Economic correlates of footbinding: Implications for the importance of Chinese daughters’ labor

Abstract

BackgroundIt is a wide-spread assumption about footbinding that footbound girls and women were more of an economic burden on their families than those never bound. It is often presumed that government policies and missionary campaigns ended footbinding.Methods/ ObjectivesWe use regression and log-likelihood tests, with bootstrapping for confirmation, to analyze which of a series of ethnographically and historically hypothesized variables significantly correlate with footbinding. We also consider an indirect measure of government prohibitions. We analyze two large datasets based on oral surveys with elderly women of the last footbound generations from 12 inland Chinese provinces.ConclusionsHandicraft production, particularly commercial handicraft production, correlates with whether Chinese girls were subjected to footbinding before 1950. Girlhood knowledge of government prohibitions against footbinding, an indirect measure of awareness by the adults who decided whether to bind a girl’s feet, did not correlate with whether women were ever footbound. Spinning cotton thread for commercial purposes (sale, wage, direct exchange) correlated with greater daily production, with great county-level variation in quantity produced. Moreover, Chinese commercial spinners labored more years before marriage than domestic spinners.ImplicationsChinese daughters—whether footbound or not—made important economic contributions to rural households, thus suggesting a need to revise our understanding of China’s gender and economic history. Further implications of our results are that research is warranted on the assumed efficacy of government prohibitions—in both rural and urban areas—and on the presumption that footbinding among elite Chinese women was unrelated to economic concerns, including handicraft production. The demonstrated economic correlates of footbinding in inland, rural China also suggest a need to reevaluate whether contemporary customs controlling and cloistering girls and women, such as female genital cutting in Africa and the threat of honor killings of girls and women in South Asia, might have economic correlates.

Collective patterns of social diffusion are shaped by individual inertia and trend-seeking

“…Aside from works focusing on empirical data and laboratory experiments 8,10,[13][14][15] , mathematical models have emerged as a valuable framework for studying social diffusion 3,16,17 . The first models, including the classical Bass model and its variants, were population models that focused on capturing the diffusion process at the macroscopic (societal) level 3,16,[18][19][20] .…”

Adopted daughters and adopted daughters-in-law in Taiwan: a mortality analysis

“…Ethnographic materials suggest that biological daughters who remained at home were viewed negatively. Seen as expensive (because they required dowries) and as a means by which other people's lineages were perpetuated, unless they began making economic contributions at an early age [ 45 , 46 , 48 ], biological daughters might have seemed like poor investments relative to giving one's own biological daughters up for adoption to another family. Although many have emphasized the stigma and neglect or mistreatment of adopted children in Taiwan during this period, treatment of biological children up until recently was also often harsh [ 60 ].…”

“…Prior work on the functions of bound feet has focused on their use as a marker of status [42,43], as a means of insuring paternity (e.g. [68]), or as a way to increase the contributions of women to household economics through handicraft production [44][45][46][47][48][49]. Any of these functions could also be associated with decreased mortality if adoptive parents felt that the benefits of adoption were increased by the binding of their adopted daughters' feet.…”

“…We also include whether a girl had bound feet, which causes limited mobility, and has been widely (if perhaps mistakenly) believed to be linked to marital aspirations (e.g. [42,43])for evidence that foot-binding is not linked to marriage, see [44][45][46]-as well as other indicators of socioeconomic status (e.g. [45][46][47][48][49]).…”

“…[42,43])for evidence that foot-binding is not linked to marriage, see [44][45][46]-as well as other indicators of socioeconomic status (e.g. [45][46][47][48][49]). The 10-year birth cohort in which a girl was born is included in our models, as both the prevalence of adoption and the risk of mortality declined through time [14,15,37,50].…”