Bound Feet Footbinding

Fashion in the early nineteen twenties was all about comfort. Men’s pants got wider and women stopped wearing their corsets and tight dresses, while older women of the age considered this scandalous and still held the thought that women should not show their ankle. Though the majority of adults disagreed with the fashion revolution, young women continually hiked up their skirts, stayed out late, and kept up with fashion trends. Times were changing, and thus the flapper age was born. Hemlines rose to the knee, and then later above it- exposing the muscular

Many children in various cultures had to undergo body modifications due to certain cultures and beliefs. “The feet of very young Chinese girls were bound and spliced, intentionally and irreversibly deforming them, because this was seen to guarantee the girls’ eventual amorous and matrimonial success.” (Borel,1994). In Polynesia, unless a girl was tattooed, she would not find a husband. An unornamented hand could not cook, nor dip into the communal food bowl (Borel,1994). It is as to say that “the fact that such motivations and pretexts depend on aesthetic, erotic, hygienic, or even medical considerations has no influence on the result, which is always in the direction of transforming the appearance of the body. Such a transformation is wished for, whether or not it is effective.”

Fatema Mernissi’s essay “Size 6: The Western Women’s Harem” shares her experience when she enters a department store in New York and is told she is too big when she can’t find a skirt her size. After being told she is too big, Mernissi continues on to question the sales lady. The sales lady then tells her that being a size six is a “normal” size. Immediately, it is noticeable that Mernissi isn’t too fond with the sales lady comment. The theme in Mernissi’s essay is the idea of women accepting the fact that men and society tell them how they should look in order for them to be beautiful. For example in the essay Mernissi questions as to why women accept this and how exactly does this work. By this, Mernissi shows her concern as to why women not only accept it, but also practice it.

In her essay “ Size 6: The Western Women’s Harem,” Mernissi strongly argues that the female body is viewed differently in America than in the middle east. Mernissi explains to us that her experience in a New York City store makes her feel very unpleasant about her body size due to the fact she was unable to fit into the size six skirt she was trying on. Mernissi states that “ The elegant saleslady in the American store looked at me without moving her desk and said she had no skirts in my size”(pg 233). Mernissi also argues that when she lived in the Middle East, there was no such thing as size. Everything was tailored to a woman's body size, so there was no need for numbers or letters to determine what one should wear. However, in America, that is the number one way many retailers carry their clothing. For Mernissi, it was very hard to understand that. America people like to love, hate, and judge our bodies and bodies of others, and Mernissi’s essay proves that.

“Lori and Pauline are excused from vacuuming on account of their backs… Helen has a bum foot, which Ted, in explaining her absence one day, blames on the cheap, ill-fitting shoes that, he implies, she perversely chooses to wear”(89).

When girls were school age their feet began bending to make them smaller. Their feet were swathe in bandages and drawn towards their heels which caused the bones to break creating a small 3 inch foot. Unfortunately, because of this custom many girls had complication which caused them to have infections, paralysis and some even died because of this gruesome tradition. The Chinese thought that this tradition of binding feet would give a young lady of the affluent class the opportunity of getting a good husband. The lower class and peasants did not divulge in this tradition because the women were needed to work in the

Foot binding was viewed as a sign of beauty, virtue, femininity, wealth, identity, and eroticism. When a girl became of marriageable age, soon-to-be mother in laws would pick a wife for their son by whichever girl had the smallest feet. The act of foot binding was to

These sadistic practices were needed to make sure that the slaves made it to their final destination alive, whether or not they were in the best shape. Although the women were not chained down like the men, they were horribly abused by the slave traders. The traders were allowed to rape them which led to the women committing suicide by jumping overboard and drowning. Rape was not necessary to scare those people into submission. Slave traders went beyond what was necessary to keep slaves. Although at some points the slaves fought back and rebelled, the treatment of the slaves on ships broke them down psychologically and physically. Robert Walsh reports that “The height sometimes between decks was only eighteen inches, so [they] could not turn round or even on their sides [because] the elevation [was] less than the breadth of their shoulders; and here they are usually chained to the decks by the neck and legs.” This made the conditions so bad that many of the enslaved people would try to “kill each other by strangulation or stabbing nails into each other’s heads in order to make more space for themselves” . Slave traders believed that these inhumane conditions were the appropriate way to transfer these people because they did not think that they were fellow human

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. They’re long and thin and splay-toed, with buttons of yellow callus on the little toes and a thick stair-step of it on the back of the heel, and a few long black hairs are curling out of the skin at the tops of the feet, and the red nail polish is cracking and peeling in curls and candy-striped with decay. Lenore only notices because Mindy’s bent over in the chair by the fridge picking at some of the polish on her toes; her bathrobe’s opening a little, so there’s some cleavage visible and everything, a lot more than Lenore’s got, and the thick white towel wrapped around Mindy’s wet washed shampooed head is coming undone

Women with large feet were considered a disgrace in China. Foot binding was the tight wrapping of fabric around a girl's foot in order to compress the foot (Moss and Wilson 230). The painful practice could cause many infections and could even lead to death. Many young girls would bind their feet around the age of eight to stop the growth of their feet, making it into a deformed shape. This was mainly practiced by the wealthier class because they wouldn't need to use their feet to work, unlike the lower class.

The concept of covering or restraining the breasts dates back to 2500 BC when Minoan women from the island of Crete wore garments which lifted the bare breasts out of their clothing. This eventually evolved into a binding that was worn by Greek women while they exercised. However, such garments

The neckline of the corsets ranged from high neck to very low.” It goes to show the extent of craftsmanship that took place in creating the ‘perfect’ body for women. This fashion trend was seen all throughout Western Europe during the 17th, 18th and 19th century, today through paintings one can see that even some of the most aristocratic women of the time such as Queen Mary II, advocated for a

Imagine someone’s toes must be bound except the big toe against the soles of their feet. It hurts just to think about it, doesn 't it? Traditions can make someone powerful by accomplishing them yet painful at the same time. Beauty traditions that girls go through bring pain. Family honor is also the reason why girls uphold such traditions. In the novel Ties that Bind, Ties that Break by Lensey Namioka, she explains how young Chinese girls are afflicted by pain by getting their feet bound. Being able to have bound feet are something those young girls have to bear. Also, “The journey by Inner Light”, by Meeta Kaur, she explain her journey to find her inner self both mentally and physically through her tradition. By following the

Foot Binding~ Have you ever heard of footbinding? Do you know what it is? In case you don’t know what it is, footbinding is what they did to young girls around four years old or even younger to the girls who lived in China (Ancient) was a process that made the girl’s foot to stop growing permanently. To be exact, footbinding is the custom of painfully tightening a girls foot to prevent their feet from growing. This was an extremely painful process, and was to start at an early age due to how long the process takes.

Ever since slavery, the size and shape of a woman’s body has been important. in the seventeenth