User:Freehilh/Foot binding

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Decline

In the mid-19th century, many of the rebel leaders of the Taiping Rebellion were of Hakka background whose women did not bind their feet, and footbinding was outlawed. However, the rebellion failed, and Christian missionaries, who had provided education for girls and actively discouraged what they considered a barbaric practice, then played a part in changing elite opinion on footbinding through education, pamphleteering, and lobbying of the Qing court, placing emphasis on the fact that no other culture in the world practiced the custom of footbinding. By the end of the 19th century, the once-revered practice of footbinding was declining.Christian missionaries were vehemently against the practice of footbinding whereas some Chinese reformers were not necessarily agonized by the practice of footbinding as much as they were agonized by foreign commentary.

The earliest-known Western anti-footbinding society, The Heavenly Foot Society, was formed in Amoy (Xiamen) in 1874 by 60–70 women in a meeting presided over by a missionary named John MacGowan. MacGowan was a member of the London Missionary Society (LMS), founded in 1795. LMS was a Protestant evangelical organization whose members embarked on missions to China. Reverend John MacGowan arrived in Shanghai in 1860 before heading to the LMS mission in Amoy, China in 1863. MacGowan held the view that footbinding was a serious problem that called into doubt the whole of Chinese civilization; he felt that "the nefarious civilization interferes with Divine Nature." With regard to the name, The Heavenly Foot Society, Dorothy Ko, who wrote Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding, notes that the "invention of the term 'natural feet' or 'heavenly feet' - as the antithesis of 'bound feet' - marked the point of no return in the cultural and social demise of footbinding." The Heavenly Foot Society asked members to promise not to bind their daughters' feet or let their sons marry a woman who bound their feet. In 1895, Christian women in Shanghai led by Alicia Little, formed the Natural Foot (tianzu, literally 'Heavenly Foot') Society. It was also championed by the Woman's Christian Temperance Movement founded in 1883 and advocated by missionaries including Timothy Richard, who thought that Christianity could promote equality between the sexes.

While there was certainly condemnation of footbinding from individuals early on whose attacks owed little to Christian missionaries' influence, from 1840 onward, opposition was entrenched with Western Protestant missionary circles. This missionary-led opposition had stronger impacts than earlier Han or Manchu opposition. Rachel Keeling notes that the efforts and lack of success by the Manchus is evidence of the difficulty in eliminating the practice.  Western missionaries formed societies like the Heavenly Foot Society, established the first schools for girls, and encouraged women to end the perpetuation of the practice of footbinding. Aside from their efforts and establishments to contradict footbinding, Christian missionaries were also successful because of their influence of Western culture. They did not conceal their shock and disgust when explaining the process of footbinding to Western peers, and their descriptions electrified people back home. Alison Drucker explains that it was this combination of their ideological infusion on Western opinion of China, and their incessant missionary activities aimed at curbing the practice in China that drew prominent attention to actively opposing the practice.

Reform-minded Chinese intellectuals began to consider footbinding to be an aspect of their culture that needed to be eliminated. In 1883, Kang Youwei founded the Anti-Footbinding Society near Canton to combat the practice, and anti-footbinding societies sprang up across the country, with membership for the movement claimed to reach 300,000. The anti-footbinding movement, however, stressed pragmatic and patriotic reasons rather than feminist ones, arguing that abolition of footbinding would lead to better health and more efficient labor. Kang Youwei submitted a petition to the throne commenting on the fact that China had become a joke to foreigners and that "footbinding was the primary object of such ridicule."

Reformers such as Liang Qichao, influenced by Social Darwinism, also argued that it weakened the nation, since enfeebled women supposedly produced weak sons. In his “On Women’s Education,” Liang Qichao asserts that the root cause of national weakness inevitably lies the lack of education for women. His thought process is that the more people that are working, the stronger the nation will be, so, if women are able to be educated and then employed, the nation will inevitably grow stronger. He also argues that the lack of education for women is the original factor for poverty. He says that “education is the mother of occupations." Liang Qichao's connection between education for women and footbinding is that “As long as foot binding remains in practice, women’s education can never flourish.” Liang Qichao characterized footbinding as a crippling torture that had been far too long ignored by rulers. Liang Qichao was also disappointed that foreigners had opened the first schools as he thought that the Chinese should be teaching Chinese women.

At the turn of the 20th century, early feminists, such as Qiu Jin, called for the end of footbinding. In 1906, Zhao Zhiqian wrote in Beijing Women's News to blame women with bound feet for being a national weakness in the eyes of other nations. Many members of anti-footbinding groups pledged to not bind their daughters' feet nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet. In 1902, Empress Dowager Cixi issued an anti-footbinding edict, but it was soon rescinded.[citation needed]</ref>

In 1912, the new Republic of China government banned footbinding, though the ban was not actively implemented, and leading intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement saw footbinding as a major symbol of China's backwardness. Provincial leaders, such as Yan Xishan in Shanxi, engaged in their own sustained campaign against footbinding with foot inspectors and fines for those who continued the practice, while regional governments of the later Nanjing regime also enforced the ban. The campaign against footbinding was successful in some regions; in one province, a 1929 survey showed that, whereas only 2.3% of girls born before 1910 had unbound feet, 95% of those born after were not bound. In a region south of Beijing, Dingxian, where over 99% of women once had bound feet, no new cases were found among those born after 1919. In Taiwan, the practice was also discouraged by the ruling Japanese from the beginning of Japanese rule, and from 1911 to 1915 it was gradually made illegal. The practice lingered on in some regions in China; in 1928, a census in rural Shanxi found that 18% of women had bound feet, while in some remote rural areas, such as Yunnan Province, it continued to be practiced until the 1950s. In most parts of China, however, the practice had virtually disappeared by 1949. The practice was also stigmatized in Communist China, and the last vestiges of footbinding were stamped out, with the last new case of footbinding reported in 1957. By the 21st century, only a few elderly women in China still had bound feet. In 1999, the last shoe factory making lotus shoes, the Zhiqian Shoe Factory in Harbin, closed.