Open AccessLaurel Bossen and Hill Gates (2017). Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China.
Author(s) -
Jie Lin
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the british association for chinese studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2048-0601
DOI - 10.51661/bjocs.v8i2.4
Subject(s) - demise , china , industrialisation , beauty , politics , tracking (education) , history , political science , sociology , law , pedagogy
Ten years after Dorothy Ko’s study that shifted the understanding of footbinding fundamentally (Ko, 2007), Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates’s ground-breaking research on footbinding will again change our knowledge of this practice for good. Through exploring the long-neglected subject of rural women’s footbinding, Bossen and Gates argue that the reason for the demise of footbinding in village China is not because of fashion, beauty, sex, education or a political campaign. Instead, women stopped this practice because of industrialisation, which inevitably drove them out of the business of domestic, sedentary textile-production.