Saturday Reads

Speaking of the shitty treatment of women and girls, just what were the longterm medical consequences of the footbinding of women in China?

Fascinating as anything:

Soon after, another woman came in with a crutch and an odd kind of shoe. When Cummings asked about the woman’s feet, his colleagues—many of them female doctors in their late 50s—told him that they had been bound. “I assumed it was fairly rare,” he said.

Then more women with bound feet started coming in. What Cummings realized—the reason he hadn’t seen these women elsewhere in China—was that for the most part they physically couldn’t go out. The women he met spent much of their life in or very close to their home, their disability preventing them from venturing farther out. He was seeing them in the lab only because transportation to the hospital was provided.

The women he’d met with bound feet, Cummings eventually wrote in a report on the cohort, were much more likely to have fallen in the previous year than women without, had lower bone density in their hips and lower spines, and had greater trouble getting up from a chair without assistance. Although the consequences for millions of Chinese women living with what he calls a “forced disability” were profound, Cummings’s study was initially turned down by journals like The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine. Both told him that because foot-binding was essentially extinct, it wasn’t a current medical problem. He finally sent his report to the American Journal of Public Health in 1996 with a note to explain that although foot-binding is no longer practiced, “the study has enormous implications for how we treat women.”

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Of course, this is a stunt designed to make a point about abortion.
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