Barbarian, Modern, Feminine

One of my favorite things about teaching history is trying to dispel the universal belief that our generation represents the apex of human development. In our World Civilization course we acknowledge how we have benefitted from discoveries made by our ancestors. We also try to uncover mentalities and problems that transcend time and culture, that are universal to the human condition.

This subject came up last week when we were discussing the Tang and Song dynasties in China. Increasing trade and wealth threatened traditional Confucian social structures, which provoked a reaction among the patriarchal order. This is the era when the practice of foot-binding became popular. Aristocratic mothers would bind the feet of their daughters, folding up the toes in the shape of a lotus. As the foot grew, the bones in the feet would actually break as they expanded. This permanently crippled the young woman.

The Chinese did this for two reasons. First, Chinese men found tiny feet very attractive. Second, if women were crippled they were not able to go out on their own. It was an sure way to make sure a woman stayed in her place - the home. Foot-binding was eradicated in China during the early twentieth century, largely due to the influence of western missionaries. Noting the reaction of shock among some of the students, I asked them if the Christians were right to eliminate foot-binding, or if this was simply another example of imperialist arrogance in altering indigenous culture to make the world more European.

At Wisconsin this would not be a provocative question. Those students are so laden with 'white guilt' that the minorities are the heroes of every narrative. Imperialist are always Caucasian males, always in a dominant position, and therefore always wrong. But at BYUH, where most of the student have yet to be indoctrinated by post-modernism and post-colonialism, there are still lots of students who still believe that western civilzation has some redeeming qualities.

Inevitably, a female student raised her hand to say that, of course the elimination of foot-binding was a positive thing. It was a male-inspired practice that crippled women solely for aesthetic purposes. Our culture may not be superior, but at least we treat women with a greater degree of equality and don't force them to suffer in order to conform to some male-inspired ideal of beauty.

This, of course, is exactly what I had hoped someone would say...

I then ask students if they are familiar with the term 'corset'. At the same time Chinese women were breaking their own feet, European and American women were cinching themselves into a painful contraption designed to narrow their waists and create the hour glass figure men found so attractive. Corsets caused physical discomfort by constricting a woman's diaphragm and making it much more difficult to inhale and exhale. There's a reason why Jane Austen characters are always fainting at an emotionally traumatic development - they can't breathe.

Even worse, scientists have determined that the tightness of a corset impeded the natural growth of a women's spinal cord. Many aristocratic women developed back problems and even scoliosis from wearing such tight-fitting apparatus. All in the pursuit of beauty.

Thankfully, corsets are no longer the style and the modern woman has been sufficiently liberated by the feminist movement that she no longer submits herself to such painful or dehabillitating procedures in order to appear attractive. Except perhaps to wear high heels, or inject collagen into her lips, or insert large sacs of saline into her body in order to...enhance...certain feminine features. I then show them slides of the evolution of the ideal female body type - from the cherub-like physique of Titian's Renaissance nudes, to the voluptuous femininity of Jane Russell during the Depression, to the stick figure Kate Moss ideal of the nineties, to the mandatory rock-hard physique of today.

The point of the discussion (I hope) is not to degrade women, but simply to point out that our culture is not so very different from the Medieval Chinese. Both societies conceive of ideal notions of beauty, and require women to engage in all sorts of bizarre rituals in order to achieve it. All of our advanced technology has not prevented us from acting out some of the same primitive behavior as our ancestors.

It is generally a very postive discussion, and a gratifying experience to watch students try to re-position themselves as their pre-conceived notions of superiority towards other cultures or eras gradually erode. For students it can be very disorienting to realize that our own ideals of beauty are not universal, and that instead of reflecting our own individual choices, these decisions are often made for us by the subtle marketing of clothing, makeup, and sporting goods manufacturers. They come away feeling a little perplexed and disoriented, and begin wondering what other assumptions they should begin questioning.

I know they feel this way because that's exactly how I felt many years ago, when my World Civ professor did this to me.