title: Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding
author:  Dorothy Ko 
description: "Slender, small, pointy, arched, fragrant, soft and straight." This mantra, allegedly muttered in the early 20th century by a male professor amongst friends, is said to summarize the mystery of bound feet. Meanwhile, sexual fetishism, oppression and godless contrivance are said to characterize the reality. Ko distrusts both, however, in this dense and impressive social history, best read as an expanded sibling to her previous work, Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet. Readers are reminded that footbinding was "central to the mechanisms of Chinese society and gender relations" for roughly 1,000 years, and none of those years are adequately explained by "envy, cruelty, violence, objectification" and other accusations against the Chinese male. As a professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University, Ko frets her contemporaries "are accustomed to viewing footbinding only from an anti-footbinding perspective." So she avoids those goggles, and reaches instead for the female perspective. Working backwards through time and drawing on women's diaries, poetry and material artifacts, she writes a complex history that respects the energy and self-esteem Chinese women invested in what, to outsiders, seems a senseless deformation. To be sure, Ko does not defend footbinding, nor does she make a case for cultural relativism; her concern is only to "understand the powerful forces that made binding feet a conventional practice. " By her own account, she fails ("the history of footbinding does not add up"). But aside from some fibrous jargon ("multiple tonalities," "episteme of the functionalist body," "ontological status"), Ko's peerless work will be relished by scholars and enjoyed by layreaders interested in Chinese history.<BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  A MODERN CINDERELLA: OR, THE LITTLE OLD SHOE
  
  
    
    
  [HOW IT WAS LOST  
    
  ](A%20MODERN%20CINDERELLA_%20OR%2c%20THE%20LI_split_001.html#filepos1529)[HOW
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  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com
  
  
  # A MODERN CINDERELLA: OR, THE LITTLE OLD SHOE
  
  
  ### Louisa May Alcott
  
  
  
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com  
    
  
  * HOW IT WAS LOST
  
  
  * HOW IT WAS FOUND 
  
  
  
  
  
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  ### HOW IT WAS LOST
  
  
  Among green New England hills stood an ancient house, many-gabled,
  
  
  mossy-roofed, and quaintly built, but picturesque and pleasant to the
  
  
  eye; for a brook ran babbling through the orchard that encompassed it
  
  
  about, a garden-plot stretched upward to the whispering birches on the
  
  
  slope, and patriarchal elms stood sentinel upon the lawn, as they had
  
  
  stood almost a century ago, when the Revolution rolled that way and
  
  
  found them young.
  
  
  
  
  
  One summer morning, when th