Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates (2017). Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China.

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.