Depending on whom you ask, foot-binding was everything from a bizarre cultural fetish that placed male ideas of beauty ahead of women's health and well-being to a brutal tradition intended to keep ...

Was one of the cruelest ways of making women conform to crazy beauty standards about attractiveness for the marriage market, or was its endurance actually due to economic reasons? A series of recent ...

For the past year I have been working with Britain’s BBC television to make a documentary series on the history of women. In the latest round of filming there was an incident that haunts me. It took ...

A woman with three-inch bound feet. The Chinese practice of binding feet started in the 7th century, and was thought to occur to cater to men's sexual tastes. The practice stopped in the early 20th ...

For almost 1,000 years, women in China were forced to bind their feet in order to represent their status and to make themselves more attractive. The practice was outlawed in 1912. The Good Earth by ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

More than 1,000 years ago in dynastic China, many young girls had their toes tightly bound in gauze strips to create the illusion of dainty feet. The oldest preserved example of their petite footwear, ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Exaptation is a familiar concept to evolutionary biologists. It's the basic idea explaining that a trait can evolve because it starts serving a different function. Think of birds: at ...

I just got finished reading an awesome book called: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Have any of you read it? It's a beautiful tale set in ancient China of two little girls who become best friends ...

We should all be thankful the process of foot binding is finally over. But what is foot binding, exactly? Well, imagine bending (and occasionally, breaking) your feet to grotesque angles from the age ...