Every step a lotus : shoes for bound feet
"In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its origins, purpose, and spread before the nineteenth century. She uses women's own voices to reconstruct the inner chambers of a Chinese house where women with bound feet lived and worked. Focusing on the material aspects of footbinding and shoemaking - the tools needed, the procedures, the wealth of symbolism in the shoes, and the amazing regional variations in style - she contends that footbinding was a reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity, motherhood, and handiwork
Print Book, English, ©2001
University of California Press, Berkeley, ©2001