Footbinding and Women’s Labor in Sichuan 1st edition by Hill Gates- Ebook PDF Instant Download/Delivery:9781138104211,1138104213
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ISBN 10: 1138104213
ISBN 13:9781138104211
Author: Hill Gates
When Chinese women bound their daughters’ feet, many consequences ensued, some beyond the imagination of the binders and the bound. The most obvious of these consequences was to impress upon a small child’s body and mind that girls differed from boys, thus reproducing gender hierarchy. What is not obvious is why Chinese society should have evolved such a radical method of gender-marking. Gendering is not simply preparation for reproduction, rather its primary significance lies in preparing children for their places in the division of labor of a particular political economy.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with almost 5,000 women, this book examines footbinding as Sichuan women remember it from the final years of the empire and the troubled times before the 1949 revolution. It focuses on two key questions: what motivated parents to maintain this custom, and how significant was girls’ work in China’s final pre-industrial century? In answering these questions, Hill Gates shows how footbinding was a form of labor discipline in the first half of the twentieth century in China, when it was a key institution in a now much-altered political economy. Countering the widely held views surrounding the sexual attractiveness of bound feet to Chinese men, footbinding as an ethnic boundary marker, its role in female hypergamy, and its connection to state imperatives, this book instead presents a compelling argument that footbinding was in fact a crucial means of disciplining of little girls to lives of early and unremitting labor.
This vivid and fascinating study will be of huge interest to students and scholars working across a wide range of fields including Chinese history, oral history, anthropology and gender studies.
Footbinding and Women’s Labor in Sichuan 1st Table of contents:
1 Footbinding in Sichuan, 1854–1954
Two questions about footbinding
Footbinding in the flesh
Gathering and interpreting evidence
What the plain facts tell
Notes
2 Patchworking Sichuan women’s history across 100 years
Below the oral history horizon in Sichuan
Living memories
Ms. Wu of Suining
Ms. Li of Mingshan
Steamboat trade into Sichuan
New thoughts flowing
Ms. Gao of Emei Shan
Ms. Zhang of Emei Shan
The 1911 revolution
Ms. Ma of Lezhi
Ms. Liu of Lezhi
Anti-footbinding in the early Republic
Ms. Xu of Suining
Ms. Zhou of Mingshan
The time of wars
Ms. Wang of Suining
Ms. He of Emei Shan
Notes
3 Erotic attraction vs. mothers-in-law, state mandates, and early unbinding1
Chinese erotica reconsidered
Wang Shizhong’s Jin Ping Mei2
Flower shadows behind the curtain
Footbinding and female weakness
Footbinding and fertility
The mother-in-law and footbinding
A state mandate for footbinding?
Unbinding little girls
Notes
4 Structure, hypergamy, and footbinding
China’s classes: the internal dynamic of a precapitalist political economy
The doors to officialdom: literacy, schooling, and Chinese characters
Education and footbinding
Marketable property
Structural positioning,3 hypergamy, and footbinding
Seeking hypergamy
Notes
5 The life course
Evidence from the tables
Footbinding
Adoption and minor marriage
Menarche
Marriage
Marriage in relation to menarche
Divorce and remarriage
Fertility and childbearing
Unmarried mothers and childbearing widows
Menopause
Notes
6 Girls and hidden work
Work as value for girls and boys
Hats and hidden work
Harvesting insects
Quantifying my subjects’ girlhood labor: non-textile work
Girls’ earnings as self-support
Tea and opium
Agriculture
Housework, servanting, and family business helpers
Crafts
Miscellaneous “other” non-craft work
Embroidery
Notes
7 Light labor Textiles and footbinding
The coming of foreign cotton
Earnings from cotton
Other textiles: farm-raised (“thrown”) silk and bast fibers
Girls’ earnings in textile work
Notes
8 Hypergendering
Definition
Developmental biology and hypergendering
Restricting the concept: initiations, FGM, fattening, claustration, veiling, body shame
Limiting the concept to the Old World agrarian empires
AfroEurAsia, the continent without women
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