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  • Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet
  • Linda B. Arthur (bio)
Dorothy Ko. Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 162 pp. 61 color plates, 32 black-and-white plates, 6 maps. Hardcover $45.00, ISBN 0-520-23283-6. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 0-520-23284-4.

The topic of Chinese footbinding is one that has incited a great deal of interest and fascination through the years, especially for Westerners who do not understand the meanings associated with this Chinese fashion that eventually became customary for most Chinese women. Because this practice began in the tenth century and lasted into the twentieth, it is an issue that merits serious scholarly study. Footbinding has not been well understood by the Western world. Since it has been associated with both female oppression and sexual fetishism, these aspects of footbinding overshadow much of the complexity of this cultural practice. At long last, we have a book that examines the breadth and depth of this topic.

In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko examines footbinding and lotus shoes in great detail. Those of us who are interested in material culture will be grateful for her thorough and scholarly analysis. Novels, trade books, and other works on this subject have been interesting but often have focused on the more intriguing aspects of footbinding such as the fetishism or its debilitating effects, with less attention paid to the cultural context that led to the practice. With Every Step a Lotus, Ko examines the underlying meanings that led Han Chinese women to bind their daughters' feet. As part of the larger Confucian system, footbinding was a significant female rite of passage that introduced girls to their gender roles as women. The elaborately embroidered shoes reveal the cultural, social, and economic issues that underlay the practice. While footbinding began as an upper-class fashion among dancers, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had spread throughout the classes in China (and even among Chinese in nineteenth-and twentieth-century Hawai'i). Footbinding became embedded in the Confucian cult of domesticity. Ko explains that we should not see it as a senseless act of deformation but as a meaningful way in which Chinese women adapted to a man's world.

Fashion has always played with ambivalence. In the contemporary world, ambivalence is seen in the competition between conformity and self-expression. Similarly, for Chinese women footbinding played with the ambivalence between deformity and refinement. The lotus was the perfect symbol for ambivalence regarding the bound foot, as in Buddhist ideology the lotus stood for both piety as well as the pleasure of the senses.

In Every Step a Lotus, Ko, a history professor at Barnard, brings a fresh perspective to her methodology. To reveal the symbolic meanings that underlay this [End Page 195] unique form of material culture, she uses a variety of sources. For example, she examines not only the historic artifacts themselves (the shoes) but also the written texts (poetry) that provide a context for the meanings attributed to the shoes and the footbinding practice. Ko thus lets the women speak for themselves by using their own words. Through this methodology, she examines a cultural phenomenon that is the result of the interaction of gender relations in a Confucian society where domesticity and finely embroidered textiles were symbolic of female virtue. This is a marvelous book, a scholarly work that provides a good example of triangulated methodology.

Linda B. Arthur

Linda B. Arthur is Professor and Chair of the Apparel, Merchandising, Design and Textiles Department at Washington State University. Her research focuses on an investigation of the numerous intersections between culture, gender and dress, with most research projects addressing the complex meanings underlying traditional textiles and clothing in Asia and the Pacific.

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