Patriarchy In Ancient China

Human beings exhibit little reverence for the sanctity of their flesh. In our eternal quest for aesthetic perfection, bodies are twisted, molded, plucked and burned in order to live up to unobtainable ideals. Unfortunately, though human desires can be appeased, they are never satisfied, and beauty is no exception. To quote Legal Professor Deborah L. Rhode: “Desires, expectations, and standards of comparison increase as rapidly as they are satisfied.” (Rhode 30) Undeniably, the female body is overwhelmingly and disproportionately subjected to such modifications, due in no small part to the pervasive desires of patriarchies perpetuated through history. This beauty mandate has left innumerable women aching for perfection in an era where the feminine
As one example, the ancient practice of Chinese foot binding as a beauty institution serves as an excellent model which exemplifies such immobilization of women. In attempting to decipher the bound foot, feminist dialogues have concentrated on its role in sexually objectifying women. Though valuable, this interpretation lacks a comprehensive understanding of the patriarchy which sustained foot binding and continues to sustain similar, modern-day practices like the high heeled shoe. Careful examination of the two further reveals that the immobilization of women through beauty practices subverts their economic autonomy. The patriarchy both intends for and is established by these
Brown et al. have also produced data attempting to answer this long-standing theory on the purpose of foot binding. In their 2012 paper, Marriage Mobility and Footbinding in Pre-1949 Rural China: A Reconsideration of Gender, Economics, and Meaning in Social Causation Brown et al preface their data by stating “It has long been assumed that before 1949 Chinese society was hypergamous —that most women married to a “better” household than the one in which they were born.” Despite this belief, they describe “In our sample of 7,314 rural women living in Sichuan, Northern, Central, and Southwestern China in the first half of the twentieth century, two-thirds of women did not marry up. In fact, 22 percent of all women, across regions, married down. In most regions, more women married up than down, but in all regions, the majority did not marry hypergamously.” (Melissa J. Brown et al 1035) In an attempt to reconcile this data, which debunks much of the assumptions that John Mao’s preferred theory rests upon, the paper presents a more likely theory: that feet binding was a form of labor control. In their discussion, they write “We deal elsewhere with the question of why footbinding ended, which can be summarized by saying that we have growing evidence that footbinding was a form of labor control to boost the contribution of young girls to handcraft production…We think changes in the larger political economy that threw