Talk:Foot binding

Wiki Education assignment: HIST 4048 Women and Gender in Modern China

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 18 January 2022 and 5 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Freehilh (article contribs).

Harbin shoemaker was not necessarily the last "littleshoes" factory to close

This Harbin shoemaker kept her factory open not for profit but because she was committed to "keeping every last of these elderly ladies well-shod, so they can still get around as they will". Basically it was a contribution to her local community. When she got to retire her production line in Harbin, there were still lots of elderly women with bound feet outside Manchuria, but factories there were closing off nonetheless as it became less and less profitable. I've not yet found a reliable source as to if Harbin Zhiqiang was really the last one. It'd be sad if true. Even today there's inflicted elderly ladies who's only in their 70's, if you think about it.

I'm removing this sentence for now because her mission completion marked only the disappearance of this abhorrent tradition in Manchuria, and bears a sense of false optimism that would potentially make one ignore other elderly ladies' unmet needs, if there's still any. Arachnikhan (talk) 20:59, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

You should not remove the sentence until you cam provide an alternative source. Hzh (talk) 21:49, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the instruction. The ref was a popular book that only mentioned Harbin shoemaker anecdotally to ease into the main theme. I probably should have marked it with a flag like [dubious] first? Although my reason for deleting mainly was it was placed at the very end of "decline" section presumably as a closure, but it was actually anachronistic with the previous sentence.

This preceding sentence sounds pretty questionable too. The sources quoted here are two blog posts that refers to the same photographer's recent(2015) published photos & interviews of "the very last victims of foot binding after nine years of searching and travelling across China". It doesn't appear the editor who added it intended to promote anything here, but I don't think this description can be taken literally.

On a side note, is "Heavenly Foot Society" a legit translation used by people back then? There's a separate article under this exact name but was translated from Swedish. I'm thinking if there wasn't a well-established English term already maybe we should use "Natural Foot Society"? .. "heavenly foot" sounds suspiciously like what contemporary dudes would want the most given the history development.. oooor, maybe if unless "heaven" underwent similar change like "gay" did and people really did call it that back then.. in which case Heaven Eden Tengri pardon my degeneracy Arachnikhan (talk) 13:25, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

The book is written by an academic and a social historian, and she likely knows more than you do. So far you haven't offered anything apart from personal opinion, and Wikipedia article has no place for personal opinion. The Guardian or Slate article are not blogs, they simply gave something from a recently published book. "Heavenly" is a direct translation of "tian", more recent publication prefers "natural", which is more explanatory. Either is fine, I have no objection to anyone changing it. Hzh (talk) 14:10, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Citation Misuse of the NPR 2007 article

The claims which use this citation: the "40-50%" figure nor any other figure is ever mentioned; the talk about a handful of elderly with bound feet in 2007 - the only relevant claim is that there used to be 300 people with bound feet in one particular village; and no mention of rice fields. Gross misuse of the NPR article and I have removed all statements that cite this article. Will need a source that actually corroborates the statements, rather than having nothing to do with them.

On a side note, there seems to be many claims without citations, but that's another issue. Song12301 (talk) 19:27, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

From that NPR source: "According to the American author William Rossi, who wrote The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe, 40 percent to 50 percent of Chinese women had bound feet in the 19th century. For the upper classes, the figure was almost 100 percent." – notwally (talk) 19:44, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

The problem arose because the website originally had two articles there, one with the 40-50% quote, one without. It seems that one was removed later (but it was still in the archived page). I've fixed the link. Hzh (talk) 20:27, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Sourced content

@Mangopapayafruit Please don't remove sourced content in article. The source is an encyclopedia, unless you have evidence to counter it, it is not for you to judge the validity of the information within it, nor does an encyclopedia require it to give further sources. So either leave it alone or provide sources that say otherwise. You can find other sources that say similar things like here (page 97) citing the book on footbinding by Levy. Hzh (talk) 09:03, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Just because Victoria Pitts-Taylor called her book an encyclopedia does not mean that it has all the academic rigor of other encyclopedias. Wikipedia guidelines say, "Exceptional claims require exceptional sourcing". The claim that the Mongol rulers of the Yuan dynasty encouraged footbinding is an exceptional claim, therefore it needs an exceptional source. Howard S. Levy said that the Han Chinese during the Yuan dynasty might had encouraged footbinding to distinguish Chinese women from foreign women. It was after this when he said "Perhaps the Mongols encourage it....". Keyword "perhaps", meaning that this claim is speculative in Levy's book. When this claim got put onto wikipedia, it was reported as if it is a rigorously attested fact. Mangopapayafruit (talk) 16:30, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Don't make claim about WP guidelines you don't understand. If the claim is exceptional, you should be able to easily find sources that can counter it, and you haven't produced one despite me asking you for it multiple times. It's not as if this is something widely discussed. The worst you can say is that that source mis-stated an opinion as a fact, or an unresolved issue as established consensus. And if it did, then a simple adjustment to the text should be sufficient. As it is, I have already adjusted the text to something that is not disputed (and adding a source for that). In the meantime, I will look for other sources that have discussed the issue to see what the general opinion on this is. Hzh (talk) 20:01, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Bossen (2017)

@Mcenedella, you added some shortened footnotes pointing to Bossen (2017) earlier. Should those point to

• Bossen, Laurel, and Hill Gates. Bound feet, young hands: tracking the demise of footbinding in village China (Stanford University Press, 2017)

which is already in the bibliography, or is it a different source? In the latter case could you add it to the bibliography section please?

BTW, you don't need to put <ref> tags round {{sfn}} – it essentially generates its own reference internally.

Thanks, Wham2001 (talk) 20:00, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for flagging that, User:Wham2001 — I totally borked the footnote setup. I've now made sure all the {{sfn|Bossen|2017}} citations point to the proper full cite, and removed the unnecessary <ref> tags. Appreciate the catch! Mcenedella (talk)(contribs) 21:14, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

No worries! I've updated the sfns as well – for a two-author source you need to list both of them for the template to work. {{sfn}} is a pain until you get used to it, and you might like to install this script which highlights any issues in a garish shade of purple – I find it indispensible.

Finally, I see that there is still one source missing, Turner 1997 (reference #89). If you know what source that is could you add it to the bibliography? Thanks, Wham2001 (talk) 10:38, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

Use of erotic image

@ Dronebogus (talk · contribs) Please note that per WP:Pornography, such images should be used if and only if their omission would cause the article to be less informative, relevant, or accurate. That image only illustrates a single sentence in the entire section, and that sentence is clear enough without the need of an image, it is therefore entirely unnecessary. Its presence distorts its significance to the subject and only serves to satisfy the prurience of some readers which distracts from the article as a discussion of a social practice. Hzh (talk) 11:29, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

@Hzh: It is not prurient, it shows how bound feet were considered so intimate they weren’t revealed even in a picture of a fully nude couple making love. While this is only one sentence, the original image is unrelated to any part of the section. It is not exceptionally explicit, nor does it include the subject purely incidentally. The omission does make the article less informative, because it turns it into a “take my word for it” situation. If you like, a compromise could be made where a link to the image could be provided instead of the image itself, but that feels uncomfortably close to censorship to me. Dronebogus (talk) 16:03, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

The image can't tell us much because you can't really see clearly whether the feet are bound without clicking on it to enlarge the image. It is useless on the page as it doesn't show at a glance anything apart from two naked people, so it is entirely for prurient purpose. It cannot confirm whether the statement is true or not because it is just one image, while the statement would apply to all erotic images because it says the bound feet were never depicted uncovered, and it's an impossibility to show all Qing erotic images for you to check. Wikipedia rely on sources to give reliable information, rather using images. The sentence effectively gives all the necessary information, while the image cannot. Hzh (talk) 16:45, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

The current image should be removed then, because it doesn’t illustrate the subject of the section either. Dronebogus (talk) 17:24, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Why? You want an image that illustrates beauty and allure, which is the subject of the section. Why do you put an image of two women in the 1960s (the young one with unbound feet) to illustrate the history section when footbinding was common practice among young women? Have the good sense to use appropriate illustration. Hzh (talk) 18:43, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

I moved the image of the two women in the 60s down to the “decline” section and removed multiple extraneous images, including the discussed one. They struck me as more decorative and only being used because there are a lot of available images and space for them. Dronebogus (talk) 21:21, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

You are just being ridiculous. What illustrates beauty and allure other than images that show them to be attractive? And you removed attractive images that illustrates beauty and allure because you think they are decorative? You don't seem to be a good judge of how image should be used by the way you stick random images into different sections. Hzh (talk) 22:13, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

I removed the image we were discussing because it doesn’t illustrate “beauty and allure”, which are abstract and subjective concepts, but a random image of a woman with a caption about beauty and allure. I removed another similarly arbitrary image of a woman from the section on the practice’s connection to Neo-Confucian values, since it didn’t relate to Confucianism. I moved some other images around— the aforementioned case of the image of two women (which is now in an appropriately relevant section about decline and shows how the practice faded with modernity), plus another of a normal foot vs. a bound foot to the section on medical effects since it illustrates the superficial difference between a healthy foot and one destroyed by food binding. There was another image I removed that was just another image of a woman with an irrelevant caption about aesthetics that it didn’t objectively illustrate in a section it wasn’t particularly relevant to. All my image changes were reasonable and improved the article. Dronebogus (talk) 22:22, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

So you actually don't know what beauty and allure are? But you know what decorative is? Yet you stuck a pornographic image in that section? Hzh (talk) 22:36, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

At this point you are just insulting me, acting like I’m too stupid to know what basic words mean. You may have had a point with your initial statement the erotic image might have been WP:GRATUITOUS (I don’t entirely agree but it’s a reasonable assertion) and now you’re just looking for reasons to be upset about minor changes. Dronebogus (talk) 22:40, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

If I get annoyed, it's because you removed an image after I explained why it needed to be kept, giving a spurious reason for its removal. What does it mean "beauty and allure" are abstract and subjective concepts therefore that image needed to be removed? Are you saying that "beauty and allure" can't be illustrated (you can delete all images illustrating beauty in other articles then), or are you saying that you are the sole arbiter of what can illustrate "beauty and allure" and images that don't fit your criteria needed to be removed (which is an arrogant position to take)? If you think they are subjective, then you should also accept that other people have a different opinions from you, and you would need to respect other people's opinion and not just remove any image that illustrates abstract and subjective concepts in any article. The image you removed from the History section illustrates what a attractive young woman with small feet in Qing costume normally looked like, which is perfectly acceptable in a section that mentions bound feet was a mark of beauty and that small feet were ideal. Hzh (talk) 09:56, 2 February 2026 (UTC)