I don’t feel that it is my right to criticize the traditions and customs of other cultures, but I am certainly glad that foot binding in China was ended. The article below comes from a newspaper published in 1912.
End to Binding Feet
Wuchang, China, July 24. — Where moral suasion fails, Vice President Li Yuan Hung is the type of reformer who advocates resorting to force to get things accomplished.
Five times Vice President Li has pointed out by proclamation to his countrymen that there is not only no sense in binding girls’ feet but that it is harmful to do so. Thrice he has issued edicts informing them that they must stop it. Yet there are those who haven’t paid any attention to him.
So now the vice president has issued another proclamation providing a penalty for further disregard of his suggestion.
He has started with Hupeh province, thought the length and breadth of which the head of each family is required to notify the local authorities immediately of the number of women and girls in his household and to bring them before the nearest magistrate on a specified date to have their feet examined.
The magistrates are required to inflict punishment for every girl of 10 or under whose feet are bound, to see that the bindings are removed immediately from the feet of girls between 10 and 20 and to give women of 20 or more three months within which to remove their bindings.
The women will not be punished. It will be upon the head of the family in each case that the punishment will fall.
The penalty, to be sure, is a fine of from only $2 to $5 “Mex.” or from $1 to $2.50 in United States money, but it must be remembered that $1 in United States money represents the average Chinese workingman’s income for fully ten days, so the fine is not, after all, such a trifling sum.
“Two hundred million people, or one half of our whole population are women,” says the proclamation, “and from the day of their birth they have been the subjects of repression and coercion, but in this reform era, with autocracy being done away with and the abuses of thousands of years being rectified, their rights and liberties must be restored to them.
“If we are to be a strong country our people must be physically strong, and if the women are enfeebled by the pernicious practice of foot binding this is impossible. It is therefore necessary to forbid it.”
The vice presidency of China is not a merely ornamental position, like the vice presidency of the United States. To all intents and purposes, Li Yuan Hung is not vice president, but president of the southern provinces, which President Yuan Shi Kai is too far away from to have much to say about very frequently until after Vice President Li has had his own way with them.
The vice president even takes it on himself to do considerable advising concerning the northern administration. This is not because President Yuan wants his advice. Vice President Li gives it without waiting to be invited.
[Source: The Day Book (Chicago, Illinois newspaper). July 24, 1912.]
