Foot binding was an old Chinese custom in which young girls' feet were tightly bound to restrict and alter their growth. Although it was banned nearly a century ago by the Chinese government and is now seen as barbaric, the practice took years to die out, and a few of its victims -- most far older than 70 -- can still be found today.
Foot binding is thought to have originated in imperial China in the 10th or 11th century, probably as a fashionable practice among wealthy women. Although its first adherents used it as a status symbol to indicate their high social rank, foot binding gradually spread throughout the culture. By the 12th century, even the poorest families practiced it.
When a girl was about three years of age, most of her toes would be fractured and her feet bound tightly with linen strips to impede their growth. The ideal was to create a 3-inch "lotus foot" by limiting growth to just a few inches. The binding forced a girl's toes down toward the soles of her feet to form a concave shape.
The practice became so pervasive that a woman whose feet had not been bound would have difficulty finding a husband; most families worried they would not be able to find husbands if they had normal-size feet so they tried to demand a woman with tiny feet when selecting a wife for their son.
Even after foot binding was banned by the Chinese government in the early 20th century, the practice continued in secret for years, especially in rural areas where enforcement was difficult. Chinese families that immigrated to other countries, including the United States, frequently brought the tradition with them, but it was later outlawed in other nations. All in all, even though foot binding is no longer practiced today, its effects can still be seen in China.
In the 1997 UCSF study, researchers, who examined a randomly selected sample of women ages 70 and older in Beijing, found that the misshapen feet hindered their abilities to work in the fields and made them less able to support their families.