What Are The Main Arguments In Cinderella'S Sisters: A Revisionist History Of Footbinding?

2025-12-09 15:28:22 40

5 Answers

Natalie
Natalie
2025-12-10 06:09:01
Ko’s revisionist take on footbinding caught me off guard in the best way. She argues that reducing it to 'patriarchal torture' ignores women’s own voices. Elite women, especially, used bound feet to signal refinement—comparing it to corsets in Europe makes you realize how beauty standards often demand suffering. The book’s strength is its focus on everyday objects: tiny shoes hidden in dowries, poems comparing feet to lotus blossoms. These details show how deeply embedded it was in culture.

I’m still wrestling with the idea that pain could be reinterpreted as virtue. Ko doesn’t excuse the practice but forces us to confront our assumptions. History’s messy like that.
Talia
Talia
2025-12-12 05:51:13
Ko’s book shattered my black-and-white view of footbinding. She shows how it was tied to Confucian ideals of discipline—women’s pain mirrored men’s scholarly endurance. The most striking part? Footbinding’s link to textile economies. Producing those intricate shoes became a cottage industry, giving women economic roles.

It’s uncomfortable to sit with, but Ko insists complexity doesn’t equal justification. Her approach reminds me of how we now dissect things like high heels or diets: harmful, yet deeply personal. That tension lingers.
Logan
Logan
2025-12-13 05:10:59
Dorothy Ko's 'Cinderella’s Sisters' completely flipped my understanding of footbinding. I used to think of it as just this brutal, oppressive practice forced on women—but Ko argues it was way more complex. Women weren’t just victims; they actively participated in shaping the culture around it. Footbinding became a symbol of elegance and even eroticism, tied to social status and artistry. The book digs into how women used embroidery, poetry, and rituals to turn this painful tradition into something tied to their identity and agency.

What really stuck with me was how Ko challenges the Western lens that often reduces footbinding to 'backwardness.' She shows how it evolved over centuries, influenced by economics, fashion, and even politics. It wasn’t static—it adapted. The idea that women might’ve found pride or community in it? That’s a perspective I’d never considered before. Makes you rethink how we judge historical practices through modern eyes.
Scarlett
Scarlett
2025-12-14 15:21:46
What hooked me about 'Cinderella’s Sisters' is how Ko frames footbinding as a dynamic conversation, not a monolith. She critiques earlier historians for projecting modern feminism onto the past. For example, footbinding’s decline wasn’t just due to moral outrage—industrialization made delicate feet impractical for working-class women. The book also explores male perspectives; some literati wrote erotic poetry about bound feet, while others condemned it.

Ko’s archival work is stellar. Letters between mothers and daughters reveal how footbinding rituals bonded generations. It’s a grim topic, but her writing makes it human—not just a footnote in 'oppression studies.' Makes me wonder what future scholars will say about our beauty rituals.
Freya
Freya
2025-12-14 20:24:24
Reading 'Cinderella’s Sisters' felt like peeling back layers of a cultural onion. Ko doesn’t just dismiss footbinding as barbaric; she treats it as a lived experience. One fascinating angle is how footbinding intertwined with marriage markets—small feet weren’t just beauty standards but social capital. Families invested in it like we might invest in education today. The book also highlights regional variations, debunking the myth that it was uniformly practiced. Some communities resisted!

Ko’s attention to artifacts—shoes, textiles—brings the history alive. These weren’t just tools of oppression; they were works of art. The way women negotiated pain and creativity through craftsmanship adds nuance to the narrative. It’s uncomfortable but necessary to sit with this duality: something can be both harmful and meaningful to those who lived it.
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