Unraveling a brutal custom
Gasps echoed through the Radcliffe gymnasium on Wednesday as audience members reacted to the image of a woman’s, projected on a large screen at the front of the hall. It was a foot in name only. The misshapen mass looked more like a hoof bisected by a crack. The deformity was the result of foot binding, a common practice in much of China until the middle of the last century that involved wrapping the foot of a young girl or woman tightly with a cloth to stunt its growth, explained Laurel Bossen, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. That particular type of bound foot was called “the three-inch golden lotus,” said Bossen. “That’s the ideal. It gradually broke the girl’s arch … you can see that the arch is just a crevasse on that foot.” While at Harvard, Bossen and Melissa Brown, Radcliffe’s Frieda L....