Thankfully this doesn’t go on anymore. It’s such an extreme and bizarre manifestation of misogyny that it’s hard to believe it ever happened to anyone ever, let alone an estimated billion women in China across hundreds of years.

In 1883 the Christian Temperance movement started to move against these abominations, educated Chinese women also realised that this was not in keeping with the modern world evolving around them. Feminists were, of course, against foot binding, but the group that probably swung it the most was a group of (mostly male) social Darwinists who believed that women with small feet had weaker babies.

So bloody typical. A bunch of blokes shooting in the wrong direction managed to free women from a trap that they’d laid themselves.

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