黑料网

For almost one thousand years, 90 per cent of Chinese women had their feet bound to achieve an artificial smallness that corresponded to an ideal of beauty, but restricted movement and caused immense pain and suffering. The eradication of this practice in the early twentieth century was a huge achievement and stands as a symbol of both female emancipation and the end of the old imperial order with the fall of the last dynasty in 1911. But it was but one among many changes in the status of Chinese women, which fluctuated with the political movements of the period. This lecture will trace these changes, from the decline in footbinding, through the social developments in early twentieth-century cities like Shanghai, to the implementation of the 1950 Marriage Law passed in the young People’s Republic.