Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding

I have a huge fascination for the topic of footbinding, mostly because it's so difficult to believe that it was done for so long. By the end of reading this book, I felt like I had a better understanding of how and why it happened, and more compassion for the women who overtook the lifelong arduous task of binding their feet.This book is extremely academic, and is mostly a literary study. Its topic is more "who said what about footbinding and when" than it is an explainer of the practice. I read the novel "Three Inch Golden Lotus" first, and then read this. As a result I felt like I had the understanding of what footbinding was like for the women who lived it before I started this book, which allowed me to meander through the literary review with more context and patience than I would have if I had started here.The choice to start with the abolition of footbinding and work backwards in time seems odd. I am not sure it totally served the book. If you are trying to wrap your head around what footbinding was and why it happened, diving straight into the abolition movement might not be satisfying, and you might want to start with another book like the novel I mentioned above. But it was super interesting content to me so I stuck with it for all 225 dense pages!Thank you Dorothy Ko for all that must have gone into writing this. No small feat! (Pun not intended 😉)

I love this book, BUT... its not a "fun read" it doesn't have lots of color pictures, and honestly it could have used a bit better narrative structure. So, basically its a textbook. It primarily talks about how foot binding was viewed, by various people at various times...It is also organized from "more recent" to "further past" so each chapter has you going backward in time. it takes a bit of getting used to.That said? primary source documentations are cited, lots of references i could never have found otherwise, and pretty accurate translations (and notations where the translation is unsure). IF you are looking for this kind of information.. this is your bookotherwise? if you want lots of color pictures, and embroidery close ups, and a bit of the history, you will find  Splendid Slippers: A Thousand Years of an Erotic Tradition  more to your taste.

This study is by a Barnard College professor that I heard lecture at the China Institute in New York City. The traditional Chinese cultural custom of deforming women's feet to make them smaller, resulting in pain, deformity, and disability, is no longer practiced. But it is a complex and controversial subject involving, among other things, sex, social status, and feminism. For me the value of this book is the author's focus on the perspectives of women who experienced, continued, and even promoted the practice, highlighting their views on it's costs and benefits. It's a useful counterpoint and a rich resource.

An insightful and extremely well-written book on a very difficult topic. Here, Dorothy Ko suggests that by merely condemning the practice of footbinding, we risk essentializing and ignoring that footbinding was a reality for many woman over several centuries. Instead, she looks at footbinding as a varied and changing practice, using several angles and historical periods to examine ow footbinding has been written about and understood in myriad ways.

This book was suppose to be a school project but I was stunned,educated and entertained at how informative Dorothy was in educating her readers on the extent on which beauty was measured in this culture. It made me realise how in almost every country is measured in so many different ways

good

I had to give it 1 star to be able to continue the review but it deserved nothing. This was unreadable. It might be readable by someone who likes to read facts ad nauseum. And I kept reading for a couple of chapters mistakingly thinking that it would somewhow turn into something of interest...no such luck. Don't waste your money like I did. You would get a better perspective of this practice if you read "The Binding Chair" by Kathryn Harrison.

It's totally new! The condition is "very good" but I will say it's "totally new"! The best condition ever! Thanks :)

I am researching foot binding for a book I am writing and so I have a read a lot on material on the subject. Ko's book is very interesting, yet she seems to shy away from actually discussing the process, ritual and female mystique of footbinding; she instead writes about it in a broader cultural sense and almost exclusively from the 19th/20th century male perspective. I understand the bulk of writings done on the subject were by men, however women who have bound feet are still alive today and I would love to have heard their voices in this book as well.I have read other works by Ko and I get the impression she considers writing about the 'nitty gritty' of this cultural practise beneith her. Whilst I respect she doesn't wish to cater to shock junkies or voyures, I find it astounding that this is a book about foot binding that fails to properly explain what it is and how it was done. She seems entirely preoccupied with how it was seen, not what it was.I don't wish to be entirely negative, this book is very easy to read and as a result I have a hundred new leads to continue with my own research.

bought for a history-mad daughter - she loves it. a very interesting topic. thank you.

Although it may be a general consensus that footbinding of the Chinese female -- the practice needs to start with young girls as early as at four or five -- began around the 10th century CE, the idea already began to form in a much earlier period, perhaps during the Six Dynasties (222-589 CE). In the Epilogue, Dorothy Ko says, "The aesthetic idea of tiny feet and dainty steps first appeared as poetic allusions to enchanting but distant goddesses in the Six Dynasties period." (p. 228). That is, the idea to have small female feet in terms of beauty came much earlier than the actual practice itself.Once bound, the binding would be lifelong. Not even during sleeping in bed was the binding removed. Removal of the binding strips -- several feet long -- might perhaps happen only during washing or bathing. This is what I could gather from reading the book.During the late Ming dynasty around the late 16th century, in Chinese vernacular novels the practice is also evident. I came across the following two lines of verse -- my translation -- in two well-known late Ming novels. The "red lotus petal" and "golden lotus" refer to the bound feet, probably as dressed up in socks and shoes:(1) "The red lotus petal kicks up the magnificent stirrup / Showing more clearly the narrowness of the golden lotus."(In chapter 53 of "Creation of the Gods" (Feng shen yan yi); this passage describes the look of the woman general Deng Chanyu on horseback ready to engage her foe.)(2) "... The golden lotus as narrow as three Chinese inches ...."(In chapter 72 of "Journey to the West" (Xi you ji); this passage describes the look of the female spiders who take on a human form.)We may know, then, the practice of footbinding was pervasive in late Ming (1368-1644), when woman fighters and even monsters also had it.As late as around the early 1930s, there were reportedly still over 300,000 girls under 15 who had bound feet in the northern province of Shanxi (p. 62). And, "even the victory with girls was mostly illusionary. In 1921, rumors spread that the government had ceased to be concerned with women's feet, and girls promptly began binding in many counties [in Shanxi province]." (p. 62)