"Footbinding as Fashion demonstrates convincingly that local social status hierarchies and the desire for respectability were the key influences on the spread or curbing of footbinding."
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Louise Edwards, author of Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China
"Shepherd argues that footbinding was merely a fashion, but one closely linked to marriageability, and thus important to status competition."
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William Lavely, University of Washington
"This book is a bravura performance: scientific anthropology, historical anthropology and sinology combined to deal with Chinese footbinding through ethnographic analysis, a skillful disaggregation of data sets, and an orientation towards theory guided by a critical (and convincingly dismissive) examination of pre-existing hypotheses regarding footbinding and the factors supporting it in late imperial China. By isolating footbinding as 'fashion,' Shepherd succeeds in a revisionist interpretation of this crippling practice, one offering a far better understanding of its very mixed acceptance by the Han Chinese."
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Myron L. Cohen, professor of anthropology, Columbia University
"John Shepherd confronts the hypothesis that the Qing conquest government attempted to proscribe footbinding in China soon after it captured Beijing in 1644, and that these policies produced a reaction among Chinese elites that made footbinding as a marker of Chinese identity in the conquest state, eventually accruing even more ideological significance in relation to subordination of women and anxieties over economic competition. Shepherd re-examines the evidence for the Qing period and adds a deep case study of turn-of-the-century Taiwan to suggest that that these hypotheses are too grand. Instead, he reinstates contemporary commentary both Chinese and foreign, and clarifies past explanations by anthropologists and sociologists, to argue that the meaning of footbinding was not identity, or the entanglements of male eroticism, or economic anxieties, but mundane concerns of beauty in the eyes of self and of the beholder, shaped by the enduring thrall of conformity."
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Pamela Kyle Crossley, author of A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology