Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic & informative! High price of fashion and status...
Review: For centuries in China women tottered wearing tiny silk shoes. In "Every Step a Lotus," Dorothy Ko describes the obscure Chinese custom of footbinding. Every culture has different forms of unusual, sometimes unpleasant, rituals. In pre-1949 China petite feet symbolized beauty, status and honor. A woman's face and personality became secondary to tiny feet adorned with exquisite shoes.

Chinese women were revered for their textile artistry and took enormous pride in creating their own shoes, sitting together for days chatting and sewing decorative embroidery on ravishing silk. Lotus shoes told stories with intricate needlework reflecting hopes and dreams of a better life.

Ko's well-researched exposé and graceful prose details a custom that was the outcome of living in a male dominated Confucian culture. Ko includes over one hundred illustrations of exquisite antique lotus shoes from different regions during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Most of the spectacular shoes, from the collection of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, have never been exhibited before. Readers also get to see rare black and white photographs of women with bound feet.

Ko writes "As a historian who has studied footbinding and women's cultures for years, I do not claim to be neutral. I feel strongly that we should understand footbinding not as a senseless act of destruction but as a meaningful practice in the eyes of the women themselves." The author is a professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Ko's mission is refreshing and admirable. Passing judgment is hypocritical as every culture has idiosyncrasies. Footbinding is no different than plastic surgery, facelifts and silicon breast implants--modern examples of what people will endure for beauty and status. Let's not overlook Victorian era corsets that were dangerously tight, which reduced breathing capacity and jammed internal organs into hazardous positions.

Readers of "Every Step A Lotus" will gain appreciation for this unusual bygone Chinese custom. Why does footbinding continue to intrigue history enthusiasts and many others? Perhaps the answer lies in the author's words "Most of the bodies are gone; only the shoes remain."

By looking at these little silk treasures a world vastly different from ours is unveiled...we are given a glance of old China from 5,000 miles away.

Thank you Dorothy Ko for your expertise and writing this outstanding book. --M. Morrison, ...