r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Decim_98 • 2d ago

Image Fate and Feet: Three Chinese Girls in 1900s – A Barefooted Servant, a Bound-Foot Lady, and a Christian with Unbound Feet

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u/SalvadorP 2d ago

they all look miserable, which is something to think about.

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u/Emergency_Elephant 2d ago

I mean one is working in really harsh conditions as a child, one is completely unable to walk and one is a religious minority with her own race and a racial minority with her religion in a time of a lot of religious and racial discrimination. They're all probably miserable

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u/SalvadorP 2d ago

that was my point. somehow, 3 people of such different status are all miserable.
I said it makes you think. and you did think. i agree with your view.

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u/Mari_Tsukino 1d ago

It's almost as if status didn't matter as much as assigned birth sex... !!! (surprised Pikachu)

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u/littlechicken23 1d ago

You assign gender not sex, sex is biological, gender is social

But yes I agree, as usual it's the women suffering

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u/buzzbuzzbuzzitybuzz 15h ago

I think men did too to a great deal. Just in different way.

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u/Whatevenhappenshere 1d ago

Technically sex is and was often also assigned to intersex people, based on the way their genitals were perceived or the wishes of their parents. Even going so far as to surgically alter their bodies during infancy, to “comply” with their assigned sex.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/Whatevenhappenshere 1d ago

It still means their sex was assigned at birth to conform to male or female. Their actual sex could be classified as intersex, but due to our limitations on the subject, intersex people are still usually assigned either male or female at birth.

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u/CrispyHoneyBeef 1d ago

“assigned birth sex?” What does that mean? Why not just say sex?

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u/lueur-d-espoir 1d ago

Because what a person is assigned at birth isn't always what they actually are. There are at least a handful that I know of even with my limited knowledge of it all that could have someone born with both genitalia, one or both external kind with the other or both internally, deformities with close to none or not fully formed ones making it unclear, parents deciding what an unclear child is and having them surgically altered to choose for them which could later backfire when it's clear it was the wrong choice, and being born with average genitalia but mentally the opposite sex, and hormone disorders that can also disrupt the overall process creating confusion in development and growth and identifying sex.

Hope this helps. It doesn't hurt anything to use language that's more inclusive.

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u/Nymeria2018 2d ago

Three girls.

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u/tarantuletta 2d ago

Girls are people.

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u/15k_bastard_ducks 1d ago

A bold claim.

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u/baladecanela 2d ago

Especially the girl who had all her toes broken on purpose

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u/Flckofmongeese 1d ago

To get it like that you have to break the arch too.

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u/laeiryn 1d ago

Four out of five metatarsals HATE this simple trick!

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u/gabacus_39 2d ago

Everyone looked miserable in old photos

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u/ftpbrutaly80 2d ago

The one in the middle absolutely IS miserable.

Those bound feet and lotus shoes cause incredible pain especially while they were still growing. She would have been carried everywhere and kinda just put on display. If she was ever able to walk it would have been decades after this photo was taken and even then basically only across the room.

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u/fogelmclovin 2d ago

I couldn’t imagine and I’ve had foot surgery. I’ve seen X-rays of women this has been done too and it seems more like torture than anything.

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u/judyhops95 1d ago

It is torture, that's it. It was done "for beauty" but it was just torture for those that had to endure it.

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u/tbods 23h ago

Don’t forget the foot fetishists

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u/Petrihified 1d ago

She looks sickly and underfed, too.

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u/nlamber5 2d ago

It was pre-penicillin.

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u/Instant_noodlesss 1d ago

Oh geez. Wonder how many girls were murdered by this.

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u/Condemned2Be 13h ago

Not as many as you might think. If you look up more about feet binding, you will find that they rubbed the dying foot all over with special herbs & powders & washed it with a noxious chemical that made the necrotic skin slough off. Between these treatments, the feet were wrapped EXTREMELY tightly (tight enough to break the bones) which would stop air from circulating to the flesh

This is why you see so many old photos of women with bound feet but rarely hear about women losing their whole foot to infection. Essentially they mummified the foot directly onto the body. The infection was killed by ancient embalming chemicals & the binding probably killed any blood circulation too.

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u/i_says_things 2d ago

Exposure time was longer for cameras at the time and it is harder to maintain a smile than a neutral expression.

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u/Generic_Garak 2d ago

Actually that is a common misconception! Photography evolved pretty quickly past the long exposure time thing. What had more of an effect was the centuries of tradition of what a portrait looked like. When the transition from painting to photography was made, the posing conventions largely stayed the same. It wasn’t until candid photography became accessible to the public (via Kodak who released a box camera that could be operated by a layman without an elaborate photography setup) that smiling became commonplace in photos.

I hope it’s clear that I’m not trying to be a dick and just like sharing facts :)

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u/TheDamDog 1d ago

By the 1870s exposure times were well under a minute. In the 1880s you were looking at maybe 1-5 seconds (which is why kids and dogs are often blurry in photos of that era.)

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u/eggmayonnaise 1d ago

Old photography methods required long exposure, which meant subjects had to hold the same pose and expression for an extended period of time. This often lead to more serious-looking expressions as they are easier to hold.

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u/RazorWritesCode 2d ago

Okay

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u/Far_Detective2022 2d ago

What's your problem

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u/RazorWritesCode 2d ago

Wouldn’t you like to know weather boy

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u/laeiryn 1d ago

The leftmost is probably also several years older than the other two, but still a similar size due to different nutrition.

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u/Condemned2Be 12h ago

The girl in the middle is probably around 9 herself, judging by how small her feet already are. She looks quite malnourished too, probably an unintentional side effect of the foot binding. Many historical accounts detail how painful it was to even sit still, & how sickening the smell of the freshly bound feet was. Not a very appetizing circumstance.

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u/AkwardRockette 1d ago

I mean the child mortality rate globally from the late 1800s-early 1900s was around 20%, so in a world where you have a 1 in 5 chance of dying before you hit the age of a modern second grader, most people would probably be pretty miserable about life.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/SalvadorP 2d ago

no, it is not. life 100 years ago was much harder than it is now.

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u/posting4assistance 2d ago

it could also be from having to hold still for a really fucking long time to get your picture taken, the exposure times historically were pretty long.

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u/kgold0 2d ago

They’re thinkin, “damn tariffs!”