Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them

by Mrs. Archibald Little

The Chinese saying is, "For each pair of bound feet there has been a whole kang, or big bath, full of tears"; and they say that one girl out of ten dies of footbinding or its after-effects. When I quoted this to the Italian Mother Superior at Hankow, who has for years been head of the great Girls' School and Foundling Establishment there, she said, with tears in her eyes, "Oh no, no! that may be true of the coast towns." I thought she was going to say it would be a gross exaggeration in Central China; but to my horror she went on, "But more here—more—more." Few people could be in a better position to judge than herself; for until this year the little girls under her charge have regularly had their feet bound. As I have understood, there the bandages were only tightened once a week. The children were, of course, exempted from all lessons on those days; and the Italian Sister who had to be present suffered so much from witnessing the little girls' sufferings that she had to be continually changed, no Italian woman being able to endure the pain of it week after week. Of course, the only reason they bound the children's feet was from anxiety about finding husbands for them in after-life, and from fear of parents not confiding their children to them unless they so far conformed to Chinese custom. But this year the good Mother has at last decided that public opinion has been sufficiently developed to make it possible for her to dispense with these hateful bandages. "Do you suppose I like them?" she said, the last time I saw her. "Always this question of new shoes of different sizes, according as the feet are made smaller; always more cotton-cloth being torn into bandages: the trouble it all entails is endless—simply endless." This was a point of view I had never considered. But it is a comfort to think the good Mother is delivered from it; for she wrote to me in the spring of 1898 that she knew I should be glad to hear fifty little girls had just been unbound, and no more girls were to have their feet bound under her care.

Dr. Reifsnyder, the lady at the head of the Margaret Williamson Hospital at Shanghai, says toes often drop off under binding, and not uncommonly half the foot does likewise. She tells of a poor girl's grief on undoing her bandage—"Why, there is half my foot gone!" and how she herself had said to her that, with half her foot, and that half in good condition, she would be much better off than those around her. And so it has turned out. This girl walks better than most others. Her feet had been bound by a cruel mother-in-law; and, according to Dr. Reifsnyder, of all cruel people a Chinese mother-in-law is the cruelest to the daughter-in-law under her keeping. The foot of another daughter-in-law, she knew, dropped off entirely under the process of binding. Another error, Dr. Reifnysder points out, is that people often think that, after the first, binding does not hurt. She had in her employ a woman fifty years old; and she knew that, after standing more than usual, this woman's feet would still bleed, as is not unnatural, when it is considered this woman, weighing one hundred and forty pounds, stood up in shoes two and a half inches long.

Dr. Macklin of Nanking, on my asking him what sort of cases he had come across, he having the reputation of thinking many things more pressing than unbinding the feet of the women of China, at once told me of a little child of a poor family brought to his hospital with an ulcer that had begun at the heel, caused by the bandages. When he first saw the child, the ulcer extended half-way up to the knee; and the child would have died of blood-poisoning in a few days, if she had not been brought to him. Another of his cases ended more sadly. The poor little girl was the granddaughter of an official, her father a teacher. When only between six and seven, she was brought to the hospital, both her feet already black masses of corruption. Her relations would not allow her feet to be amputated; so in a few months they dropped off. The stumps were a long time in healing, as the skin was drawn back from the bone. The child was taken home, gradually became weaker and weaker, and after a year and a half of suffering died.

Dr. McCartney of Chungking mentions one case in which he was called in to a little girl. When he removed the binding, he found both feet hanging by the tendons only, with gangrene extending above the ankles. Immediate amputation was at once necessary; but the unfortunate child will have to go through life without feet. The mother of the child was a confirmed opium-smoker, and her indifference had led to the result indicated. The two greatest curses in China are, in his opinion, opium-smoking and footbinding. Another case was an unmarried woman who had paralysis in both legs. She was treated by removing the bandages on her feet, by massage, and electric current. In less than a month she was able to walk. Her trouble was caused by nothing more or less than footbinding. He says the Chinese know nothing of the physiology and anatomy of the human body; and this ignorance causes untold suffering to the women and children of China. Footbinding has nothing to recommend it but the dictates of a senseless fashion. Women with small feet are unable to stand still, but are continually swaying and taking short steps, like a person on tiptoe. He defies any Chinaman to tell him there is not great pain and discomfort in footbinding. Chinese women were disinclined to confess pain. To do so would be pu hao i-su—indelicate. There is in a bound foot a space like that between the closed fingers and the ball of the thumb. This space does not touch the shoe, and is consequently soft and tender. Perspiration gathers there, and, unless kept extremely clean, eczema results, and finally ulceration and mortification. He had had several cases of double amputation. From the time the feet were bound until death, they caused pain and were liable to disease. Not only did these serious local troubles exist, but others occurred in the internal organs, and in many cases affected the offspring.

It would require a medical work to describe the various maladies more or less directly traceable to binding. Let it suffice here to point out that when a Chinese woman walks it is on her heel entirely, and to suggest that the consequent jar to the spine and the whole body is very likely the cause of the internal maladies of women, so general, if not universal, in those regions where binding is generally practised. Lady doctors have already observed that in certain parts of China where binding is universal, whatever disease a woman may come to the hospital for, she is always afflicted with some severe internal trouble; whereas in those parts where only a few bind, it is rare to find these same maladies.

CHAPTER VII.
ANTI-FOOTBINDING.

Church Mission's Action.—American Mission's Action.—T`ien Tsu Hui.—Chinese Ladies' Drawing-room Meeting.—Suifu Appeal.—Kang, the Modern Sage.—Duke Kung.—Appeal to the Chinese People.

To turn to a cheerfuller subject. Although the Roman Catholics, the American Episcopal Church, and some other missionary bodies have in former days thought it wiser to conform to Chinese custom in the matter of binding, there have been other missionary bodies, that have for twenty years or more refused to countenance it. One or two examples of their methods of work will probably suffice. The Church Mission at Hangchow opened a school for girls in 1867, and in 1896 Mr. J. L. Stuart wrote:

"The Mission undertook from the first to feed and clothe and care for the girls for about ten years; and it was required that the feet of the girls should be unbound, and that they should not be compelled to marry against their own consent. The school opened with three scholars; but the number soon increased to a dozen, and then to twenty, and after a few years to thirty, and then to forty, and for five years it has had fifty pupils. After the first few years, no solicitations were ever made for pupils, and they were not taken under eight or ten years of age; but there have always been more applicants than can be accommodated. For ten years the pupils have furnished their own clothing and bedding, and a few have paid for their food. The superintendent of the school took the ground in the beginning that, as the Mission undertook to support and train the girls, it was not only a right but it was an obligation to require the girls to conform to rules that were considered right and proper as far as possible. The success of the school proves the wisdom of the stand taken at the time. The girls have a good yard in which to play, and no sprig of grass can make headway where their big feet go romping about, and their rosy cheeks and happy faces are in marked contrast to the average Chinese girl seen in the street and in their homes. As the girls grow up and are ready to leave the school, in almost every case they have been claimed by some Christian young man who is not ashamed of their big feet. In the course of the past twenty-eight years many pupils have been sent out from this school; but, so far as is known, none of them have ever attempted to rebind their daughters' feet."