Economic correlates of footbinding: Implications for the importance of Chinese daughters' labor.

ABSTRACT:

Background

It is a wide-spread assumption about footbinding that footbound girls and women were more of an economic burden on their families than those never bound. It is often presumed that government policies and missionary campaigns ended footbinding.

Methods/ objectives

We use regression and log-likelihood tests, with bootstrapping for confirmation, to analyze which of a series of ethnographically and historically hypothesized variables significantly correlate with footbinding. We also consider an indirect measure of government prohibitions. We analyze two large datasets based on oral surveys with elderly women of the last footbound generations from 12 inland Chinese provinces.

Conclusions

Handicraft production, particularly commercial handicraft production, corre

SUBMITTER: Brown MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6147408 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature