March 19, 2014 • 34 mins
Foot binding was practiced in China for more than 1,000 years -- far longer than can be attributed to a mere cultural or fashion fad. Why did such an extreme type of body modification become such an ingrained part of the culture for so long? Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry Tracy Wilson, and today we are going
to talk about one of those cultural practices that often
gets put squarely in the barbaric bucket when people outside
(00:24):
that culture talk about it and outside of that time. Um.
But while it does involve some pretty uh you know,
make your spine crawley manipulation of the body, there are
a lot more layers to it than that. Uh. And
heads up, fashion people, this will also cover some fashion elements.
But we're going to talk about the history of foot binding.
(00:46):
And we've had a few requests for it, and it's
also something I've just been fascinated with for a long time, uh,
largely coming at it from the clothing angle. Yeah. I
think when we in our in our previous podcast, Pop Stuff,
I think we talked about it a little bit in
the episode where we talked about shoes. Yeah. And I
will talk about one of the books that I talked
about in that episode. Uh. That was written by an
(01:08):
author named Dorothy co who will reference a couple of
times during this podcast. Uh. And it's estimated that during
the height of footbindings popularity, more than two billion girls
had their feet altered in this way. Although I will
say this looking at multiple different sources, as often happens,
I feel like I'm always kind of saying this qualifier.
You will see vastly different numbers. Some will list one billion,
(01:31):
some will list three billion. But I found several the
list two billion, and it's the mean. So I we're
using that number. So and regardless b with a B
billion like many many, many um. And part of the
reason is that this practice went on for more than
ten centuries. I mean, it was more than a thousand
years of China's cultural history, and that is a very
(01:53):
long time. I don't need to tell anyone far more
than you can really just right off as a cultural
or fashion fat. I mean, this was an ingrained part
of culture. So we're going to examine today what it
is about footbinding that made it such an important cornerstone
of Chinese womanhood for so very long, and kind of
(02:13):
how the different facets of its place in the culture.
The exact origin point of binding we don't really know,
As with many things, it may have begun in the
Late Tongue Dynasty, between six eighteen and nine oh six.
Some scholars point instead to a period that's actually referred
(02:34):
to as the Five Dynasties and Ten States period, and
this was a period of time when political upheaval was
so constant that leadership in China was changing so rapidly
that they it doesn't always get given individual dynasty names.
It gets lumped under this bigger one, and that was
in between the Tong dynasty and the Song dynasty. There
(02:56):
are several different origin stories that kind of load around.
In one, the favorite concubine of an emperor bound her
foot into the shape of a hoof so that she
could dance on a gilded lotus stage. And this origin
story sort of characterizes the binding that the concubine did
as similar to using point shoes in ballet. It was
(03:18):
just a temporary alteration of a dancer's foot. And because
this dancing concubine in this story was the emperor's favorite,
she set a trend with her tiny lotus feet that
she had created for this dance, and ladies of the
court wished to emulate her style, and that started the practice.
Another version of the story features another concubine who had
(03:40):
naturally tiny, delicate feet and was ordered to bind them
so that they wouldn't grow and similar to the dancing tail.
This practice was then emulated by other court ladies. And
then there's another origin theory that suggests that there was
an empress uh during an earlier period that had a
club foot, and d of the court began binding their
(04:01):
feet to resemble her, although some versions of the story
portrayed the empress as demanding that other women be bound
so that they would all kind of have a similar
foot shape. Uh. And this particular story really predates the
Tong dynasty timeline by more than a thousand years in
some tellings, uh. Sometimes it's place between seventeen hundred and
ten twenty seven b c. E. And this one is
(04:24):
not really substantiated, uh terribly well, so it's usually disregarded
by scholars, and they tend to favor more of the
Tong dynasty or five Dynasties and ten States era as
being when this all happened. Regardless of exactly how the
practice began, we do know that during the Song dynasty
from nine sixty to twelve ninety seven, foot binding became
(04:47):
more and more popular and became a lot more common
throughout the upper classes, and then during the Ming period,
which began around thirteen eight, footbinding really spread in popularity
to the work in classes and even into rural villages,
and because of its status symbolism, it's even been theorized
that women who wished to marry up adopted this practice
(05:11):
and that that's how it eventually saturated Chinese society at
almost every level. There are also scholars who argue that
marrying into a higher social class wasn't really the motivation
for adopting footbinding and more rural areas, but that was
instead a means to keep girls at home working in
domestic duties. They could not run off to a better life, uh,
(05:33):
particularly when they were young and their feet were still
kind of being formed and altered in this way, so
they would have to stay home and work on textiles
and do things around the house. But the footbinding continued
to grow steadily in popularity, and by the middle of
the seventeenth century, pretty much any girl who wished to
marry underwent this body modification, and that remained the state
(05:55):
of affairs were right up until the twentieth century. So
now back to slightly more squeamishy subjects of how footbinding
was actually performed. It is described as having been performed
really with great care, and only women were present during
what was likely a very tortuous affair. So first the
(06:17):
girl's feet would be very carefully washed, her nails clipped,
and alum and other astringens would be applied to the feet.
Then the outer four toes were folded under the foot,
which required breaking them, and the feet were then bound
up with long cloth wraps to bring the toes very
close to the heel and a very extreme arch. And
(06:39):
the goal was to form this coveted golden lotus shape. Yeah.
And some versions, uh, descriptions that I've read of how
this was performed suggests that the feet the toes weren't
broken to fold them under, although some describe it that way.
Others say that the toes just broke by virtue of
them being folded under and then wrapped so tightly they
(06:59):
sort of throughout the process. Neither sounds very enjoyable. Uh.
And when people talk about bound feet, the perception then
becomes I think that the entire foot was made to
be tiny, But that's not entirely accurate. Uh. It's more
a matter of kind of folding the foot in such
a way that the space it occupies is different than
if it were allowed to grow naturally. So a lotus slipper,
(07:23):
which is what the shoes for bound feet are called,
UH would cover the toes, which had formed kind of
a point at this point, and then the heel, but
a significant portion of the actual mass of the foot
was actually above the shoe, so you can imagine it's
sort of being folded down as well as under. Normally,
(07:43):
the process of creating this golden lotus foot would start
when a girl was really very young and her feet
were still malleable, so the bones had not completely solidified yet.
So foot binding would usually start between the ages of
four and six. And while there were certainly outliers beyond
these numbers, children younger than four we're not believed to
(08:05):
be able to handle the pain of binding their feet,
and after the age of six the bones were a
lot more difficult to alter. Yeah, there are stories of
girls being altered as early as two, and some girls
later on as it was sort of spreading into more
rural areas when they were really beyond the age where
it was most ideal. Um, But the two to six
(08:29):
or the four to six ranges what you'll normally see.
And this process of actually getting the foot bound into
the the desired shape would actually take two to three
years because these are children and they're growing, so the
bones would have to be rebroken periodically as the foot grew.
So as a child grew, they would, you know, continue
(08:49):
to wrap the toes under more and more and more
as they got longer, and then they would keep binding
them and they would rebreak on each binding. Yeah. So,
and of course when a foot is being broken and
tied into these positions and and very rarely uncovered, there
are going to be other issues aside from all the
breakage and the reforming of the way the footlooks. Sores
(09:11):
and even gang green were among the potential risks and
bound feet, particularly as this became a lot more widespread
and commonplace, bound feet were described pretty often as smelling
quite unpleasant because unwrapping and washing them was a very
time consuming affair. And in addition to these fairly obvious
negative physical effects UH footbindings, long term repercussions on women's
(09:35):
health has also been studied in kind of the more
modern era UH. In a University of California study, published
its findings after examining a group of women in Beijing,
And so at this point, footbinding had was not really
happening regularly, but there were still women in the population
who had had their feet found when they were young.
And so these researchers found that when they compared all
(09:59):
of these women, the women with bound feet had about
five percent lower bone density than their peers without bound feet. Uh.
And since weight bearing exercise is one of the things
that helps maintain bone density, it makes sense that women
with reduced mobility would experience bone loss at a faster
rate than people who had not had this done. Uh.
(10:20):
Just an interesting thing that I don't think. I certainly
had not thought about it until I was doing the
research on this. Yeah. Well, and even knowing the importance
of weight bearing exercise and bone health like that is
something that never occurred to me either. Yeah. And they
do describe Um. I mean, I feel like we should
note that women with bound feet could walk, although they
were not likely to walk terribly long distances. It wasn't
(10:44):
like they were confined to a chair, which I think
sometimes people conjure in their heads that this is crippling
to a point that mobility is completely eradicated, but that's
not accurate. They kind of learned to live with this
and walk on it. Um And there are some um
write ups of it that suggests that the women that
had their feet bound did end up actually developing very
(11:04):
strong leg and hip and buttock muscles, kind of his
compensation for the state of their feet. Um. But even so,
bone loss over time is something that you can't really
avoid with even if you have great muscularity. As with
any trend that starts in the upper class and then
(11:24):
becomes widespread, there was a certain amount of status that
was associated with foot binding. So not only would a
bound foot be really delicate and tiny, which were characteristics
that were often described as beautiful when mentioned in relation
to foot binding, it would also make the owner of
the foot really unable to do heavy manual labor. A
woman with bound feet was elevated beyond work. Basically, a
(11:48):
man who could have a wife who was unable to
help with manual labor would also gain status. While the
roots of the practice of systematic crippling are in fact
in the aristocracy, and they initially at their inception, were
to convey the wealth and standing of the person whose
feet were bound uh During the Song Dynasty, the overall
(12:09):
status of women really shifted into a lower position than
it had been, and women at this point really lost
some of their power, both in their marriage and in society,
and they were no longer as educated as women had
been during previous eras. And in this context, foot binding
became less about status and fashion and it sort of
(12:32):
took on a more sinister connotation. So at this point,
a woman with bound feet was physically weakened and subjugated
to the role of a trophy wife, while a man
who was married to a woman with bound feet still
gained the same status from it, being able to say, yes,
my wife is unable to do work, I can keep
a wife that's just pretty. She's not really contributing to
(12:55):
the day to day, whereas the woman in that case,
her life had shifted completely, but the men in the
pictures still got the same benefit. At the same time,
as foot binding became hugely popular throughout all the social strata,
the only women who wouldn't have their feet mound were
the ones who were extremely poor, or are the ones
who worked on fishing boats. And so these were women
(13:15):
who just really simply could not afford the life of
reduced mobility that came with having their feet bound, and
on another sort of level of it, outside of first
the sort of fashion and empowerment and then the subjugation
of women, bound feet also had this element of being
considered extremely erotic and beautiful, and they were really even
(13:38):
fetishized by some books were written about maximizing sexual pleasure
by stroking bound feet. Uh. Although the sort of odd
flip is that a woman's bound feet were virtually never
seen naked by a man. Not even her husband would
normally ever see her feet. It was customary for a
(13:58):
woman with bound feet to sleep not only in bindings,
but also in special bed shoes sort of sleeping slippers
that covered her lotus feet. So we don't want to
avoid the fact that, UH, footbinding had had an innately
disfiguring nature, but at the same time it was also
an incredibly complex social practice. It's hard to comprehend perhaps
(14:21):
how a mother would have her daughter's feet bound, like
why a mother would put her daughter through this practice,
But it's really important to also consider that that once
footbinding was a really common practice, leaving a child's feet
unbound would basically condemn her to a life with no
marriage prospects and societal scorn. And it's important, uh to
(14:44):
also discuss the fact that this practice was also ingrained
in women's culture in ways that might not be immediately apparent. UH.
Footbinding was passed from mother to daughter as an important
rite of passage, and this really created a unique bond
uh in groups of women, as adult women shared their
(15:05):
knowledge on enduring the pain and discomfort of the procedure
with younger girls, and they in many ways it's described
as them teaching the next generation how to survive in
a world where men had the power. So it's kind
of like they're a mentorship, very unique, certainly not the
standard mentorship you would normally think of. Um, yeah, I
(15:29):
think it this it has parallels with female circumcision also
called female genital mutilation in that way that it was
a very mother to daughter practice, with mothers passing information
onto their daughters about how their lives are going to
be after this practice is performed on their body. Yeah. Um,
(15:50):
Like I struggle to wrap my head around all of
that as as somebody who like I have no firsthand
experience with either of these cultures or practices. Um, it's hard,
you know, as you said, without first hand experience, to
imagine just surviving that and then the idea of getting
through it and then going and I'm going to do
that to one of the people I love most. Yeah,
(16:12):
it sort of becomes an impossible situation for women in
the culture to have to choose between a daughter who's
going to be outcast forever and a daughter he's going
to have this this painful and debilitating and disfiguring procedure
performed on them. But they also, you know, culturally, it
had been sort of ingrained so much that that was
(16:35):
an achievement of beauty that I think that kind of
mitigated to some degree, some of the thinking of this
is horrible. Like I think that in many cases there
probably was no choice considered. It was just this is
what you do to be pretty. Uh, It's it's mentally
it's a struggle I think for like you said, for
(16:56):
people that have no first hand experience of that, Like
I I cannot on a LEAs say what I would
do as a mother if that were the choice given
to me. Oh yeah, I mean, uh, But to get
to the pretty things. Not to downplay the important about discussion,
but women also really bonded over the stitching of these
(17:17):
lotus shoes, and this was a task which would often
be performed in group settings, like women would come together
to so lotus shoes, and these tiny shoes, which are
now very highly prized by collectors, would often carry messages
and symbolism in their decoration. Shoes for brides would have um,
you know, message laden symbolism in the form of embroidery
(17:39):
or painted imagery. They would even have sometimes erotic imagery
in the souls that was intended for the bride to
share with the groom. Uh. And shoes that were meant
for day to day wardrobes would feature symbols and designs
that expressed the wearer's personality. They would sometimes carry greetings
from female relatives. They would also sometimes have astrological meaning. Uh.
(18:00):
There were these little, tiny works of art that had
so much intent behind their every design that that also
was kind of part of the bonding among women was
creating these beautiful little um accessories right well. And while
foot binding had transitioned from being a source of status
(18:23):
for women to a source of subjugation for women, the
world of the lotus slipper remained really the world of
women and was a very cherished form of expression right
until the end of her life. A woman's lotus shoes
were really imbued with both meaning and fashion. A woman's
final pair of shoes her funerary pair, which she would
(18:44):
normally make herself. They were also sometimes called her longevity shoes.
Was traditionally blue, and these would be fairly plain when
compared to other lotus shoes, but on the soul, a
lotus blossom and other small symbols, sometimes like a crane,
would accompany the embroidered phrase every step of Lotus all
(19:05):
the way to Heaven. And these are the shoes that
they were wearing, you know, in their repose of death.
And it's sort of a beautiful idea that they would
be simple and beautiful and just carrying this message that
they were going to the afterlife in the sort of beautiful,
delicate way. Uh. And I can only imagine what it's
(19:25):
like to make your own pair of shoes that you're
going to wear after you have died. It reminds me
of craftsmen making their own casket. Um Dorothy co who
Holly mentioned earlier, has written two books about footbinding and
its cultural roots, and she said in an l A
Times interview quote, it is hard to romanticize the practice,
and I'm happy to see it go, but it is
(19:47):
a pity that there is no comparable, but obviously less
painful practice to take its place and bond generations. Before
we get to how footbinding stopped being a standard part
of a Chinese girl's life, do you want to pause
for one moment for a word from our sponsor. Let's
do okay, and with that we'll get back to the
(20:08):
matter at hand of footbinding. Obviously, this is not a
practice that's still going on. So the end of footbinding
was actually catalyzed in part by Christian missionaries who traveled
to China in the nineteenth century, and at this point
footbinding was more popular than ever, and foreign visitors seeing
it for the first time were immediately outspoken against it.
(20:29):
And yes, this does indeed bring up a whole other
debate over the conceit of imposing your own cultural norms
on another culture versus the idea of interceding on behalf
of children who you think are being systematically abused in
this modification process. But that is a whole other discussion
that could go on for to be like a twelve
(20:50):
part or we're going for one. And I remember having
a whole, a whole long series of discussions and class
that I took in college about that exact question of
like when when you are a culture, when you're part
of a culture, that is that is becoming introduced to
another culture and that other culture does something that your
(21:11):
culture finds to be barbaric and offensive, like where is
the line? And I we never got to any kind
of satisfying resolution in that discussion, because there isn't one um. Again,
that's a whole, big mammoth discussion. So in addition to
the work of the missionaries, there were also many Chinese
intellectuals who went abroad to study and returned to their
(21:34):
homeland afterward with a new perspective on the practice, and
they joined the chorus of Christ for abandoning this tradition,
and eventually public opinion shifted against foot binding enough for
the band that took place in nine to take effect. Yeah,
and it's one of those things where it's not like
the whole country suddenly went oh, yeah, we shouldn't be
(21:55):
doing this. I mean, this was something that um was
hard fought on both sides. It was not cut and dried. Uh.
And while the embracing of this different fashion meant that
little girls were no longer being forced to hobble on
broken feet, it really also created this sort of lost
generation of women in China who had grown up with
(22:17):
modified feet, and now we're finding themselves spurned to some
degree is relics of an age that was more and
more associated with this embarrassment over this practice. In an
interview with NPR, author Young Young said, these women were
shunned by two eras. When they were young, foot binding
was already forbidden, so they bound their feet in secret.
(22:39):
When the communist era came, production methods changed, they had
to do farming work, and again they were shunned. Yeah.
These were women that were never meant to do real
heavy labor, as we said before, and suddenly they had to.
There was just no choice. So they had to keep
up with people that had not had this modification done
to their feet. Uh. I can only imagine how difficult
(23:01):
they had to have been. And they were also shunned
as being unfashionable. And while that sounds like an almost
flip thing to even mention, it was actually a very
serious and problematic issue. Women were sometimes abandoned by their husbands.
Husbands as a consequence of being suddenly thrust into this
position where they were considered irretrievably unattractive. Additionally, some women
(23:24):
with bound feet were actually attacked in the streets and
their bindings were cut and it exposed their feet in
the assault. And since, as we mentioned earlier, women with
bound feet normally never showed them to anyone, so this
was an incredibly cruel and humiliating thing to do. Despite
the band, there were villages that still practiced footbinding into
(23:46):
the nineteen fifties, and rural areas where footbinding stayed in
favor a long time after the band was instituted. Parents
would hide their daughters tiny feet in big shoes to
try to full government inspectors. Yeah, there are lots of
firsthand account that you'll read where people talk about, you know,
getting these big shoes and having to stuff them with
cotton and trying to angle their foot in so that
(24:08):
it would stay in the shoe, and just so they
could kind of maintain this thing that they still thought
was really a part of their culture they didn't want
to let go of. But eventually footbinding was abandoned. Even
in these hold out areas. Uh As with any huge
cultural shift. As I said earlier, it's not like it
happened all at once, and it's sort of slowly petered
(24:29):
out over time. Uh in these last few villages that
hung onto it. And there were also some probably well
intended but ultimately misguided efforts to force women who had
bound feet to unbind them. But this was met with
a whole lot of resistance from the women themselves because
giving up binding as an adult, in addition to all
(24:50):
the cultural implications we've just been talking about, often resulted
in excruciating pain. Yeah, there's one story that's told. I
think it comes been one of Dorothy Coe's books where
she talks about um, a woman going up to a man.
I think she has like a a knot of dough
that's been baked, and she says, if you can return
(25:13):
this to its original shape, I will stop binding my feet.
You can't do it well. And once once a person's feet,
like their footbones have broken and re healed repeatedly, like
there's no going back now, and like even it seems like,
even with extensive corrective surgeries, would probably just be a
life of a different pain than the pain that was
(25:35):
already there. Yeah, yeah, uh. And in her book Cinderella's Sisters,
Dorothy Co describes this period after footbinding is a really
emotionally confused time for a lot of China, as the
country transitioned out of this cultural norm that had been
ingrained for many, many centuries. So even I think there
may be a couple of survivors still with bound feet.
(25:57):
Many of them died in the early two thou that
had been sort of the ones on record. But even so,
it's like when you hear interviews with them, there is
this there's conflict even now or you know, in the
recent years prior to any of them passing away, where
on the one hand, they they sort of still seem
(26:18):
to think it's pretty, but they also recognize that it's
not really, uh, something that is sustainable in the modern world,
Like they kind of recognize their own sort of awkward position,
which is heartbreaking in many ways. Yeah, it's like already said,
I can't even imagine, but I can't even imagine, Like
(26:41):
I can't even imagine living in a world where the
relationships between genders are so heavily influenced by this practice
that is eventually banned, Like that. I mean, it really
threw a lot of established cultural norms out the window
and sort of like where do we go from here?
Like how does this change everything? Uh? And you know
that was a time when when China was shifting a
(27:04):
lot anyway culturally, So this was one part of a
much bigger picture of constant change. Uh. But yeah, it's
a fascinating little part of the culture that I say little,
but it was really huge because it was really day
to day life, Yeah, affecting every aspect. Basically. I was
trying to think of like something, um, like two modern
(27:27):
Americans that would be comparable, but it's it's difficult to
think of anything. Yeah, there's certainly no thing that we
have been doing for like a thousand years that no
one else was doing. Yeah, the United States as a
nation hasn't even existed for a thousand years. I mean
that obviously there were many people with many cultures here before,
(27:48):
which brings up this whole same issue we've been talking
about when when one culture begins to enforce its own
norms upon another, what happens food for thought for sure. Uh.
And with that, I will turn us towards listener mail.
Let's do that. So This is a mail that we
got in response to our Maurice Duplasy episodes, and it
(28:11):
is from our listener. I'm going to assume he goes
by Denny Um and not Dennis, although if you whichever,
he can give me a yell and tell me I'm wrong. Uh.
And he says, Bog Holly and Tracy Uh. And he says,
I was. I'm I'm editing a little bit because it's
a longish email, so my apologies to Deny for taking
out any of his words. It's a long email, but
(28:31):
it's so full of interesting and good information. He says.
I was happy and pleasantly surprised that this part of
our history referring to Maurice Stuplassy made it to the
to your show. But also because I'm a little bit
obsessed by Duplessy being from the same town and all.
He has a statue his birthhouse as a museum, the
whole shebang. Really, I've always found the podcast instructive and interesting,
(28:52):
and I was intrigued to hear this story from an unbiased,
in different perspective. You see, not only is Duplessy in
the Great Darkness still polarizing all fifty five years after
his death, but it still relates to current political tensions
and sentiment. I will do my best to leave my
personal opinions out of this email, but for full disclosure,
I work for the federal government. It's a Mountie. I
don't think we've ever gotten an email from a Mountie before,
(29:14):
though if we have, I apologized that I did not
acknowledge it, and he says I want to elaborate on
why Holly I believe did not get any response when
asking English Canadians for info about Duplessi. That was me.
In Canada, there is a wide cultural schism between French
and English, but also Quebec and the rest. In Quebec
we learned little about other provinces past the confederation in
(29:35):
eighteen sixty seven. Uh. The opposite is true for the
rest of Canada, where they learned just about nothing about
us at all. And this leads to an almost unfillable
cultural gap between the two founding people and ultimately makes
us both slightly ignorant of the other and therefore not
surprised at all that the Anglophones would know nothing of Duplessy. Ironically,
(29:56):
Duplassy is mostly credited for seating this gap in first place.
Just fascinating. Uh. Okay, I'm jim hanging ahead a little bit.
As I said, it's full of information. I'm trying to
hit the high points. Uh. There's an interesting tidbit you
did not mention that I think is worth mentioning. The
du Plessy Bridge, which collapsed in nineteen fifty and was
rebuilt we mentioned in the episode, still stands today, only
(30:18):
a few meters north of where the collapse happened. You
can actually still see the old pillars sticking out of
the water. It was left pretty much unchanged until last
year when it went when it underwent renovations to modernize
the lighting and enlarge it a bit, I believe. But
the most interesting thing was the well documented speech at
the original bridges inauguration. Du Plassy said this bridge will
(30:39):
be as solid and long lasting as the Union Nationals government,
which was ominous of the latter's devise. Of course. Uh
he talks about the du Passy kind of devious voting things,
and one of the good things he actually did is
still here today. The flag prior to nine nineteen fifty,
in its present form, Quebec had a Union Jack type
(31:00):
provincial ensign. As many provinces still have today looked at Ontario,
for instance. But in his push to give French Canadians
their own identity and for other political reasons, I'm sure
Duplessy had the new flag pushed through the Assembly and
it became the ominous Fleur de Lis or the white
Saint George cross on a blue background with Fleur de
Lee in all four corners. This was a major departure
(31:22):
from the unified federalism that existed prior to his reign. Interestingly,
this was actually a Roman Catholic flag, going to show
his closeness to the Church. Equally interesting, one of the
early drafts for the flag was a single red maple leaf,
which of course became the Canadian flag in nineteen sixty eight.
I think don't quote me. I did not look up
to see if it was my apologies. And he does
(31:43):
talk a little bit more about other things and some
of the other things that he was associated with and
accused of. But I really like, uh this paragraph towards
the end er he says I have come I've always
come to the conclusion that Duplessy was as close as
Canada ever came to a dictatorship, in the sense that
given some more time, I'm convinced it would have turned
into a personality cult. Even with the orphan scandal, we
(32:06):
were treading dangerously close to a totalitarian regime. Uh so cool.
I love having all of this insight uh from someone
who is from Quebec and can give us that perspective, because,
as I said, all the Canadians I know are not
from Quebec. I think I have a couple of relatives
there that are so distant I could not get ahold
of them. So it's very cool. We also, i should
(32:28):
point out, did get some letters from people in other
parts of Canada that said, no, no no, we did learn
a little bit about duplacy in class, not as in
depth certainly as someone who grows up in Quebec, but
that divide is very fascinating to me. It's super fascinating
to me. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(32:51):
You can visit us at Facebook dot com, slash missed
in History at missed in History on Twitter, missed in
History dot tumbler dot com, on tum learn, and you
can visit us on pinterest dot com slash mist in
History where we are pinning away and have pictures of duplacy,
and we'll soon have pictures of beautiful load isssues uh.
If you would like to learn more about what we
(33:11):
talked about today, you can go to our website and
type in the words footbinding into the search bar and
you will get an entire article called how footbinding works
are worked past tense uh, which covers some of the
things that I talked about today and some other elements
of it. And you can learn about that and almost
anything else you can think of at our website, which
is how stuff works dot com for more on this
(33:35):
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up today.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry Tracy Wilson, and today we are going
to talk about one of those cultural practices that often
gets put squarely in the barbaric bucket when people outside
(00:24):
that culture talk about it and outside of that time. Um.
But while it does involve some pretty uh you know,
make your spine crawley manipulation of the body, there are
a lot more layers to it than that. Uh. And
heads up, fashion people, this will also cover some fashion elements.
But we're going to talk about the history of foot binding.
(00:46):
And we've had a few requests for it, and it's
also something I've just been fascinated with for a long time, uh,
largely coming at it from the clothing angle. Yeah. I
think when we in our in our previous podcast, Pop Stuff,
I think we talked about it a little bit in
the episode where we talked about shoes. Yeah. And I
will talk about one of the books that I talked
about in that episode. Uh. That was written by an
(01:08):
author named Dorothy co who will reference a couple of
times during this podcast. Uh. And it's estimated that during
the height of footbindings popularity, more than two billion girls
had their feet altered in this way. Although I will
say this looking at multiple different sources, as often happens,
I feel like I'm always kind of saying this qualifier.
You will see vastly different numbers. Some will list one billion,
(01:31):
some will list three billion. But I found several the
list two billion, and it's the mean. So I we're
using that number. So and regardless b with a B
billion like many many, many um. And part of the
reason is that this practice went on for more than
ten centuries. I mean, it was more than a thousand
years of China's cultural history, and that is a very
(01:53):
long time. I don't need to tell anyone far more
than you can really just right off as a cultural
or fashion fat. I mean, this was an ingrained part
of culture. So we're going to examine today what it
is about footbinding that made it such an important cornerstone
of Chinese womanhood for so very long, and kind of
(02:13):
how the different facets of its place in the culture.
The exact origin point of binding we don't really know,
As with many things, it may have begun in the
Late Tongue Dynasty, between six eighteen and nine oh six.
Some scholars point instead to a period that's actually referred
(02:34):
to as the Five Dynasties and Ten States period, and
this was a period of time when political upheaval was
so constant that leadership in China was changing so rapidly
that they it doesn't always get given individual dynasty names.
It gets lumped under this bigger one, and that was
in between the Tong dynasty and the Song dynasty. There
(02:56):
are several different origin stories that kind of load around.
In one, the favorite concubine of an emperor bound her
foot into the shape of a hoof so that she
could dance on a gilded lotus stage. And this origin
story sort of characterizes the binding that the concubine did
as similar to using point shoes in ballet. It was
(03:18):
just a temporary alteration of a dancer's foot. And because
this dancing concubine in this story was the emperor's favorite,
she set a trend with her tiny lotus feet that
she had created for this dance, and ladies of the
court wished to emulate her style, and that started the practice.
Another version of the story features another concubine who had
(03:40):
naturally tiny, delicate feet and was ordered to bind them
so that they wouldn't grow and similar to the dancing tail.
This practice was then emulated by other court ladies. And
then there's another origin theory that suggests that there was
an empress uh during an earlier period that had a
club foot, and d of the court began binding their
(04:01):
feet to resemble her, although some versions of the story
portrayed the empress as demanding that other women be bound
so that they would all kind of have a similar
foot shape. Uh. And this particular story really predates the
Tong dynasty timeline by more than a thousand years in
some tellings, uh. Sometimes it's place between seventeen hundred and
ten twenty seven b c. E. And this one is
(04:24):
not really substantiated, uh terribly well, so it's usually disregarded
by scholars, and they tend to favor more of the
Tong dynasty or five Dynasties and ten States era as
being when this all happened. Regardless of exactly how the
practice began, we do know that during the Song dynasty
from nine sixty to twelve ninety seven, foot binding became
(04:47):
more and more popular and became a lot more common
throughout the upper classes, and then during the Ming period,
which began around thirteen eight, footbinding really spread in popularity
to the work in classes and even into rural villages,
and because of its status symbolism, it's even been theorized
that women who wished to marry up adopted this practice
(05:11):
and that that's how it eventually saturated Chinese society at
almost every level. There are also scholars who argue that
marrying into a higher social class wasn't really the motivation
for adopting footbinding and more rural areas, but that was
instead a means to keep girls at home working in
domestic duties. They could not run off to a better life, uh,
(05:33):
particularly when they were young and their feet were still
kind of being formed and altered in this way, so
they would have to stay home and work on textiles
and do things around the house. But the footbinding continued
to grow steadily in popularity, and by the middle of
the seventeenth century, pretty much any girl who wished to
marry underwent this body modification, and that remained the state
(05:55):
of affairs were right up until the twentieth century. So
now back to slightly more squeamishy subjects of how footbinding
was actually performed. It is described as having been performed
really with great care, and only women were present during
what was likely a very tortuous affair. So first the
(06:17):
girl's feet would be very carefully washed, her nails clipped,
and alum and other astringens would be applied to the feet.
Then the outer four toes were folded under the foot,
which required breaking them, and the feet were then bound
up with long cloth wraps to bring the toes very
close to the heel and a very extreme arch. And
(06:39):
the goal was to form this coveted golden lotus shape. Yeah.
And some versions, uh, descriptions that I've read of how
this was performed suggests that the feet the toes weren't
broken to fold them under, although some describe it that way.
Others say that the toes just broke by virtue of
them being folded under and then wrapped so tightly they
(06:59):
sort of throughout the process. Neither sounds very enjoyable. Uh.
And when people talk about bound feet, the perception then
becomes I think that the entire foot was made to
be tiny, But that's not entirely accurate. Uh. It's more
a matter of kind of folding the foot in such
a way that the space it occupies is different than
if it were allowed to grow naturally. So a lotus slipper,
(07:23):
which is what the shoes for bound feet are called,
UH would cover the toes, which had formed kind of
a point at this point, and then the heel, but
a significant portion of the actual mass of the foot
was actually above the shoe, so you can imagine it's
sort of being folded down as well as under. Normally,
(07:43):
the process of creating this golden lotus foot would start
when a girl was really very young and her feet
were still malleable, so the bones had not completely solidified yet.
So foot binding would usually start between the ages of
four and six. And while there were certainly outliers beyond
these numbers, children younger than four we're not believed to
(08:05):
be able to handle the pain of binding their feet,
and after the age of six the bones were a
lot more difficult to alter. Yeah, there are stories of
girls being altered as early as two, and some girls
later on as it was sort of spreading into more
rural areas when they were really beyond the age where
it was most ideal. Um, But the two to six
(08:29):
or the four to six ranges what you'll normally see.
And this process of actually getting the foot bound into
the the desired shape would actually take two to three
years because these are children and they're growing, so the
bones would have to be rebroken periodically as the foot grew.
So as a child grew, they would, you know, continue
(08:49):
to wrap the toes under more and more and more
as they got longer, and then they would keep binding
them and they would rebreak on each binding. Yeah. So,
and of course when a foot is being broken and
tied into these positions and and very rarely uncovered, there
are going to be other issues aside from all the
breakage and the reforming of the way the footlooks. Sores
(09:11):
and even gang green were among the potential risks and
bound feet, particularly as this became a lot more widespread
and commonplace, bound feet were described pretty often as smelling
quite unpleasant because unwrapping and washing them was a very
time consuming affair. And in addition to these fairly obvious
negative physical effects UH footbindings, long term repercussions on women's
(09:35):
health has also been studied in kind of the more
modern era UH. In a University of California study, published
its findings after examining a group of women in Beijing,
And so at this point, footbinding had was not really
happening regularly, but there were still women in the population
who had had their feet found when they were young.
And so these researchers found that when they compared all
(09:59):
of these women, the women with bound feet had about
five percent lower bone density than their peers without bound feet. Uh.
And since weight bearing exercise is one of the things
that helps maintain bone density, it makes sense that women
with reduced mobility would experience bone loss at a faster
rate than people who had not had this done. Uh.
(10:20):
Just an interesting thing that I don't think. I certainly
had not thought about it until I was doing the
research on this. Yeah. Well, and even knowing the importance
of weight bearing exercise and bone health like that is
something that never occurred to me either. Yeah. And they
do describe Um. I mean, I feel like we should
note that women with bound feet could walk, although they
were not likely to walk terribly long distances. It wasn't
(10:44):
like they were confined to a chair, which I think
sometimes people conjure in their heads that this is crippling
to a point that mobility is completely eradicated, but that's
not accurate. They kind of learned to live with this
and walk on it. Um And there are some um
write ups of it that suggests that the women that
had their feet bound did end up actually developing very
(11:04):
strong leg and hip and buttock muscles, kind of his
compensation for the state of their feet. Um. But even so,
bone loss over time is something that you can't really
avoid with even if you have great muscularity. As with
any trend that starts in the upper class and then
(11:24):
becomes widespread, there was a certain amount of status that
was associated with foot binding. So not only would a
bound foot be really delicate and tiny, which were characteristics
that were often described as beautiful when mentioned in relation
to foot binding, it would also make the owner of
the foot really unable to do heavy manual labor. A
woman with bound feet was elevated beyond work. Basically, a
(11:48):
man who could have a wife who was unable to
help with manual labor would also gain status. While the
roots of the practice of systematic crippling are in fact
in the aristocracy, and they initially at their inception, were
to convey the wealth and standing of the person whose
feet were bound uh During the Song Dynasty, the overall
(12:09):
status of women really shifted into a lower position than
it had been, and women at this point really lost
some of their power, both in their marriage and in society,
and they were no longer as educated as women had
been during previous eras. And in this context, foot binding
became less about status and fashion and it sort of
(12:32):
took on a more sinister connotation. So at this point,
a woman with bound feet was physically weakened and subjugated
to the role of a trophy wife, while a man
who was married to a woman with bound feet still
gained the same status from it, being able to say, yes,
my wife is unable to do work, I can keep
a wife that's just pretty. She's not really contributing to
(12:55):
the day to day, whereas the woman in that case,
her life had shifted completely, but the men in the
pictures still got the same benefit. At the same time,
as foot binding became hugely popular throughout all the social strata,
the only women who wouldn't have their feet mound were
the ones who were extremely poor, or are the ones
who worked on fishing boats. And so these were women
(13:15):
who just really simply could not afford the life of
reduced mobility that came with having their feet bound, and
on another sort of level of it, outside of first
the sort of fashion and empowerment and then the subjugation
of women, bound feet also had this element of being
considered extremely erotic and beautiful, and they were really even
(13:38):
fetishized by some books were written about maximizing sexual pleasure
by stroking bound feet. Uh. Although the sort of odd
flip is that a woman's bound feet were virtually never
seen naked by a man. Not even her husband would
normally ever see her feet. It was customary for a
(13:58):
woman with bound feet to sleep not only in bindings,
but also in special bed shoes sort of sleeping slippers
that covered her lotus feet. So we don't want to
avoid the fact that, UH, footbinding had had an innately
disfiguring nature, but at the same time it was also
an incredibly complex social practice. It's hard to comprehend perhaps
(14:21):
how a mother would have her daughter's feet bound, like
why a mother would put her daughter through this practice,
But it's really important to also consider that that once
footbinding was a really common practice, leaving a child's feet
unbound would basically condemn her to a life with no
marriage prospects and societal scorn. And it's important, uh to
(14:44):
also discuss the fact that this practice was also ingrained
in women's culture in ways that might not be immediately apparent. UH.
Footbinding was passed from mother to daughter as an important
rite of passage, and this really created a unique bond
uh in groups of women, as adult women shared their
(15:05):
knowledge on enduring the pain and discomfort of the procedure
with younger girls, and they in many ways it's described
as them teaching the next generation how to survive in
a world where men had the power. So it's kind
of like they're a mentorship, very unique, certainly not the
standard mentorship you would normally think of. Um, yeah, I
(15:29):
think it this it has parallels with female circumcision also
called female genital mutilation in that way that it was
a very mother to daughter practice, with mothers passing information
onto their daughters about how their lives are going to
be after this practice is performed on their body. Yeah. Um,
(15:50):
Like I struggle to wrap my head around all of
that as as somebody who like I have no firsthand
experience with either of these cultures or practices. Um, it's hard,
you know, as you said, without first hand experience, to
imagine just surviving that and then the idea of getting
through it and then going and I'm going to do
that to one of the people I love most. Yeah,
(16:12):
it sort of becomes an impossible situation for women in
the culture to have to choose between a daughter who's
going to be outcast forever and a daughter he's going
to have this this painful and debilitating and disfiguring procedure
performed on them. But they also, you know, culturally, it
had been sort of ingrained so much that that was
(16:35):
an achievement of beauty that I think that kind of
mitigated to some degree, some of the thinking of this
is horrible. Like I think that in many cases there
probably was no choice considered. It was just this is
what you do to be pretty. Uh, It's it's mentally
it's a struggle I think for like you said, for
(16:56):
people that have no first hand experience of that, Like
I I cannot on a LEAs say what I would
do as a mother if that were the choice given
to me. Oh yeah, I mean, uh, But to get
to the pretty things. Not to downplay the important about discussion,
but women also really bonded over the stitching of these
(17:17):
lotus shoes, and this was a task which would often
be performed in group settings, like women would come together
to so lotus shoes, and these tiny shoes, which are
now very highly prized by collectors, would often carry messages
and symbolism in their decoration. Shoes for brides would have um,
you know, message laden symbolism in the form of embroidery
(17:39):
or painted imagery. They would even have sometimes erotic imagery
in the souls that was intended for the bride to
share with the groom. Uh. And shoes that were meant
for day to day wardrobes would feature symbols and designs
that expressed the wearer's personality. They would sometimes carry greetings
from female relatives. They would also sometimes have astrological meaning. Uh.
(18:00):
There were these little, tiny works of art that had
so much intent behind their every design that that also
was kind of part of the bonding among women was
creating these beautiful little um accessories right well. And while
foot binding had transitioned from being a source of status
(18:23):
for women to a source of subjugation for women, the
world of the lotus slipper remained really the world of
women and was a very cherished form of expression right
until the end of her life. A woman's lotus shoes
were really imbued with both meaning and fashion. A woman's
final pair of shoes her funerary pair, which she would
(18:44):
normally make herself. They were also sometimes called her longevity shoes.
Was traditionally blue, and these would be fairly plain when
compared to other lotus shoes, but on the soul, a
lotus blossom and other small symbols, sometimes like a crane,
would accompany the embroidered phrase every step of Lotus all
(19:05):
the way to Heaven. And these are the shoes that
they were wearing, you know, in their repose of death.
And it's sort of a beautiful idea that they would
be simple and beautiful and just carrying this message that
they were going to the afterlife in the sort of beautiful,
delicate way. Uh. And I can only imagine what it's
(19:25):
like to make your own pair of shoes that you're
going to wear after you have died. It reminds me
of craftsmen making their own casket. Um Dorothy co who
Holly mentioned earlier, has written two books about footbinding and
its cultural roots, and she said in an l A
Times interview quote, it is hard to romanticize the practice,
and I'm happy to see it go, but it is
(19:47):
a pity that there is no comparable, but obviously less
painful practice to take its place and bond generations. Before
we get to how footbinding stopped being a standard part
of a Chinese girl's life, do you want to pause
for one moment for a word from our sponsor. Let's
do okay, and with that we'll get back to the
(20:08):
matter at hand of footbinding. Obviously, this is not a
practice that's still going on. So the end of footbinding
was actually catalyzed in part by Christian missionaries who traveled
to China in the nineteenth century, and at this point
footbinding was more popular than ever, and foreign visitors seeing
it for the first time were immediately outspoken against it.
(20:29):
And yes, this does indeed bring up a whole other
debate over the conceit of imposing your own cultural norms
on another culture versus the idea of interceding on behalf
of children who you think are being systematically abused in
this modification process. But that is a whole other discussion
that could go on for to be like a twelve
(20:50):
part or we're going for one. And I remember having
a whole, a whole long series of discussions and class
that I took in college about that exact question of
like when when you are a culture, when you're part
of a culture, that is that is becoming introduced to
another culture and that other culture does something that your
(21:11):
culture finds to be barbaric and offensive, like where is
the line? And I we never got to any kind
of satisfying resolution in that discussion, because there isn't one um. Again,
that's a whole, big mammoth discussion. So in addition to
the work of the missionaries, there were also many Chinese
intellectuals who went abroad to study and returned to their
(21:34):
homeland afterward with a new perspective on the practice, and
they joined the chorus of Christ for abandoning this tradition,
and eventually public opinion shifted against foot binding enough for
the band that took place in nine to take effect. Yeah,
and it's one of those things where it's not like
the whole country suddenly went oh, yeah, we shouldn't be
(21:55):
doing this. I mean, this was something that um was
hard fought on both sides. It was not cut and dried. Uh.
And while the embracing of this different fashion meant that
little girls were no longer being forced to hobble on
broken feet, it really also created this sort of lost
generation of women in China who had grown up with
(22:17):
modified feet, and now we're finding themselves spurned to some
degree is relics of an age that was more and
more associated with this embarrassment over this practice. In an
interview with NPR, author Young Young said, these women were
shunned by two eras. When they were young, foot binding
was already forbidden, so they bound their feet in secret.
(22:39):
When the communist era came, production methods changed, they had
to do farming work, and again they were shunned. Yeah.
These were women that were never meant to do real
heavy labor, as we said before, and suddenly they had to.
There was just no choice. So they had to keep
up with people that had not had this modification done
to their feet. Uh. I can only imagine how difficult
(23:01):
they had to have been. And they were also shunned
as being unfashionable. And while that sounds like an almost
flip thing to even mention, it was actually a very
serious and problematic issue. Women were sometimes abandoned by their husbands.
Husbands as a consequence of being suddenly thrust into this
position where they were considered irretrievably unattractive. Additionally, some women
(23:24):
with bound feet were actually attacked in the streets and
their bindings were cut and it exposed their feet in
the assault. And since, as we mentioned earlier, women with
bound feet normally never showed them to anyone, so this
was an incredibly cruel and humiliating thing to do. Despite
the band, there were villages that still practiced footbinding into
(23:46):
the nineteen fifties, and rural areas where footbinding stayed in
favor a long time after the band was instituted. Parents
would hide their daughters tiny feet in big shoes to
try to full government inspectors. Yeah, there are lots of
firsthand account that you'll read where people talk about, you know,
getting these big shoes and having to stuff them with
cotton and trying to angle their foot in so that
(24:08):
it would stay in the shoe, and just so they
could kind of maintain this thing that they still thought
was really a part of their culture they didn't want
to let go of. But eventually footbinding was abandoned. Even
in these hold out areas. Uh As with any huge
cultural shift. As I said earlier, it's not like it
happened all at once, and it's sort of slowly petered
(24:29):
out over time. Uh in these last few villages that
hung onto it. And there were also some probably well
intended but ultimately misguided efforts to force women who had
bound feet to unbind them. But this was met with
a whole lot of resistance from the women themselves because
giving up binding as an adult, in addition to all
(24:50):
the cultural implications we've just been talking about, often resulted
in excruciating pain. Yeah, there's one story that's told. I
think it comes been one of Dorothy Coe's books where
she talks about um, a woman going up to a man.
I think she has like a a knot of dough
that's been baked, and she says, if you can return
(25:13):
this to its original shape, I will stop binding my feet.
You can't do it well. And once once a person's feet,
like their footbones have broken and re healed repeatedly, like
there's no going back now, and like even it seems like,
even with extensive corrective surgeries, would probably just be a
life of a different pain than the pain that was
(25:35):
already there. Yeah, yeah, uh. And in her book Cinderella's Sisters,
Dorothy Co describes this period after footbinding is a really
emotionally confused time for a lot of China, as the
country transitioned out of this cultural norm that had been
ingrained for many, many centuries. So even I think there
may be a couple of survivors still with bound feet.
(25:57):
Many of them died in the early two thou that
had been sort of the ones on record. But even so,
it's like when you hear interviews with them, there is
this there's conflict even now or you know, in the
recent years prior to any of them passing away, where
on the one hand, they they sort of still seem
(26:18):
to think it's pretty, but they also recognize that it's
not really, uh, something that is sustainable in the modern world,
Like they kind of recognize their own sort of awkward position,
which is heartbreaking in many ways. Yeah, it's like already said,
I can't even imagine, but I can't even imagine, Like
(26:41):
I can't even imagine living in a world where the
relationships between genders are so heavily influenced by this practice
that is eventually banned, Like that. I mean, it really
threw a lot of established cultural norms out the window
and sort of like where do we go from here?
Like how does this change everything? Uh? And you know
that was a time when when China was shifting a
(27:04):
lot anyway culturally, So this was one part of a
much bigger picture of constant change. Uh. But yeah, it's
a fascinating little part of the culture that I say little,
but it was really huge because it was really day
to day life, Yeah, affecting every aspect. Basically. I was
trying to think of like something, um, like two modern
(27:27):
Americans that would be comparable, but it's it's difficult to
think of anything. Yeah, there's certainly no thing that we
have been doing for like a thousand years that no
one else was doing. Yeah, the United States as a
nation hasn't even existed for a thousand years. I mean
that obviously there were many people with many cultures here before,
(27:48):
which brings up this whole same issue we've been talking
about when when one culture begins to enforce its own
norms upon another, what happens food for thought for sure. Uh.
And with that, I will turn us towards listener mail.
Let's do that. So This is a mail that we
got in response to our Maurice Duplasy episodes, and it
(28:11):
is from our listener. I'm going to assume he goes
by Denny Um and not Dennis, although if you whichever,
he can give me a yell and tell me I'm wrong. Uh.
And he says, Bog Holly and Tracy Uh. And he says,
I was. I'm I'm editing a little bit because it's
a longish email, so my apologies to Deny for taking
out any of his words. It's a long email, but
(28:31):
it's so full of interesting and good information. He says.
I was happy and pleasantly surprised that this part of
our history referring to Maurice Stuplassy made it to the
to your show. But also because I'm a little bit
obsessed by Duplessy being from the same town and all.
He has a statue his birthhouse as a museum, the
whole shebang. Really, I've always found the podcast instructive and interesting,
(28:52):
and I was intrigued to hear this story from an unbiased,
in different perspective. You see, not only is Duplessy in
the Great Darkness still polarizing all fifty five years after
his death, but it still relates to current political tensions
and sentiment. I will do my best to leave my
personal opinions out of this email, but for full disclosure,
I work for the federal government. It's a Mountie. I
don't think we've ever gotten an email from a Mountie before,
(29:14):
though if we have, I apologized that I did not
acknowledge it, and he says I want to elaborate on
why Holly I believe did not get any response when
asking English Canadians for info about Duplessi. That was me.
In Canada, there is a wide cultural schism between French
and English, but also Quebec and the rest. In Quebec
we learned little about other provinces past the confederation in
(29:35):
eighteen sixty seven. Uh. The opposite is true for the
rest of Canada, where they learned just about nothing about
us at all. And this leads to an almost unfillable
cultural gap between the two founding people and ultimately makes
us both slightly ignorant of the other and therefore not
surprised at all that the Anglophones would know nothing of Duplessy. Ironically,
(29:56):
Duplassy is mostly credited for seating this gap in first place.
Just fascinating. Uh. Okay, I'm jim hanging ahead a little bit.
As I said, it's full of information. I'm trying to
hit the high points. Uh. There's an interesting tidbit you
did not mention that I think is worth mentioning. The
du Plessy Bridge, which collapsed in nineteen fifty and was
rebuilt we mentioned in the episode, still stands today, only
(30:18):
a few meters north of where the collapse happened. You
can actually still see the old pillars sticking out of
the water. It was left pretty much unchanged until last
year when it went when it underwent renovations to modernize
the lighting and enlarge it a bit, I believe. But
the most interesting thing was the well documented speech at
the original bridges inauguration. Du Plassy said this bridge will
(30:39):
be as solid and long lasting as the Union Nationals government,
which was ominous of the latter's devise. Of course. Uh
he talks about the du Passy kind of devious voting things,
and one of the good things he actually did is
still here today. The flag prior to nine nineteen fifty,
in its present form, Quebec had a Union Jack type
(31:00):
provincial ensign. As many provinces still have today looked at Ontario,
for instance. But in his push to give French Canadians
their own identity and for other political reasons, I'm sure
Duplessy had the new flag pushed through the Assembly and
it became the ominous Fleur de Lis or the white
Saint George cross on a blue background with Fleur de
Lee in all four corners. This was a major departure
(31:22):
from the unified federalism that existed prior to his reign. Interestingly,
this was actually a Roman Catholic flag, going to show
his closeness to the Church. Equally interesting, one of the
early drafts for the flag was a single red maple leaf,
which of course became the Canadian flag in nineteen sixty eight.
I think don't quote me. I did not look up
to see if it was my apologies. And he does
(31:43):
talk a little bit more about other things and some
of the other things that he was associated with and
accused of. But I really like, uh this paragraph towards
the end er he says I have come I've always
come to the conclusion that Duplessy was as close as
Canada ever came to a dictatorship, in the sense that
given some more time, I'm convinced it would have turned
into a personality cult. Even with the orphan scandal, we
(32:06):
were treading dangerously close to a totalitarian regime. Uh so cool.
I love having all of this insight uh from someone
who is from Quebec and can give us that perspective, because,
as I said, all the Canadians I know are not
from Quebec. I think I have a couple of relatives
there that are so distant I could not get ahold
of them. So it's very cool. We also, i should
(32:28):
point out, did get some letters from people in other
parts of Canada that said, no, no no, we did learn
a little bit about duplacy in class, not as in
depth certainly as someone who grows up in Quebec, but
that divide is very fascinating to me. It's super fascinating
to me. If you would like to write to us,
you can do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(32:51):
You can visit us at Facebook dot com, slash missed
in History at missed in History on Twitter, missed in
History dot tumbler dot com, on tum learn, and you
can visit us on pinterest dot com slash mist in
History where we are pinning away and have pictures of duplacy,
and we'll soon have pictures of beautiful load isssues uh.
If you would like to learn more about what we
(33:11):
talked about today, you can go to our website and
type in the words footbinding into the search bar and
you will get an entire article called how footbinding works
are worked past tense uh, which covers some of the
things that I talked about today and some other elements
of it. And you can learn about that and almost
anything else you can think of at our website, which
is how stuff works dot com for more on this
(33:35):
and thousands of other topics because at how stuff works
dot com. Audible dot com is the leading provider of
downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment. Audible has
more than one thousand titles to choose from to be
(33:58):
downloaded too your iPod or m P three player. Go
to audible podcast dot com slash history to get a
free audio book download of your choice when you sign
up today.
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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