Dorothy Ko’s Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding has been the standard work on the ancient practice for several years now.  Ko’s premise is that footbinding was “an embodied experience, a reality to a select group of women from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries.”  Instead of denouncing it, she aims to understand “the powerful forces that made binding feet a conventional practice . . .  The reality of the practice lies not only in the screams and tears on a girl’s first day of biding, but also in the assiduous maintenance and care she had to lavish on her feet every day for the rest of her life.”  Ko points out that Hill Gates and Laurel Bossen, featured in the link below, offer an explanation of footbinding based on fieldwork in Sichuan and Fujian: “Peasant women with bound feet routinely performed such tasks as spinning and weaving, oyster shucking, and tea picking, which required strength and skill in her hands but not her feet.  Footbinding lost its raison d’etre when factory-based textile production replaced home-based spinning and weaving.”  Ko points out that footbinding is not a uniform and timeless practice “motivated by a single cause” and that monocausal explanations misfire, failing to grasp the complexities of the social practice.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/12/unraveling-a-brutal-custom/

In the Grimms’ “Cinderella,” the stepsisters famously cut off their toes and heels to make the shoe fit.  I’ve often been asked whether that episode has a contemporary analogue in plastic surgery and other cosmetic practices.  Here’s one answer: