Thanks for this! It wouldn’t have occurred to me to consider the decline of footbinding as a case study of moral progress,
I think you’ve probably noted this and perhaps didn’t mention it because it’s not directly relevant to the main questions you’re investigating, but I think it’s important to note for someone who only reads this post that having bound feet was a status symbol—it began among the social elite and spread over time to lower social classes, remained a status symbol because families who needed girls to conduct agricultural labor could not partake in the practice, and in practice an incentive to do it was to increase marriage prospects.
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).
“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.”
Some other related things I’ve pulled from my notes are arguments in Brown’s review article against Shepherd’s view:
“99 percent of women married regardless of how many had ever bound. So bound feet were clearly not needed to be able to marry. The BBG data show regional variation in whether being footbound at marriage age led to hypergamy, with significant correlations only for Sichuan (primarily from two counties) and not for North, Central, and Southwest China.17 Nevertheless, about 47 percent of women—even in Sichuan—married to households at the same wealth level as their natal households.”
Shepherd’s Taiwan data shows earlier marriage for footbound girls, but later marriage could also indicate more economic value to the parental household, so this isn’t a clear signal
“most ever-bound women had released their feet before marriage”
Thanks for this! It wouldn’t have occurred to me to consider the decline of footbinding as a case study of moral progress,
I think you’ve probably noted this and perhaps didn’t mention it because it’s not directly relevant to the main questions you’re investigating, but I think it’s important to note for someone who only reads this post that having bound feet was a status symbol—it began among the social elite and spread over time to lower social classes, remained a status symbol because families who needed girls to conduct agricultural labor could not partake in the practice, and in practice an incentive to do it was to increase marriage prospects.
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.”
Some other related things I’ve pulled from my notes are arguments in Brown’s review article against Shepherd’s view:
“99 percent of women married regardless of how many had ever bound. So bound feet were clearly not needed to be able to marry. The BBG data show regional variation in whether being footbound at marriage age led to hypergamy, with significant correlations only for Sichuan (primarily from two counties) and not for North, Central, and Southwest China.17 Nevertheless, about 47 percent of women—even in Sichuan—married to households at the same wealth level as their natal households.”
Shepherd’s Taiwan data shows earlier marriage for footbound girls, but later marriage could also indicate more economic value to the parental household, so this isn’t a clear signal
“most ever-bound women had released their feet before marriage”