽剛化真是一個好課題。
引用《內閣刑科題本》乾隆年間判例。

[Agnieszka · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am very interested in the topic of footbinding, and what I normally find in literature are some vague remarks or fictional accounts of footbinding (such as in Secret Fan and the Snow Flower by Lisa See).
I wanted to read a proper book that would explain in a straightforward manner when, why and how.
This book, unfortunately, did not exactly meet my expectations. I appreciated the photos and fragments of sources that spoke of footbinding, but still, all that was very vague. The book consists mostly of fragments of writing by men on footbinding (none of them giving proper, or full information on the topic) and fragments of stories.
All that being very interesting, I hoped the author would do the job of deciphering old sources and providing me with solid information that would let me learn more of footbinding than I had already known. It is nice to be able to read original sources, but in my opinion they should only illustrate the information that the author gives us, not the other way round.
All in all, it was good to be able to have a look at the photographs included in the books and browse through some early writings on the topic of footbinding, but in the end, I know as little as I knew at the beginning.

[Hutch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most people approach the subject of footbinding in China with a gross fascination. How could someone do that to themselves? A daughter? How could it be considered attractive? After reading Beverly Jackson's Splendid Slippers, and searching the internet for images and articles, I decided to delve as deep as possible into a cultural history of the practice.

Dorothy Ko's book puts footbinding in as complete a context as I have encountered. She includes excerpts from texts of footbinding fetishists, images, stories of small foot contests, and the cultural implications of the size of a woman's foot. As you delve into this text, footbinding becomes less strange, and I gained a great appreciation for what it meant to Chinese society before it was outlawed and eventually discredited.

This book is not for the casual reader, it is an academic text, and reads slowly for someone simply looking for a quick glimpse at footbinding. For those simply looking for a basic understanding of the practice, I recommend Splendid Slippers, or Ko's other book, Every Step a Lotus.

[ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really excellent example of what academic history can (and in my opinion, often should) be. Ko goes past the general assumptions about footbinding and into a huge body of primary sources, many of which had not been used by earlier historians. She makes a point to draw from women's experiences and writings when possible, which is a particularly strong aspect of her research. Without becoming an apologist, Ko reframes footbinding within Chinese culture and society, particularly in terms of the tensions between "Western" and Chinese values and traditions. Her notes are extensive and useful. I'd highly recommend it for historians, women's studies folks, people interested in the social construction of beauty, and anyone interested in Chinese history.

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book helped to complicate my understanding of footbinding, mostly in Ko's efforts to focus on the multifaceted traditions and experiences of footbinding, rather than reinforce the idea that the practice was homogenous across place and time, and how Chinese women may have experienced the customs. Ko attempts to challenge the anti-footbinding narratives that can only understand the practice through the narrow and limited view of the present.

[Iñaki Tofiño · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is dense, filled with information, but it tells a fascinating story of footbinding as a cultural practice, far from a Manichean reading which would condemn it without taking into account the social and economic contexts of its appearance and its slow abandon. It is interesting to see how women's bodies are always the location of culture, the place where multiple elements are embodied, where men and women show their status, their economic means... Ko perfectly situates all these elements through readings of literature and analysis of material culture. My only criticism is that I did not understand why she presented them chronologically backwards. In any case, an absorbing book.

[Eustacia Tan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve finally read this book! My friend who lent it to me has been raving about it for a while, and since I know nothing about footbinding, I was interested in learning more.

Cinderella’s Sisters is a “revisionist history of footbinding”. The author, Dorothy Ko, applies the term “revisionist” to her history because she doesn’t start from a place of condemnation. Rather, her goal is to write a non-derisive history of footbinding, approaching it as a historical rather than a polemical subject. Her thesis is that there is not one footbinding but many, as different regions and different villages practiced different forms of footbinding. Starting with the end of footbinding, Ko takes us back in time to investigate why footbinding died, its origins, and why it became so popular.

As it turns out, the origins of footbinding are murky. To make things difficult, writing about footbinding was taboo in most official genres and most male scholarly writing appears as jotting in notation books. Zhang Bangji writes that footbinding is popular in his time, i.e. the twelfth century, and that is when we know for sure that footbinding is present. Before that and we have disputed writing about how big feet were (inches changed from dynasty to dynasty) and we have legends about certain famous beauties who might or might not have inspired footbinding. With all this, it’s hard to pinpoint a person or time when footbinding became popular, but it was certainly present in the twelfth to nineteenth centuries.

My biggest takeaway from this book is that most of the writing about footbinding has been written through the gaze of male desire, which makes it very difficult to tease out women’s thoughts about the subject. However, a few accounts from the natural feet movement, which sought to stop footbinding, indicate that footbinding was a source of pride for some women, who did not wish to unbind their feet (and also, a lot of reformers did not understand the complexity in unbinding feet).

This book also had me thinking about the sometimes illusionary nature of choice. After footbinding had become popular and pervasive (though it was not universally applied across China) and after footbinding had fallen from fashion and anti-footbinding became the norm, women didn’t really have the chance to choose what they wanted to do with their feet. Can you really opt out of footbinding if this is going to hurt your daughter’s chances of marriage? Can you really choose to continue footbinding if it’s going to give you fine after fine? The social and sometimes legal pressure removed these women’s right to choose (though some tried to choose – like an older woman who scolded the young women campaigning against footbinding) and when you couple this with the fetishistic way footbinding is spoken of, it really does feel like women have merely been seen as objects for a long, long time. Which of course shows in the difficulty in bringing out women’s voices in this book, as women either do not speak or their words are filtered through a man before we even get to hear them.

As expected, this was an illuminating and fascinating book. I’m very tempted to buy a copy of myself, because I think that I haven’t properly absorbed all the arguments that Ko is making and I will need to read the book a few more times to understanding fully.

This review was first posted at Eustea Reads

[Raquel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The is the first academic text I’ve read since college (~6 years) and I’m glad it’s my reintroduction to academia. This very much feels like a “playful” text in that it’s asking us to play with meaning and meaning-making outside of the ways we usually make and interpret meaning. In the context of footbinding, she’s asking us to suspend any moralistic judgment we may make in order to explore other avenues of meaning. There is much to mine from this text but what I was fixated on was the blurring, or wholesale collapsing, of the private/public dichotomy — how our bodies are often sites where sociopolitical forces play out both in the way we interact with our own bodies but also in the way its viewed by others (which seems especially true for female-socialized folks). It’s sparked my interest in the material history behind various temporal and spatial cultures of beauty, which is a fascinating and often neglected facet of women’s history.

The only drawback is that it’s not particularly accessible. Although it’s not as dense as most academic texts, it definitely isn’t “pop history” in the way that The Cosmic Serpent is “pop anthropology” or The Invisible Gorilla is “pop psychology.” So if you’re looking for accessible “pop history” about or overview of footbinding, this is definitely shouldn’t be your go-to.

[Kavya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many gender studies books do not do justice to the complexity of non-male desires. This is a great book that examines textual and material culture and presents a nuanced argument. It is recommended for anyone interested in gender issues. The argument is not without controversy, due to our current desire for (moral) purity and clear cut answers.

物极必反。越是规训某一些东西，比如脚的大小或者女性的“贞洁”，越是会激起一些欲望。任何器官都可以成为性器官。禁忌产生刺激。道德虚无。

[yuefei]

I think this is one of the best academic history texts I've read. Resisting the widespread moral condemnation of footbinding, Ko proceeds without judgement to unravel the complexities of the practice in a quiet commemoration of women's lives, their desires, and their bodies (while sustaining its contradictions, leaving a textual openness within her fragmentary history for the reader).

[Naked Fish · Rating 3 out of 5]

每一章单独拿出来都是很好的research （特别是山西的放足运动那一章），但组合在一起就显得刻意和奇怪。花大力气证明记录缠足的文字材料不可靠，大多是男性和性有关的想象。直到最后一章（还包括倒数第二章的最后几节）才开始从女性身体与物质文化的角度讨论问题。其实全书严格说并不是关于缠足的修正历史，而是关于缠足之想象的历史。

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to add later

[Edward · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Chyi · Rating 3 out of 5]

读来本为猎奇，看完却并不觉有趣。本书绝大篇幅都是在叙述男性对“金莲”的欲望和想象，缺乏女性自己的声音。此外，单纯视传统妇女为“受害者”的论述固不可取，但我也很难认同作者“缠足不是一种负累，而是一种特权”的看法。

[Leah Yang · Rating 5 out of 5]

挺有意思的，虽然看完感觉啥也没记住。

[Wenjing Fan · Rating 3 out of 5]

作者的核心观点是，不能用“反缠足”的视角写缠足的历史。但作者写了很多男性视角下对缠足的衍生叙述，而她最开始也一直在说她希望写的“女性身体”的部分在文中也一直是客体的存在（男性欲望的客体、叙述的客体、历史的客体）。很难认可这本书。

[Αγγελόπουλος · Rating 4 out of 5]

第一部分比第二部分好看很多，只是真的可惜沒有很多一手的採訪資料。針對壓迫女性的研究永遠不會有盡頭。

[Alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently I was a bit disappointed when I first finished this book three years ago because I thought it was basically a textbook. Which yeah it is, it’s a dense nonfiction book relying heavily on primary sources. But it WAS pretty interesting and it was so enlightening about something (foot binding) that was a real lived cultural and social and historical and physical reality for generations and generations. This was a normal thing, and just chalking everything up to patriarchy does not explain fully how footbinding existed in the world around it as a normal thing. I’ve remembered this book multiple times now in my college studies because a lot of what I found here was just so enlightening, because yeah, it is surprising that something as seemingly on-the-nose oppressive as bodily mutilation could have deeper complexities. For example, I remember one primary source Ko cited of a woman arguing that women’s education and foot binding are not antithetical because women with bound feet could study perfectly fine. I also remember other sources Ko cited on how, well, SEXIST some of the anti-footbinding inspectors were and how sneered upon footbound women became after the practice fell out of fashion. For a long-term impact like that, of course I have to raise the star rating.

20th May 2025

[Dawn · Rating 2 out of 5]

The beginning was interesting, but the fourth and fifth chapters delved into the male fantasy world and all its vulgarities far longer than I cared for. As with many books, the main points could have been stated in a far shorter volume. I did learn quite a lot about footbinding, but what good is that knowledge to me? What it did do was get me thinking about beauty and how we try to manipulate ourselves to fit its current definition. We look at footbinding with gaping mouths, but in a society where plastic surgery, lazer treatments, even spray tans are prevalant why are we so judgmental. Hell we still wear our version of bound feet, high heels, so comfy right? And do we do this for ourselves? I love getting gussied up as much as the next woman but usually what we do for ourselves involves a long bath and putting on the most body loving pajamas we own.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book! Ko does an excellent job of presenting a controversial topic that allows the nuance of both the pain and pleasure, oppression and female agency to shine through. Her focus on material culture is unique in my experience. Her style is also highly readable. While this is far from narrative history it is an enjoyable read!

[Anh Le · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the reason why I want to write cultural history. Period. Best approach to a topic as sensitive and emotionally wrought as footbinding. I even wrote an extended historiographical review for this book and talked about how crucial is is to the developments of feminist scholarships and modern Chinese cultural history.

[June · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and photographed

[Kandice Newren · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was pretty interesting, but there were some really slow parts. It covered the history in an informative way without being judgmental. There was a lot of primary documents quoted, which made the history more interesting. I would give it a read if you were ever curious about it.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome book. She sets out to provide a different perspective on foot-binding, one that is neither for or against and does so. Encourage people to read as an introspective on how we view the actions of others and the kind of history we are leaving behind ourselves.

[Wajiha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, never imagined a custom like this would be practiced for so many years.

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very interesting

Incredibly dull

I mostly skimmed to the more interesting parts

Speed reading and glancing the rest

[Lavana Sanchez · Rating 5 out of 5]

chinese footbinding is an interesting bt welling to read

[Lauren Gilmore Hautamaki · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting perspective on footbinding. enjoyed book structure and sources.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

not one foot-binding, but many embodied practices ... rituals, material culture, daily routine, fashion regimes ...