Why It Sucks to Be a Foot-Bound Wife (in Qing Dynasty)

You are born in Beijing in 1868, a Han girl on the wrong side of the wall from the Manchus, whose own women never bind their feet. At five, your mother heats a basin of water and shuts the door. This is the life of a foot-bound wife, told in second person: the binding, the shoes that win a husband, the summer of 1900, the ban that came too late, and the burial shoes with a ladder stitched on the soles. SOURCES Melissa J. Brown and Damian Satterthwaite-Phillips, "Economic correlates of footbinding", PLOS ONE (2018) Dorothy Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (2005) Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates, Bound Feet, Young Hands (2017) Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han (2000) Sidney Gamble, "The Disappearance of Foot-Binding in Tinghsien", American Journal of Sociology (1943) S. R. Cummings and colleagues, "Consequences of foot binding among older women in Beijing", American Journal of Public Health (1997) Textile Research Centre Leiden, Chinese Lotus Shoes exhibition Gerry Mackie, "Ending Footbinding and Infibulation", American Sociological Review (1996) NOTES ON PRECISION The heroine and her family are invented; the customs, dates and numbers around her come from the sources above. Nobody knows how many girls died of binding, so the video gives no death rate. Whether bound feet really won better marriages is disputed; the video shows it as what her family believed. Everyone in this video is a stick figure and the main character is invented. No likeness of any real person is depicted or implied.