A woman with three-inch bound feet. The Chinese practice of binding feet started in the 7th century, and was thought to occur to cater to men's sexual tastes. The practice stopped in the early 20th ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

For the past year I have been working with Britain’s BBC television to make a documentary series on the history of women. In the latest round of filming there was an incident that haunts me. It took ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. CHICAGO — For centuries, small feet were ...

It was an excruciatingly painful practice that maimed the feet of millions of Chinese girls and women for centuries: foot-binding. Tiny “golden lotus” feet – achieved through breaking girls’ toes and ...

For around ten centuries, successive generations of Chinese women endured a practice when, as children, their feet were systematically broken and shaped in such a way that they resembled hooves. The ...

Foot-binding was practiced for about 1,000 years in China. The memory of this practice is preserved in historical documents, shoes found in graves of the elite and the testimonies of a dwindling ...