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

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, correlates with whether Chinese girls were subjected to footbinding before 1950. Girlhood knowledge of government prohibitions against footbinding, an indirect measure of awareness by the adults who decided whether to bind a girl’s feet, did not correlate with whether women were ever footbound. Spinning cotton thread for commercial purposes (sale, wage, direct exchange) correlated with greater daily production, with great county-level variation in quantity produced. Moreover, Chinese commercial spinners labored more years before marriage than domestic spinners.
Implications
Chinese daughters—whether footbound or not—made important economic contributions to rural households, thus suggesting a need to revise our understanding of China’s gender and economic history. Further implications of our results are that research is warranted on the assumed efficacy of government prohibitions—in both rural and urban areas—and on the presumption that footbinding among elite Chinese women was unrelated to economic concerns, including handicraft production. The demonstrated economic correlates of footbinding in inland, rural China also suggest a need to reevaluate whether contemporary customs controlling and cloistering girls and women, such as female genital cutting in Africa and the threat of honor killings of girls and women in South Asia, might have economic correlates.

研究背景
学界曾有一项广为流传的预设：缠足(footbinding)的女童与女性相比未缠足者，给家庭造成的经济负担更重。人们通常还认为，是政府政策与传教士活动终结了缠足。

方法与研究目标
本研究采用回归分析与对数似然检验，并结合Bootstrap自助法进行验证，以分析一系列基于民族志与历史研究提出的假设变量中，哪些与缠足存在显著相关性。我们同时纳入了一项衡量政府禁令的间接指标。本研究基于对中国12个内陆省份最后一代缠足老年女性的口述调查，对两套大型数据集展开分析。

研究结论
手工业生产，尤其是商业性手工业生产，与1950年前中国女童是否被缠足存在显著相关性。女童时期对缠足禁令的知晓程度——这是衡量决定是否为女童缠足的成年人认知水平的间接指标——与女性是否曾缠足并无关联。以商业用途（售卖、获取薪酬、直接交换）为目的的纺棉活动，与更高的日产量相关，且产量在县级层面存在显著差异。此外，从事商业性纺棉的女性在婚前的劳作年限长于家庭纺工。

研究启示
无论是否缠足，中国女性都为农村家庭做出了重要的经济贡献，这表明我们有必要修正对中国性别与经济史的既有认知。本研究结果的进一步启示在于：无论是在农村还是城市地区，政府禁令的预设有效性都值得开展相关研究；同时，关于中国精英女性的缠足与包括手工业生产在内的经济考量无关的预设，也需要重新审视。中国内陆农村地区缠足与经济因素的显著相关性，还提示我们需要重新评估当下管控、幽禁女童与女性的习俗——比如非洲的女性外阴残割，以及南亚地区针对女童与女性的荣誉杀人威胁——是否同样存在经济层面的相关性。