My
great-grandmother, who recently passed away at the age of 96, escaped the
torture that is
footbinding because she came from a fairly
Westernized and
rich industrial
family, who didn't need their
daughters to marry
rich to advance up the
social ladder. Her
father didn't want my
great-grandmother to suffer the fate of his
wife, who was chosen for him (it was made by a
matchmaker).
The old lady used to tell me stories of how her mother would bite her lip at night to stifle her screams of pain as she removed the "wrappings", which were really bandages. The arch of the foot was completely destroyed, bent upwards, so that the toes pointed down instead of forward. The procedure was performed on her at the age of 2, she remembered every detail before fainting from the pain.
Sometimes, after walking too much (about a mile), my poor ancestral mother would pass out, and had to be carried home by her husband, who cried for her, because he loved her, despite the fact that it was an arranged marriage. Later in life, he sent her to America in an attempt to fix her feet, which were by then a mass of broken bones and swollen flesh. After several surgeries, her feet was nearly straightened out, but it was still grotesquely misshappen. A large number of bone fragments had to be physically removed, but at least she could now walk without passing out from the pain. She had to soak her feet in strong disinfectant every day. Ouch.
The atrocity of footbinding was abolished completely by the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, which had strict rules on the equality of women. Hence explained the large number of women sympathetic to their cause, many of their guerilla fighters were women.