Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet

In Every Step a Lotus, Dorothy Ko embarks on a fascinating exploration of the practice of footbinding in China, explaining its origins, purpose, and spread before the nineteenth century. She uses women's own voices to reconstruct the inner chambers of a Chinese house where women with bound feet lived and worked. Focusing on the material aspects of footbinding and shoemaking—the tools needed, the procedures, the wealth of symbolism in the shoes, and the amazing regional variations in style—s...