This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort, journey through the heart of Europe, on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining and cultural enrichment on board and on shore, and every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover more at Viking.com This episode contains discussions of what is modernly considered in Western countries as child abuse and the oppression of women. We will also get into detail on the process of binding a foot after the ad break, which may be too graphic for some listeners. If this isn't something you want to hear about, this may be a good episode to skip.
Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so, the mysterious and unsolved. Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity, and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages. I am one of those people. My name is Halle, and this is the morbid curiosity podcast.
As Queen Bay says, pretty hurts. This simple statement speaks volumes today, but even more so for the past. Humans, women especially, have gone to great lengths to meet societal beauty standards since before the ancient Egyptians painted their eyes with coal, a black substance traditionally made from galena, a lead ore, which is thought by some to have caused lead poisoning. European women of the 16th to 19th century wore tight-laced corsets to achieve a variety of body shapes.
If not broken in properly, corsets can cause pain, fainting, and internal injury. In Victorian England and post-Civil War America, women ingested arsenic, a known poison, to appear pale and fragile. They used eye drops made from the toxic plant belladonna to dilate their eyes. Even today, many women wear high heels to appear taller and thinner, even though heels take their toll on the joints of the spine, knees, and feet, not to mention blisters, ripped toenails, shortened calf muscles, and fall injuries that can occur.
And there are myriod hazards when it comes to plastic surgery and injectables. Some other things done in the name of beauty are more extreme than others, and one practice that caused a lot of shock, disgust, and outcry from western explorers and colonizers in the 19th century was the Imperial Chinese practice of footbinding, in which the feet of women were read tightly in cloth bindings in order to deform them so that they appeared smaller. While footbinding is unique to females of Imperial China, it should be remembered that the practice of enduring violence, pain, and mutilation in the name of beauty can be found in almost every culture and civilization. Most of the information written about footbinding comes from Western colonial fascination with what were deemed at the time as uncivilized people with violent and oppressive traditions.
Much of the modern scholarly work also uses these reports to draw conclusions. I was able to find several sources that evaluated the archaeology and interviewed women who had participated in footbinding before it was banned in order to get a better idea of what the Imperial Chinese people felt about footbinding. However, these accounts and studies were few and far between. Because most of the information about footbinding that I had access to was in English and was written mostly by Western anthropologists and anti-footbinding societies of the 19th and 20th century, these materials are laced with cultural bias.
Cultural bias is the interpretation and judgment of another culture by standards inherent in one's own culture. Cultural bias occurs when people of one culture make assumptions about another culture's conventions, including the conventions of language, notation, proof, and evidence. These assumptions are often mistaken for the laws of logic or nature of that culture as a whole. Most of the time, this bias is unintended by the observer because one can't help but interpret new and unfamiliar things using a lens composed of familiar things.
Other times, the observer leans on the difference of the other culture in order to promote their own. Modern anthropologists have taken steps to limit cultural bias in their work, but it is close to impossible to fully understand a culture that you weren't brought up in. So keep that in mind throughout this episode. I wanted to mention this before going into detail on footbinding because I feel it's important to acknowledge one's own society's biases.
Knowing that flaws exist is the first step in fixing them. I'm not trying to generalize or judge. I'm presenting the information I found in my research for this episode. If you have any issues, please feel free to email me using the contact button on our website.
I'd also like to apologize in advance for my pronunciation of the Chinese language. I did research how to pronounce the words in this episode, but I'm sure I won't get them quite right. Footbinding is the act of using tight cloth bindings to change the shape of the foot. These wraps are pulled tightly enough to deform the bones of the foot into a new shape.
In China, from around the 10th century CE to the mid-1900s, this was done by women in order to make their feet appear very small. This type of foot shape was called the Golden Lotus. In general, bound feet were referred to as lotus feet, and they were a beauty ideal that began with the upper class and slowly spread to all imperial Chinese women. Why women routinely caused themselves pain and agony by deforming their feet is quite complicated.
While on the surface, it seems just like a harsh beauty trend. There were many other reasons why this tradition began and then carried on for so many years. To us, it seems like body mutilation inflicted on women. However, in truth, we really don't know why women did it or how they felt about it.
The archives don't specify, and our modern certainties are very likely dead wrong, as Chinese people of the past thrived on very different values and body conceptions in our own. We don't know what prompted women to bind their feet this way. The beginnings of a cultural phenomenon are complex, and it's often hard to determine their origins to a single time and place. This is true for foot binding.
Code a type of shoe, say a small slipper with pointy toes, has started the trend, or perhaps a human preference for smaller feet. We will likely never know, as there will never be one definitive piece of evidence to say why the practice began, and no one has recorded anything concrete in any language, at least that's been discovered so far. The Golden Lotus is thought to have originally been an apparatus, or sort of stage made of gilded gold in the shape of a lotus pedal on which dancers walked and danced. The use of such an apparatus is said to have begun with the emperor of Northern Jill, Xiao Bao Yuan, who reigned from 498 to 501 CE.
He supposedly had his consort walk on top of golden lotus blossoms to give the effect of causing them to bloom with each step. This invention seems to have been inspired by an Indian tale of a deer woman. The woman was hauntingly beautiful and had the hooves of a deer. When she walked, she left the impression of lotus flowers on the ground.
In the 10th century, the device was used by another emperor, Li Yul of Southern China, but he also advised his court dancers to bind their feet in order to represent the allure of the deer girl's hooves. The legend goes that the first foot binder was a dancer named Yang Yang. Her bound feet entranced the emperor, especially when she danced on her toes inside a six foot golden lotus decorated with ribbons and precious stones. Gradually, the other court ladies took up foot binding, making it a status symbol among the elite.
In Imperial Chinese art, from this time period and earlier, images of goddesses, female immortals, and girls with special talents all show faces in great detail, but the lower body, especially the feet, are always veiled in clouds or fabric. It's possible this concealment of the feet was a mark of femininity. In addition to altering the shape of the foot, foot binding also produced a particular shuffling gate that relied on the thigh and buttock muscles for support. This gate was much desired, suggesting that foot binding was also imbued with erotic overtones, as well as being a status symbol.
We'll talk more about this later. Another factor in the development of foot binding is likely the growth of a so-called Cinderella complex that went from the 9th to the 13th centuries in China. The basic elements of the story of Cinderella can be found all throughout the world, but one of its earliest appearances is in a 9th century collection of Chinese stories, specifically a collection from the Tang Dynasty, which ranged from 618 to 907 CE. The size of the shoe is key to finding Cinderella, and none but her dainty feet would fit.
This story may have inspired the trend of trying to emulate her small feet through binding. Archaeology can also assist in determining the origin and evolution of foot binding. In 1975, a tomb from the mid-13th century, which is when the Sun Dynasty was in power, was unearthed near the city of Fuzhou in the Fujian province of southern China. It belonged to Huang Sheng, the wife of an imperial official.
She was found in her coffin, with strips of gauzy cloth wrapped around her feet inside of tiny cloth shoes. There were five other pairs of tiny shoes packed away in a pouch among her other clothes, as part of her belongings to take to the underworld. There were many other mundane things inside the pouch, including socks, so it's likely the issues were meant to be worn and were not ceremonial. The size of the shoes ranged from 13.3 to 14 centimeters in length, and 4.5 to 5 centimeters in width.
That's five and a quarter to five and a half inches in length, and one and three quarter to two inches wide. This size is quite close to the size that was most popular when foot binding itself was most widespread near the end of the 19th century. Because of this discovery, archaeologists can safely estimate that by the early 13th century, high-ranking families were practicing a foot binding, at least in the southern coastal cities of China. We can also say that these shoes were of a very different construction at the later models, as they were made of mostly soft cloth with upturned toes, instead of the wooden-sold, high-heeled shoes with down-pointed toes seen in the 18th and 19th century.
What we don't know is if Huang Sheng was one of the first to bind their feet, or if this was already a tradition by this point. Scattered evidence from other 13th century tombs seemed to match Lady Huang's shoes, which suggests they were a normal item for a high-ranking woman to have at the time. Not long after the discovery of Lady Huang's tomb, another pair of shoes were discovered in a similar tomb, in Zhejiang Province, China, around 300 kilometers or 186 miles from Fuzhou, but these were made of silver plate. This tomb was that of the scholar, Sheng Tzu, who died in 1274, and his second wife.
The shoes, however, were a memental from Shew's first wife, who died in 1240. These were more likely a funerary item, made especially for burial, but they were the same size as Lady Huang's, and also had upturned toes. Another tomb in the neighboring province of Zhejiang, archaeologists found seven pairs of shoes belonging to an upper-class woman named Madam Zhou, who died in 1274, a little later than the other two women. Her shoes also included an upturned toe, but it's not as dramatic as the other two.
Her shoes were also longer and wider, around 18 to 22 centimeters or 7 to 8 and 5-8 inches long, and 5 to 6 centimeters or 2 to 2 and 3-5 inches wide. On her body, her toes were also pointed upward, conforming to the shape of her shoes. These southern elite women bound their feet in the 13th century, but aimed for a very different shape than later centuries. We still don't know why they did so.
The first European to mention foot-binding was a Franciscan friar named Odoric of Portanon, who visited China in the 1320s. He wrote that rich Chinese men had houses full of women who waited on them constantly, and that a great mark of beauty among the women was their tiny feet. He wrote that to achieve this, mothers would, quote, swallow their feet tightly so that they can never grow in the least, unquote. However, he never mentioned seeing their feet himself, so it's possible he heard this from a guide or interpreter.
He also said women begin this practice at birth, which is wrong. We'll get into the process more after the break. In the mid-1600s, mention of foot-binding began to show up in the Imperial Chinese archives. This is likely due because the new dynasty, the Qing dynasty, was one that took over the previous ruling culture, the Han, and tried to have foot-binding band, along with many other forms of Han Chinese attire in 1636.
We'll get into the dynamics of this takeover later. The ban on foot-binding must not have worked though, as it was reiterated in 1638, stating that all who wore Han's styles, including bound feet, would be punished. The Qing dynasty band foot-binding again in 1664, but that ban was rescinded in 1667. This shows both that foot-binding was seen as a form of attire, and that the Han Chinese refused to give it up.
We'll talk more about why that might be after the break. From the 16th to 18th centuries, Europeans began to explore China and write about Chinese culture. They gave detailed descriptions of the practice of female seclusion, finance in marriage arrangements, and female physical attributes, such as how they made up their faces and foot-binding. These observations are more detailed than those written by the people of China, as Chinese authors took such everyday things for granted, but Europeans found them noteworthy, as they were so different from their own cultures.
By the 19th century, western visitors, including many who had settled in China, made more observations on a wider range of women's topics, such as their opportunities for education, child rearing practices, sexual segregation, in everyday activities such as eating meals, and the type of work they performed. It was during this century, when domestic and foreign assaults brought imperial China to its knees, that foot-binding lost its value, and became superfluous. Soon after, with the rise of communism in China, foot-binding began to be looked on with scorn. Those with bound feet were limited in the work they could do, and what had once been a status symbol became a mark of uselessness.
Historically, women had worked in the creation of textiles, so they produced fabric and clothing, which was useful and productive, but also did not require them to be on their feet much. With the communist era, as well as industrialization, production methods changed, and both men and women were shifted to more physical labor, such as farming, which is not easy when your feet are bound. Also, the wealth accumulated over generations was removed, therefore, foot-binding as a way of marrying up was no longer an option. Still, many mothers wished for their sons to marry women with small feet.
When foot-binding was banned in 1912, many women continued in secret. It was such a pervasive problem for the communist government that foot inspectors used to travel the country to inspect the feet of village women. Many women avoided punishment by putting their tiny feet into larger shoes to fool the inspectors. So why did imperial Chinese women fight to keep on binding their feet even after the practice was banned, and its place as a status symbol was removed?
How did they get their feet to be so small? We'll discuss the answers to these questions after a word from our sponsors. Our regular sponsor is audible.com. Audible can provide you with interesting and engaging audiobooks.
In fact, there are over 180,000 of them to choose from, which you can listen to on your iPhone, Android, Kindle, or other MP3 players. MCP listeners can get a free audiobook download and a 30-day free trial of audible.com by going to www.audiblechild.com slash MCP. You can also find this link on our Facebook page and website. If you sign up for the free trial, you get a free audiobook that is yours to keep, even if you cancel the service as soon as you finish downloading it.
And the MCP gets the funding it needs to keep bringing morbid history to your ears. So go get your free audiobook on us. Lastly, if you like this podcast, why not sponsor the MCP yourself by becoming a patron on Patreon? Over 45,000 people download this podcast every month, but only around 140 people are supporting us on Patreon.
For a mere dollar in episode that's $2 a month, you can get ad-free episodes, bonus behind-the-scenes info, give your opinion by answering polls, have access to all the horror story readings, and get updates on past episodes. For $3 an episode, you get monthly outtake reels. For $5, you get a monthly quiz episode where I quiz my husband on past episodes. For $10, you get a detailed bibliography of all the resources I've used while researching an episode.
And for $20, you get a bit of miscellaneous morbidity, a short essay on a random morbid topic every month. Previously, we have reviewed horror video games and television shows, discussed the plague pits of London, and tried out historic recipes from previous episodes. All of these rewards aside, your patronage supports the podcast and keeps new episodes coming. I can't keep doing this podcast without you, so go to bit.ly.morbidpatron.ly.
To choose your rewards and support the MCP, you'll have my eternal gratitude. And now back to the podcast. The process of finding feet and the desired shape varied from region to region and family to family. The technique was passed down from other to daughter or aunt to niece.
The age at which feet were bound also varied, but usually the girl was no older than seven. The reasoning behind this was that the child had to be young enough that their bones were still quite flexible, but also able to understand the importance of what was being done and have the discipline to bear the pain. A reminder that the next few minutes will include graphic descriptions of the binding process, which was done to female children. The less extreme binding variant was called the cucumber foot.
This was practiced in parts of zijuan china and was focused on slimming the foot and bringing the toe to an upturned point. The four smaller toes were folded under the sole of the foot, so far under the foot that they almost peaked out on the opposite side, in line with the big toe. This bending caused green stick fractures in the metatarsals and toeful angies. This extent of folding wasn't always possible on the first bind, so each time the wrappings were removed in order to clean the foot and tend to any wounds, they were rebounded even tighter to achieve the desired length and shape.
While the toes were bound under, another length of cloth was wrapped in a figure eight around the back of the heel and ankle near the Achilles tendon. This was used to stabilize the wrapping of the toes. The foot would be unbound and rebound often after the first bind, tightening the bindings each time. After about two years, the final shape was usually achieved, but the feet remained bound in order to maintain that shape.
The desired length was between 5 and 6 inches, or 12 and a half to 15 and a quarter centimeters. The more extreme and more popularized shape were referred to as lotus feet. Instead of the figure eight wrapping being for support, it was instead pulled tight, so tight that it brought the bottom of the heel to touch the sole of the foot and the tucked toes, basically folding the foot in half at the arch. More green stick fractures were created in this process, but many tarsals were also crushed.
The calcaneus, or heel bone, was bent at a 90 degree angle. After this binding, the girls were then encouraged to walk long distances on their feet to promote bone breakage in the arch of the foot. The goal length of a lotus foot was about 4 inches, or 10 centimeters long. This length was referred to as the golden lotus and was the most desirable length.
The breaking process also took about two years, and the more bones that broke and the more flesh that dropped away due to infection. The more slender and small the foot could become. The greatest side effect of foot binding was pain. Most of the elderly women interviewed about their bound feet described the pain as a burning sensation with swelling and heat.
Most bound feet eventually became numb due to a lack of circulation. Once a foot had been crushed and bound, attempting to reverse the process was also quite painful and the foot would never resemble what it had looked like to begin with as the bones would heal and grow into place as the girl aged. With the crushing of the toes in the arch of the foot, other problems could also arise, especially infection. Toenails would ingrow, causing injury and infection.
Sometimes to avoid this, they were removed altogether. If the infection reached the bones, the toes might even drop off on their own due to flesh and bone decaying. This was seen as a benefit as then the foot could be bound even tighter. Girls with more fleshy toes sometimes had shards of glass or broken tile pieces inserted into the bindings or between the toes to induce such infections.
However, this could also cause widespread infection leading to death by sepsis. Bad circulation was also an issue leading to these injuries not healing properly as well as gangrene where the tissue dies off due to lack of blood flow and bacterial infection. Yeast infections could also develop in the new folds of skin formed by the breaking of the arch. There are many writings about the smell of bound feet, which was likely partially due to perfume but partially due to the rotting flesh hidden beneath the bindings.
Because these issues were known during those first two years of binding, the bandages were changed regularly from daily to two to three times a week. Each time the binding was removed, the foot was washed and the toenails clipped if possible. After drying, the foot was usually rebound in clean bindings. Many times the bones of the foot remained broken for years as they were constantly rebroken during rebinding, as the girl aged eventually they would heal but were still prone to breaking, especially during her teenage years.
Sometimes the bones were purposely rebroken in order to maintain or change the shape of the foot. The result of the binding was often unpredictable. The goal shape, the appearance of a tiny miniature foot, was surprisingly rare in practice, usually a lump of tissue and bone from the top of the new arch of the foot formed. This bulge could not be contained by the shoes and had to be covered by leg skirts or longer dresses.
Foot binding also caused issues later in life. Adult and elderly women with bound feet were more likely to have falls, less able to squat and less able to stand from a chair without help. A loss of bone density in the hips was also seen when modern doctors examined the few elderly women left with bound feet. So why did women do this to themselves for hundreds of years, continuing even after attempts were made to ban the practice?
The first reason most popular articles allude to is that foot binding was a beauty trend or that it was enforced upon women because men found it attractive. As they originally began as a representation of the dear woman's hoofed feet, some authors, such as Wang Ping, argue that bound feet hint at a mysterious animal aspect that promotes erotic desire, heightened by turning that part of the body into a taboo. The lotus foot exasperated and exalted desire for flesh by diminishing and covering the flesh. This tension was key to the erotic attraction of the lotus foot.
While there is some literature on the beauty and erotic quality of tiny bound feet, this was actually not the main reason it was done. Most imperial Chinese literature detailing the erotic attraction of men to a woman's bound feet comes from no earlier than the 19th century, a time when foot binding was diminishing in respect, not when it was an honored status symbol reserved for elite women. Such vulgar sexual descriptions were only possible at the time because the value and awe of foot binding had weakened and the social status of its practitioners had declined. This type of writing would have been unthinkable when the foot binding was a mark of genteel status.
The writing about bound feet from earlier in history suggests they were treated almost like sacred objects, women would guard them and no man other than a husband or lover was allowed to touch the shoes or wrappings. None but other women ever saw the feet unwrapped. To understand the deeper meaning and reason behind foot binding, we must look at representations of bound feet in writing, art and archaeology from before the 19th century. When studied altogether, the meaning and reason behind the practice of foot binding becomes quite complex.
According to Dorothy Coe, author of several excellent and well-researched books on this subject, bound feet were seen as a mark of being civilized. This comes from the value placed on properly clothed bodies in Confucianism, the leading ideology in imperial China from the Tang dynasty in the 5th century CE to about 1905. Also called Ruism, Confucianism originates in the mid-500s BCE when Chinese philosopher Confucius wrote his classic texts which proposed that the only effective system of government required prescribed relationships for each individual, letting a ruler be a ruler and his subjects be subjects. Functions of government and social stratification were facts of life to be sustained by ethical values, therefore the ideal human was quote, a gentleman or a superior person, unquote.
He also held that a king must be virtuous in order to rule properly. His teachings saw a resurgence in popularity in the 5th century CE and stayed prevalent until the fall of imperial China. Confucian values placed emphasis on the importance of family and social harmony and hierarchy, finding ordinary activities of human life, including relationships as manifestations of the sacred because they were expressions of morality. The worldly concern of Confucianism rests in the belief that humans are fundamentally good, teachable, provable, and perfectible through personal and communal endeavors, especially self-cultivation and self-creation.
Still, a balance must be found between the complementary yet opposed concepts of yin and yang, where yin is the negative, passive, and female force, and yang is the positive, active, and male force. Therefore, social harmony or morality was identified as patriarchy. Much emphasis was placed on proper behavior, attire, and the harmony of hierarchy. Part of this was properly covered bodies.
In many texts, headdress, dress, and shoes could all be used as an expression of civility, culture, and humanity. A tire in general played a central role in both external and internal definitions of Chinese identities, aiding to differentiate the Chinese from their neighbors as well as making social and gender distinctions within Chinese society. Bound feet were a way for women to express their civility, culture, and humanity. This became particularly important in 1644, when the Ming dynasty abruptly ended with the evasion of imperial China by the Manchu army.
The Ming dynasty was the last Han Chinese dynasty in history. I'm not an expert in Chinese history, so I'll do my best to summarize the political, cultural, and ethnic minutia of this turbulent time, but keep in mind it's much more complicated and nuanced than I can relate in such a short space. I apologize if I oversimplify or get anything wrong. Please email or DM the MCP if you're a Chinese history expert and have any corrections.
The Han people trace their ethnic heritage to an initial confederation of agricultural tribes that lived along the Yellow River in northern China during the Neolithic period. The Han are credited with giving birth to Chinese civilization. The Han dynasty, the second imperial dynasty in China's history, reigns from 202 BC to 220 CE, and is considered to be one of the first great eras in Chinese history, rivaling the Roman Empire in population size and geographical reach, and making China the major regional power in East Asia. The descendants of the Han, which remained in power over large parts of China up until the end of the Ming dynasty referred to their ethnic and cultural group as Han Chinese, which meant a civilized ethnic group in contrast to what they perceived as barbaric foreigners around them.
Considered one of these barbaric foreigners by the Han, the Manchu people were an ethnic minority in China, originating from the area of northern Asia, once known as Manchuria, which is now divided between China and Russia. The Qing dynasty, which reigned over all of imperial China from 1636 to 1912, came to power after the Manchu people, previously known as the Jurchen people, led by a self-proclaimed emperor of the new Manchu Qing dynasty, sacked the Ming capital of Beijing. The last emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhou Yojian, took his own life in 1644, yielding the empire to the Manchu emperor after losing Beijing to a peasant uprising. The Manchu imperial court had very different cultural values and made many changes to regulations surrounding attire in attempts to phase out Han cultural styles and ideologies.
In this period of intense anxiety over personal and national survival, Han ethnic loyalty was expressed in gender terms and sexuality acquired overt political significance. Foot binding and to a lesser degree, the top-knot, a culturally significant men's hairstyle, became the battlefield over which cultural boundaries between Han Chinese and the invading Manchus were drawn. Bound feet were seen as a form of adornment that marked someone of Han Chinese ethnicity. The unadorned feet of the Manchu were a mark of uncivilized otherness to the Han.
The Manchu rulers tried to ban foot binding and the Han refused. In fact, instead of reducing its popularity, many Manchu women imitated the bound foot style by creating anvil-shaped which gave the appearance of a bound foot without actually binding their feet. Perhaps the beauty of the detailed embroidery of the lotus shoes attracted them, or perhaps it was something else, something about the women of the Han that made the Manchu women imitate them. Historians just aren't sure.
We do know that foot binding was pulled from the private secluded traditions of Han Chinese women to become the focus of public discourse and political debate. Bound feet represented Confucian civility, identified Han ethnicity, and also ornamented and embellished women's bodies as an adornment. It was a sign of contested identities and this new visibility helped historians get glimpsed into the meaning of foot binding. Some researchers also see foot binding as a type of feminism.
This seems counterintuitive, but the practice was an all-female process and made the feet taboo to the gaze and touch of men. Women did the binding and maintained it. Mothers bound their daughter's feet, and if a mother wasn't able to cause her daughter so much pain, Han's did the binding. The practice seemed to adhere to the male-dominated Confucian ideology, but it also went against Confucianism, as self-harm was a taboo, and this process was definitely harmful and was maintained by the women herself once the initial two years of breaking were complete.
The trauma of the binding process also taught discipline and strength. If the girl could endure this, she could endure anything. Some authors, such as Wang Ping, in their year 2000 book, Aking for Beauty, hypothesized that foot binding was a mother's way of preparing her daughter for life in a society where she wasn't valued as much as males. The mother and daughter spent copious amounts of time together, the mother tending to her daughter's feet, knowing the pain she was feeling as the mother too had gone through the same thing.
In this way, the mother was imprinting the secrets of survival to her daughter. Secrets passed down from women to women for generations. Combining all these reasons, lotus feet may have been seen as attractive as they signified a woman of civility, Han ethnicity, and discipline. Even with all the research I've related here, it's important to remember that there isn't very much writing about lotus feet by women, so it's impossible to say for certain what value women placed on foot binding.
The reason it endured was due to the social value placed on it over hundreds of years. The meaning of, and the reason for binding, changed, but the value remained. Still, to us, in this modern age, the practice of foot binding seems extreme, and the fact that women continued this practice even after it was banned is what draws out the curiosity in us. Molly, Lacey, Bella, Neville, Mark, Ellie, Zombie Combat Driver, Noise, Sabrina, Daya, Allison D, and Tristan.
Noelle, Tristan, Mary O, Theresa, Amy S, James, Carol, Allison, W.E., Alice B., Elizabeth, Rebecca, Louise, and Spencer all have my eternal gratitude for becoming patrons or upping their tears. Thank you so much. Because of you, the listeners, our creepy community is growing, especially on Facebook, so head over there to engage with other listeners, discuss episodes and news articles, and share your own creepy stories and cute pet pictures. The MCP is part of a wider creepy community known as the Belfry Podcast Network.
Check out the other shows on the Belfry Network at www.thebelfry.rip. As I said before, if you really like the MCP, please consider becoming a patron on Patreon. You can also give one-time donations by going to our website, www.morbidcuriositypodcast.com and clicking the donate button. On our website, you can also find links to all our social media and sponsors, and other ways to contact us.
If you'd rather contact us by mail, this address is also listed on the website. Another way to help the show is by going to our Amazon Wishlist at bit.ly slash Morbid Wishlist. Any purchases from this list are greatly appreciated. We are eternally grateful for your support.
My name is Hallie, and until next time, thanks for listening.