Gender differences
...losed system, with little chance for vertical mobility upward on the social ladder. Foot-binding appeared to be a good custom because of the opportunity to marry into a wealthier family than one’s own. From a conflict theorist’s perspective, foot-binding increased the gap between the haves and have-nots by creating situations that were disadvantageous to the unwealthy families; the custom also widened the gender gap between men and women and the gap between the Han Chinese and Manchurian Chinese. The stratification of social inequality became obvious. As described above, the foot-binding custom permeated to even the poorest of the poor-the farming families. The wealthy families could afford to allow their daughters’ feet be bound but the farming families relied on their daughters’ assistance to work the fields. It was impractical to bind their daughters’ feet for work reasons but to not bind the feet meant their daughters would not be able to marry since prospective in-laws considered unbound feet to be dishonorable and unbefitting for marriage even to another farming family. The farmers were at a disadvantage any way already. Not having the help out in the fields meant not having as much income was better than being regarded as being disgraced by having a daughter’s feet unbound. Their only hope was that one day the daughter would marry into a family wealthier than their own and they would receive financial assistance from their son-in-law. During ancient Chinese times, better known as the patriarchal or “Confucian” period of the seventeenth century, foot-binding was equated with the supremacy of the Han Chinese civilization and had a significant effect culturally, politically, and morally on the tradition of properly covered bodies. In order to spread the Chinese culture and teach proper relations between men and women, scholars touted the practice of footbinding in writings as if it were normal. Proper attire (headdress, dress, and shoes) was the quintessential expression of civility, culture, and humanity; clothing differentiated the Chinese from their (inferior) neighbors while marking social and gender gaps. Not only did clothing distinguish humans from animals, the act of getting dressed was both cultural and political. Footbinding was an extension of having a sense of propriety and chastity, marking the separation between “us” and “them”; it was also the ultimate marker of civility, regardless of the Confucian norm against mutilation of the body. Interesting enough, this separation demonstrates the “in-group” and the “out-group”, two terms that would be later named by William Graham Sumner. With an in-group existing, there must be an out-group, people who do not feel they belong to a particular group. Foot-binding gave men a great advantage over women. As Loiselle states from Dworkin’s Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding, young girls soon realized the connection between beauty rituals and pain is not accidental: The pain, of course, teaches an important lesson: no price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation too painful for the woman who would be beautiful. “The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerance begins…in preadolescence in socialization, and serves to prepare women for lives of childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing.” Is there an ineffable connection between cultural status of beauty and pain? From a functionalist perspective, it would seem that the response is positive. Like women today who assist in clitoridectomies, infibulations, and other pain-inducing rituals in the name of cultural beauty standards and status, Chinese women are seen to have been complicit cultural gatekeepers. Mothers disclosed to their daughters that foot-binding was necessary in order to marry into a good family. A young girl growing up learned to appreciate the bound feet since she carried the family’s reputation in the bind of her feet, and that her family’s face, whether her own or the one into which she married, belonged to the male heads. Accordingly, a woman in her lifetime leaned on three men, her father, her husband, and her son. Footbinding is a bold and difficult topic for many Chinese people to speak publicly since it insinuates a backwards or barbaric streak in Chinese history. Men in particular find footbinding disconcerting because it suggests not only that they are capable of perceiving a gruesomely crippled foot as an object of seductive pleasure but that they are further capable of using their superior social position to coerce women to conform to a standard of beauty that is both deformed and grotesque. For women, footbinding is unsettling because it reveals a willingness to cripple their own daughters to meet an aesthetic and criterion of social behavior defined by men. Because foot-binding was perceived as an acceptable custom through the time, mothers shared their beliefs conc...