I’ve finally read this book! My friend who lent it to me has been raving about it for a while, and since I know nothing about footbinding, I was interested in learning more.

Cinderella’s Sisters is a “revisionist history of footbinding”. The author, Dorothy Ko, applies the term “revisionist” to her history because she doesn’t start from a place of condemnation. Rather, her goal is to write a non-derisive history of footbinding, approaching it as a historical rather than a polemical subject. Her thesis is that there is not one footbinding but many, as different regions and different villages practiced different forms of footbinding. Starting with the end of footbinding, Ko takes us back in time to investigate why footbinding died, its origins, and why it became so popular.

As it turns out, the origins of footbinding are murky. To make things difficult, writing about footbinding was taboo in most official genres and most male scholarly writing appears as jotting in notation books. Zhang Bangji writes that footbinding is popular in his time, i.e. the twelfth century, and that is when we know for sure that footbinding is present. Before that and we have disputed writing about how big feet were (inches changed from dynasty to dynasty) and we have legends about certain famous beauties who might or might not have inspired footbinding. With all this, it’s hard to pinpoint a person or time when footbinding became popular, but it was certainly present in the twelfth to nineteenth centuries.

My biggest takeaway from this book is that most of the writing about footbinding has been written through the gaze of male desire, which makes it very difficult to tease out women’s thoughts about the subject. However, a few accounts from the natural feet movement, which sought to stop footbinding, indicate that footbinding was a source of pride for some women, who did not wish to unbind their feet (and also, a lot of reformers did not understand the complexity in unbinding feet).

This book also had me thinking about the sometimes illusionary nature of choice. After footbinding had become popular and pervasive (though it was not universally applied across China) and after footbinding had fallen from fashion and anti-footbinding became the norm, women didn’t really have the chance to choose what they wanted to do with their feet. Can you really opt out of footbinding if this is going to hurt your daughter’s chances of marriage? Can you really choose to continue footbinding if it’s going to give you fine after fine? The social and sometimes legal pressure removed these women’s right to choose (though some tried to choose – like an older woman who scolded the young women campaigning against footbinding) and when you couple this with the fetishistic way footbinding is spoken of, it really does feel like women have merely been seen as objects for a long, long time. Which of course shows in the difficulty in bringing out women’s voices in this book, as women either do not speak or their words are filtered through a man before we even get to hear them.

As expected, this was an illuminating and fascinating book. I’m very tempted to buy a copy of myself, because I think that I haven’t properly absorbed all the arguments that Ko is making and I will need to read the book a few more times to understanding fully.