How universal is the desire to have, or appear to have, small feet is
shown by the fact that everybody blackens his shoes or boots; for, owing
to a peculiar optical delusion, black objects always appear smaller than
white ones; which is also the reason why too slim and delicate ladies
never appear to such advantage in winter as they do in summer, when they
exchange their dark for light dresses.
To a certain point the admiration of small feet is in accordance with
the canons of good Taste, as will be presently shown. But Taste has a
disease which is called Fashion. It is a sort of microbe which has the
effect of distorting and _exaggerating_ everything it takes hold of.
Fashion is not satisfied with small feet; it wants them _very_ small,
unnaturally small, at the cost of beauty, health, grace, comfort, and
happiness. Hence for many generations shoemakers have been compelled to
manufacture instruments of torture so ruinous to the constitution of man
and woman, that an Austrian military surgeon has seriously counselled
the enactment of legal fines to be imposed on the makers of
noxiously-shaped shoes, similar to those imposed on food-adulterators.
Most ugly and vulgar fashions come from France; but as regards crippled
feet the first prize has to be yielded to the Chinese, even by the
Parisians. The normal size of the human foot varies, for men, from 9½ to
13; for women, from 5½ to 9 inches, man’s feet being longer
proportionately to the greater length of his lower limbs. In China the
men value the normal healthy condition of their own feet enough to have
introduced certain features of elasticity in their shoes which we might
copy with advantage; but the women are treated very differently. “The
fashionable length for a Chinese foot,” says Dr. Jamieson, “is between
3½ and 4 inches, but comparatively few parents succeed in arresting
growth so completely.” When girls are five years old their feet are
tightly wrapped up in bandages, which on successive occasions are
tightened more and more, till the surface ulcerates, and some of the
flesh, skin, and sometimes even a toe or two come off. “During the first
year,” says Professor Flower, “the pain is so intense that the sufferer
can do nothing but lie and cry and moan. For about two years the foot
aches continually, and is subject to a constant pain, like the pricking
of sharp needles.” Finally the foot becomes reduced to a shapeless mass,
void of sensibility, which “has now the appearance of the hoof of some
animal rather than a human foot, and affords a very insufficient organ
of support, as the peculiar tottering gait of those possessing it
clearly shows.”
The difference between the Chinese belle and the Parisian is one of
degree merely. The former has her torturing done once for all while a
child, whereas the latter allows her tight, high-heeled shoes to torture
her throughout life. The English are the only nation that have
recognised the injuriousness and vulgarity of the French shoe, and
substituted one made on hygienic principles; and as England has in
almost everything else displaced France as the leader in modern fashion,
it is reasonable to hope that ere long other nations will follow her in
this reform. American girls are, as a rule, much less sensible in this
matter than their English sisters; one need only ask a clerk in a shoe
store to find out how most of them endeavour to squeeze their small feet
into shoes too small by a number.
Fashions are always followed blindly, without deliberation. But would it
not be worth while for French, American, and German women—and many men
too—to ask themselves what they gain and what they lose by trying to
make their feet appear smaller than they are? The disadvantages outweigh
the advantages to an almost ludicrous extent.
On the one side there is absolutely nothing but the gratification of
vanity derived from the fact that a few acquaintances admire one’s
“pretty feet”; and even this advantage is problematical, because a
person who wears too tight shoes can hardly conceal them from an
observer, and is therefore apt to get pity for her vain weakness in
place of admiration.