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Thanks for this point.

I’m actually a bit unsure how true it is that the status element of footbinding was important. Certainly that’s an established narrative in the literature (e.g. Shepherd buys it).

Brown, Bossen and Hill have an article I’ve only skimmed called ‘Marriage Mobility and Footbinding in Pre-1949 Rural China: A Reconsideration of Gender, Economics, and Meaning in Social Causation’ (link here: https://​​www.cambridge.org/​​core/​​journals/​​journal-of-asian-studies/​​article/​​marriage-mobility-and-footbinding-in-pre1949-rural-china-a-reconsideration-of-gender-economics-and-meaning-in-social-causation/​​CF5C5F1E441C5E2BF56BBA8B56F55835), which argues as follows:

• “In our sample of 7,314 rural women living in Sichuan, Northern, Central, and Southwestern China in the first half of the twentieth century, two-thirds of women did not marry up. In fact, 22 percent of all women, across regions, married down. In most regions, more women married up than down, but in all regions, the majority did not marry hypergamously. Moreover, for most regions, we found no statistically significant difference between the chances of a footbound girl versus a not-bound girl in marrying into a wealthier household, despite a common cultural belief that footbinding would improve girls’ marital prospects.”

There’s an article I haven’t read called ‘Footbinding, Hypergamy, and Handicraft Labor: Evaluating the Labor Market Explanation of Footbinding’, which sounds like it pushes back on these arguments. Link here: https://​​link.springer.com/​​article/​​10.1007/​​s40806-020-00271-9

Also, I think it’s not clear how true it is that “families who needed girls to conduct agricultural labor could not partake”:

• Many scholars note anecdotal evidence of footbound women working in fields

• In Brown and Satterthwaite-Phillips’ model, performing agricultural labour is not significant, although girls who did agricultural labour were less likely to be footbound. I can’t immediately find a figure for % of footbound girls who did agricultural labour in their dataset unfortunately Brown in their review article puts forward several arguments against Shepherd’s view:

• Bossen and Gates note “Given the wide distribution of binding we found among poor rural populations, it seems unlikely that elite emulation was the main consideration.”

Was the “moral campaign” against footbinding itself actually about morality, or was it also mainly about economics and/​or status? (Or maybe all these things are inextricably linked in our minds at a deep level.) At least one paper takes the latter perspective (albeit expressed in the language of “postcolonial feminism”). From its conclusions section:

Interestingly, foot-bound women were the strongest proponents of the practice in the face of the anti-footbinding movement.66 As Patricia Angela Sieber notes, from the perspective of these silenced Chinese women, footbinding was a “symbolic iconography of domesticity rather than [of] the deformed who hid themselves from government inspection and who reapplied binders as inspectors left.67 Why did the women who were being ‘liberated’ resist these policies for liberation? Because the anti-footbinding movement was not a movement for the ’liberation’of feet-bound women as missionaries and reformers claimed, but was rather a product of “colonial conditions of global unevenness.”68

The presence of Western missionaries and colonialists in China led to an anti-footbinding movement, which gained exposure on a global scale. Male reformers, who were already shamed by China’s military defeats, were further shamed by westerners who through anti-footbinding tactics brought forth a colonial perspective of ‘acceptable’ cultural practices, which these Chinese reformers accepted.69 As Kenneth Butler notes “exploitation” occurs when an individual or group with power utilizes that power to his or her own advantage, at the expense of another individual or group without it.70 A review of the anti-footbinding historiography and feet-bound Chinese women’s histories reveals two acts of exploitation. The first was the colonialist imposition of morality upon the Chinese reformers and the second was the enforcement of anti-footbinding measures through imperial decrees, missionaries, and reform movements.71 Through the termination of practices such as footbinding, the Chinese nation did make the transition from tradition to modernity, but the end of footbinding was by no means achieved in the interest of foot-bound women whose voices and wants have since been marginalized in Chinese history.