Most of you will not know that while I live quietly in Santa Barbara, walking the beach with my dog and writing books about Chinese costume and custom, I am quite well known in China and many parts of the world as “Lady Little Foot”. I should explain Lady Little Foot aka Beverley Jackson, far from having little feet is a size 10B!! This name they have for me is based on my book on the history of Chinese footbinding Splendid Slippers: A Thousand Years of an Erotic Tradition
I am most amused now to Google footbinding and find 49 pages filled with thesis, books, papers on the subject. The majority of them using my book for their reference material and seldom crediting my work. It takes someone as fine and important as wonderful author Lisa See to give me credit in her international best seller and soon to be a major movie.
My 1998 book Splendid Slippers has gone on and on and in February 2011 Random House reprinted it once again. But people still will read the book and comment to me their opinion that only the affluent with servants bound their feet. I stress throughout the book that although footbinding began in a palace in about 950 AD, by the 17th century even the poorest Han Chinese women bound their feet. Manchu women were forbidden by the emperor to bind feet after the Manchus invaded China in 1644.
So today I’m giving you photographic proof. In this picture, taken about 1910, the obviously not wealthy women have just climbed 6,666 steps to the top of Mt. Taishan, one of the five sacred mountains of China. They’ve climbed those 6,666 steps on those tiny bound feet most of which are about three and one half inches toe to heel. The women in this picture as you can see haven’t been sitting on silken cushions and carried everywhere by servants all their lives. The little feet you see in this photograph are used to being walked on hard and long while the women work in the fields and live most arduous lives. In this photograph the women are now sitting down taking a much deserved rest. Giving those tiny feet a rest. Those tiny feet that have just carried the not so thin ladies up 6,666 steps to the top of Mt. Tai!
They have just climbed 6,666 stairs to top of one of 5 most famous mountains of China Mt. Taishan, the birthplace of Confuscious. Shangung Province near central East Coast.
By The WayThis blog was started to sell my new book and I keep going off on other topics. Please do check out The Beautiful Lady Was A Palace Eunuch
at Amazon.comKathleen Fetner, Technical Advisor and Friend
For some strange reason, I was crying while watching the trailer for Snow Flower & The Secret Fan, although my favorite book of Lisa See’s is Peony in Love. No matter how heavy the themes of the stories, there is something exquisitely beautiful and profoundly mysterious in intricately wrought Chinese stories which solve themselves by the last page. I’m a huge fan of Amy Tan, Lisa See, Pearl S. Buck, Wei Hui and of course Lady Little Foot – who weave universes that seem far removed from my own “civilization”, and yet there is a universal message in tales and studies set in Chinese vistas.
I think you give yourself a little bit too much credit. Just because there was not any substantial English book on foot binding in 1998 doesn’t mean there weren’t many informative journal articles. Take Blakes ‘Footbinding in Neo-Confucian China’, Gates ‘Footbinding and Handspinning in Sichuan’, Ko’s ‘ Teachers of the Inner Chambers (to name some). And considering Ko’s recent work, ‘Cinderella Sister’s’, I definitely don’t think you can claim your work is the most ‘complete’ book on the subject of footbinding to this day. Have some humility.
Dear Mr Marcus,
Thank you for writing. Always interesting to get readers views. Dorothy Ko has indeed written some very interesting books on footbinding since she first came to me to find out about the subject. In her first book on footbinding, basically an excellent book form catalogue of Bata Shoe Museums exhibition of the late Glenn Roberts marvelous collection of lotus shoes, “Every Step A Lotus” published 2001 Dorothy mentions coming to me and that I gave her a single lotus shoe to take apart & learn how they were constructed. Her field of research had been 17th century Chinese courtesans as you will note from all her early writings. There was ahead of me one book on subject in English, the Levy book dealing only with sexual side of the custom. When I claim only COMPLETE book on footbinding it is not lack of humility it is fact. To this day since 1998 when my “Splendid Slippers” first came out no one in book form or articles has covered the subject as thoroughly including footbinding in painting, in porcelain, in Chinese opera, in theater acting, compared it in detail to other forms of body distortion for beauty, detailed medical aspect, footbinding in homosexuality, in all the areas I have covered it. Nor have they trekked into totally remote areas of China to interview and photograph hundreds of elderly women with bound feet and their husbands as I did on five trips to China just for that purpose. They stick to history, the process of binding, the shoes, things like handspinning, the erotic and some have made a quick trip into one village near city of Kunming to pay to watch a group of elderly women dance on bound feet for $50US fee & another $50 to photograph. Have you actually seen my prizewinning book that has just been reprinted by Random House and still sells very well after being out 13 years, particularly in major cities in China to newly affluent young Han Chinese who read English and want to know about those tiny feet their female ancestors had? It was of course never talked about nor were they ever allowed to see an unbound foot.