How long were bound feet

Shangguan began her life under unfortunate circumstances. After the plot was exposed, the irate empress had the male members of the Shangguan family executed and all the female members enslaved. Wu eventually promoted Shangguan from cultural minister to chief minister, giving her charge of drafting the imperial edicts and decrees. On one occasion the empress signed her death warrant only to have the punishment commuted at the last minute to facial disfigurement.

In she was persuaded or forced to draft a fake document that acceded power to the Dowager Empress Wei. During the bloody clashes that erupted between the factions, Shangguan was dragged from her house and beheaded. A later emperor had her poetry collected and recorded for posterity. Many of her poems had been written at imperial command to commemorate a particular state occasion. Shangguan is considered by some scholars to be one of the forebears of the High Tang, a golden age in Chinese poetry.

Li lived during one of the more chaotic times of the Song era, when the country was divided into northern China under the Jin dynasty and southern China under the Song. Her husband was a mid-ranking official in the Song government.

They shared an intense passion for art and poetry and were avid collectors of ancient texts. Li was in her 40s when her husband died, consigning her to an increasingly fraught and penurious widowhood that lasted for another two decades. At one point she made a disastrous marriage to a man whom she divorced after a few months. An exponent of ci poetry—lyric verse written to popular tunes, Li poured out her feelings about her husband, her widowhood and her subsequent unhappiness.

But her earlier works are full of joie de vivre and erotic desire. Like this one attributed to her:. I finish tuning the pipes face the floral mirror thinly dressed crimson silken shift translucent over icelike flesh lustrous in snowpale cream glistening scented oils and laugh to my sweet friend tonight you are within my silken curtains your pillow, your mat will grow cold.

Literary critics in later dynasties struggled to reconcile the woman with the poetry, finding her remarriage and subsequent divorce an affront to Neo-Confucian morals. Ironically, between Li and her near-contemporary Liang Hongyu, the former was regarded as the more transgressive. Liang was an ex-courtesan who had followed her soldier-husband from camp to camp.

Binding their feet and wearing a corset and high heels were behaviors of women pursuing beauty. They were, to some degree, harming their health. The main differences were that foot binding and wearing corsets were forced while wearing high heels was voluntary.

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Further clinical study of foot-binding is nearly impossible; the women who were girls when it was outlawed are dying out. She found 50 women to photograph, all in their 80s or older, three of whom died before the book was published in They had a wider range of mobility than the women Cummings met in Beijing—among them were women who worked in fields, raised children, fixed chimneys, and went bowling—but descriptions of their childhood binding were no less horrifying.

In certain periods in France, for example, women were arrested if they were found walking on certain streets at certain times. But women have been bent in more literal ways too. Foot-binding was one. Like recent research that makes visible the long-lasting brain damage inflicted by childhood abuse or PTSD, examining the medical consequences of corsets, high heels, and foot-binding in detail forces us to look their effects in the face.

The restrictions of foot-binding and other physical constraints imposed on girls and women are obvious; the damage is real. The oldest, Zhang Yun Ying, was Foot binding was outlawed in China years ago, following almost 10 decades of the practice. The feet were beaten, cast in herbs and oils to loosen the skin and strapped into lotus shoes. After foot binding was banned it became taboo, and in Chairman Mao ordered anti foot-binding inspectors to publicly shame any bound women they found.

Most women were bound at the age of seven.