Review of Related Studies

males; if they do not, they will find themselves becoming social outcasts” Hsu, 1971: 209. Confucianism doctrine is adopted by Chinese society to confine the movement of women. Chinese culture creates an efficient way to force women stay at home by footbinding. Footbinding was one of men’s conspiracies to keep women home as slaves physically and mentally, to turn them into sheer objects of men’s lust and perversity. Fangqin in Ping, 2000: 43 To achieve the goal of making women stay at home, Chinese culture creates the standard of beauty for women. In order to have women completely in its control and its disposal, the Confucian-dominated society also invented and forced upon women an odd and appalling concept of feminine physical beauty – the small, bound foot. It became the symbol of women’s subservience. Hong, 1997: 22 Footbinding is not only the measurement for the beauty but also as the symbol of social status. No one ever knows who the first person to do the practice of footbinding. However, most research says that footbinding began spread and popular to all over China by the Ming dynasty 1368-1644. Footbinding was once widely accepted as feminine beauty by society as explained by Wang Ping, For upper-class women, footbinding was the marker of their hierarchy. For girls from the lower class, footbinding gave them an opportunity to move upward in the marriage and service market. Ping, 2000: 32 Moreover, Chinese women believed that having bound feet is a requirement that they should fulfill to get a better life and survive in the Chinese patriarchal culture. A pair of perfectly bound feet was not only a requirement for the marriage market but also an effort that women should undergo to secure their survivability in a patriarchal society. Ping states that “during the two years of binding process, the mother has imprinted her secret knowledge of female survival onto the flesh of her daughter” Ping, 2000: 6. Therefore, mothers in China bound their daughters’ feet when they were still little girl. Even though the mother knew exactly the painful of footbinding as she had also experienced it, as a woman, she did not have another option beside did the same practice of footbinding to her daughter. The mother tried her best to make her daughter get a pair of perfectly bound feet. The mother forced her daughter to keep her walking by beating her with the sticks if she did not want to walk. The mother kept forcing her daughter to walk until the bones were broken. Wang Ping states about the painful of footbinding that women should undergo: For about two or three years, little girls go through the inferno of torture: the flesh of her feet, which are tightly bound with layers of bandages day and night, is slowly putrefied, her toes crushed under the soles, and the insteps arched to the degree where the toes and heels meet. Loving mother suddenly turn into monsters that beat their sobbing girls with sticks and brooms, forcing them to hop around to speed up the rotting of flesh and make sure the bones are broken properly. Ping, 2000: 3 This circumstance shows that how women complicit their own oppression. Women had experienced the cruel tradition of footbinding when they were young.