PDF Ebook Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet, by Dorothy Ko
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Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet, by Dorothy Ko
PDF Ebook Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet, by Dorothy Ko
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In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its origins, purpose, and spread before the nineteenth century. She uses women's own voices to reconstruct the inner chambers of a Chinese house where women with bound feet lived and worked. Focusing on the material aspects of footbinding and shoemaking--the tools needed, the procedures, the wealth of symbolism in the shoes, and the amazing regional variations in style--she contends that footbinding was a reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity, motherhood, and handwork. Her absorbing, superbly detailed, and beautifully written book demonstrates that in the women's eyes, footbinding had less to do with the exotic or the sublime than with the mundane business of having to live in a woman's body in a man's world.
Footbinding was likely to have started in the tenth century among palace dancers. Ironically, it was meant not to cripple but to enhance their grace. Its meaning shifted dramatically as it became domesticated in the subsequent centuries, though the original hint of sensuality did not entirely disappear. This contradictory image of footbinding as at once degenerate and virtuous, grotesque and refined, is embodied in the key symbol for the practice--the lotus blossom, being both a Buddhist sign of piety and a poetic allusion to sensory pleasures.
Every Step a Lotus includes almost one hundred illustrations of shoes from different regions of China, material paraphernalia associated with the customs and rituals of footbinding, and historical images that contextualize the narrative. Most of the shoes, from the collection of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, have not been exhibited before. Readers will come away from the book with a richer understanding of why footbinding carries such force as a symbol and why, long after its demise, it continues to exercise a powerful grip on our imaginations.
A Copublication with the Bata Shoe Museum
- Sales Rank: #3466760 in Books
- Published on: 2001-12-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .82" h x 9.58" w x 8.54" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 162 pages
From Publishers Weekly
One of the best known, most torturous examples of fashionable alteration is Chinese foot binding. In Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet, Barnard College history professor Dorothy Ko looks at the making and wearing of lotus shoes, the footwear for women with bound feet. Along the way she discredits some simplistic popular notions about foot binding and emphasizes the economic and social problems that it addressed. While the practice began as an exclusive custom of leisured elites, Ko explains, it spread to the peasantry in the 17th and 18th centuries, resulting in such incongruous artifacts as lotus rainboots and galoshes. Color photographs throughout the book illustrate Ko's explanation of shoemaking, foot binding and the symbolism of the shoes' decorations, though the beauty of the shoes (and this book, which includes step-by-step, how-to instructions for binding) belies the pain of the wearers.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Foot binding is often cited as an emblem of the oppression of women and as such exerts a morbid fascination. But Ko, a history professor at Barnard, urges readers not to view the practice through modern eyes but to study it as a cultural phenomenon deeply embedded in Chinese history. Downplaying the tradition's erotic aspects, Ko offers a cogent discussion of Chinese women's lives during the eighteenth century, the pinnacle of the cult of the lotus foot. Mothers bound their daughters' feet, and foot binding evolved into a rite of passage into womanhood within the Confucian system, which valued female domesticity and textile arts. Shoe making became a highly prized craft and an integral part of the foot-binding ritual, and therefore Ko's enlightening narrative is accompanied by gorgeous reproductions of unbelievably tiny, exquisitely embroidered shoes for bound feet. As she identifies various shoe styles, interprets the complex symbolism of their elaborate designs, and elucidates the spiritual and religious aspects of foot binding, Ko convincingly defines the practice as a historical source of female identity, purpose, pride, and power. Donna Seaman
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Ko convincingly defines the practice as a historical source of female identity, purpose, pride, and power." -- Booklist,
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By nutnutlodge
Excellent.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
One of The Best
By carol melcher
For anyone interested in Chinese culture and its past, this is one of the best books I have seen to introduce the reader to the subject of Bound Feet. The idea of foot-binding was an erotic, as well as economic one, and this book not only explains why the binding was done but also how, in some detail. The photos of shoes that were produced to be worn by the women who were subjected to his practice are excellent and the book, as a whole, is most interesting. Please note - this is not an in-depth study of the subject of foot-binding; rather the major amount of detail is in regard to the shoes.
For a more detailed look at foot-binding as a custom, please go to your favorite search engine and pull up Chinese Foot Binding.
(The author of this review is an author herself, as well as a professional photographer, and has been interested, in depth, in Chinese culture for over 40 years).
47 of 49 people found the following review helpful.
Fantastic & informative! High price of fashion and status...
By Mary Morrison
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 expos� 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, ...
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