WI: No footbinding

So footbinding is pretty weird. It's solely Chinese (particularly North Chinese), with the Japanese, the Vietnamese or the Koreans never practicing it. It would seem to be against major passages in the Canon of Filial Piety (among others), and yet this strange practice thrived in a Neo-Confucian China.

So what if there was no footbinding? This is probably a positive for the Chinese economy as well as the billions of five-year-olds. What would be changed?
 
So footbinding is pretty weird. It's solely Chinese (particularly North Chinese), with the Japanese, the Vietnamese or the Koreans never practicing it. It would seem to be against major passages in the Canon of Filial Piety (among others), and yet this strange practice thrived in a Neo-Confucian China.

So what if there was no footbinding? This is probably a positive for the Chinese economy as well as the billions of five-year-olds. What would be changed?

What would change? It's such a small change, and yet, it is fairly widespread. It seems initially that it was an upper class thing, but during the 19th Century, lower class women used it to marry upwards. So, I wouldn't expect much to change until the practice became common for lower class women. At that point, there's more women able to work the fields or manufactories.
 
So footbinding is pretty weird. It's solely Chinese (particularly North Chinese), with the Japanese, the Vietnamese or the Koreans never practicing it. It would seem to be against major passages in the Canon of Filial Piety (among others), and yet this strange practice thrived in a Neo-Confucian China.

So what if there was no footbinding? This is probably a positive for the Chinese economy as well as the billions of five-year-olds. What would be changed?

Civilisations make up weird shit when they have too much time on their hands, I guess.
 
What would change? It's such a small change, and yet, it is fairly widespread. It seems initially that it was an upper class thing, but during the 19th Century, lower class women used it to marry upwards. So, I wouldn't expect much to change until the practice became common for lower class women. At that point, there's more women able to work the fields or manufactories.
Large numbers of lower-classes women binding foot was significantly earlier than the 19th century, actually, and further back into the Ming/Qing era.
 
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