ABSTRACT
China also, of course, had a well-developed gender system, based on Confucian beliefs and a profound sense of hierarchy. Buddhism had modified this system very slightly, as discussed in Chapter 3, but the later decline of Buddhism reduced even this modest adjustment. Chinese beliefs and practices emphasized the importance of women’s deference and domesticity. Of course, variety existed. Peasant women, co-operating actively in the family’s work, were not as differentiated from men as those in the upper classes (though it was the upper classes that foreign observers would most likely take as models). During the Tang and particularly Song dynasties, economic growth supported larger cities, and a category of urban women arose with entertainment functions for wealthy men; some of these talented women might attain considerable if informal power. On the other hand, developments during these same dynasties increased the restrictions on larger numbers of women. The practice of footbinding became a physical manifestation of the strict gender hierarchy. In this system, women’s feet were severely bound and bent in childhood, often breaking some of the small bones; the result was a small foot, held to be aesthetically pleasing, but also a halting walk that severely limited mobility. Footbinding spread slowly, but inexorably, into the nineteenth century. It started in upper-class families, where the urge to treat women as decorative objects could be most readily indulged. Then it spread in the cities and even to the countryside, at obvious cost to the effectiveness of women’s work. Here was a classic case of the tendency for gender inequalities to increase over time
within patriarchal societies, as a result of, indeed as a way to use, growing prosperity.
