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While reading this powerful book, I was reminded of a poem by Marge Piercy, entitled ‘Work of Artifice’, part of which states: ‘The bonsai tree in the attractive pot could have grown eighty feet tall on the side of a mountain till split by lightning. But a gardener carefully pruned it. It is nine inches high … as he whittles back the branches the gardener croons, It is your nature to be small and cozy, domestic and weak; … With living creatures one must begin very early to dwarf their growth: the bound feet, the crippled brain …’ (M. Piercy: Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy, Knopf, ). In this important, clinically relevant, and well-documented book on foot-binding, Dr. Ma explores the breadth and depth of Chinese history, mythology, and fairy-tale, as well as the philosophical underpinnings used to justify and understand the brutal and soul-crippling practice of foot-binding in imperial China. The book transported me back to those consciousness-raising living rooms during the 70s resurgence of feminism. Foot-binding, this historical horror, this ultimate cultural fetish, is used by Dr. Ma as a resonant metaphor to symbolize the devaluation of the feminine in patriarchal cultures. Nowadays, women of all ages decorate their natural feet with the loving, soothing attention of beautifying pedicures. Have we come a long way, baby? Dr. Ma would state an emphatic no!
Dr. Ma successfully argues that the symbolic power of this metaphor of foot-binding contains immense psychological relevance for contemporary western women, creating a bridge between past and present, east and west. The book's main thesis is the power of analysis to ‘unbind the feet’, that is, to uncover and expose the psychological bindings that cripple and imprison our capacities for growth and psychic mobility due to patriarchal attitudes which repress the power of the feminine. This repression devalues the instinctive, intuitive, receptive, feeling side of our natures as well as denigrat