Gates is a Marxist anthropologist with chutzpah. Best known for her compelling portrayal of contemporary working-class Taiwanese, she considerably broadens and deepens her analysis of China's socioeconomy in this work.-Choice This monumental work...
Through extensive fieldwork and interviews with nearly 5,000 women, the book explores the practice of footbinding in Sichuan during the late imperial era and the tumultuous period leading up to the 1949 revolution. It investigates parental motivations for continuing this tradition and the role of girls' labor in pre-industrial China. Hill Gates argues that footbinding served as a means of labor discipline, reflecting broader changes in the political economy during the early twentieth century.
Footbinding was common in China until the early twentieth century, when most Chinese were family farmers. Why did these families bind young girls' feet? And why did footbinding stop? In this groundbreaking work, Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates upend the popular view of footbinding as a status, or even sexual, symbol by showing that it was an undeniably effective way to get even very young girls to sit still and work with their hands. Interviews with 1,800 elderly women, many with bound feet, reveal the reality of girls' hand labor across the North China Plain, Northwest China, and Southwest China. As binding reshaped their feet, mothers disciplined girls to spin, weave, and do other handwork because many village families depended on selling such goods. When factories eliminated the economic value of handwork, footbinding died out. As the last generation of footbound women passes away, Bound Feet, Young Hands presents a data-driven examination of the social and economic aspects of this misunderstood custom.