The history of footbinding is full of contradictions and unexpected turns. The practice originated in the dance culture of China's medieval court and spread to gentry families, brothels, maid's quarters, and peasant households. Conventional views of footbinding as patriarchal oppression often neglect its complex history and the incentives of the women involved. This revisionist history, elegantly written and meticulously researched, presents a fascinating new picture of the practice from its beginnings in the tenth century to its demise in the twentieth century. Neither condemning nor defending foot-binding, Dorothy Ko debunks many myths and misconceptions about its origins, development, and eventual end, exploring in the process the entanglements of male power and female desires during the practice's thousand-year history. Cinderella's Sisters argues that rather than stemming from sexual perversion, men's desire for bound feet was connected to larger concerns such as cultural nostalgia, regional rivalries, and claims of male privilege. Nor were women hapless victims, the author contends. Ko describes how women--those who could afford it--bound their own and their daughters' feet to signal their high status and self-respect. Femininity, like the binding of feet, was associated with bodily labor and domestic work, and properly bound feet and beautifully made shoes both required exquisite skills and technical knowledge passed from generation to generation. Throughout her narrative, Ko deftly wields methods of social history, literary criticism, material culture studies, and the history of the body and fashion to illustrate how a practice that began as embodied lyricism--as a way to live as the poets imagined--ended up being an exercise in excess and folly.

高彥頤，（Dorothy Ko） 美國斯坦福大學國際關係學學士、東亞曆史係博士，專攻明清社會史及比較婦女史。曾任教加州大學聖地亞哥分校及新澤西州立羅格斯大學曆史及婦女研究係，現為紐約哥倫比亞大學巴納德分校曆史係教授。近作有《步步生蓮：綉鞋與纏足文物》(Every Step a Lotus：Shoes for BoundFeet）及《閨塾師：明末清初江南的纔女文化》（TeaeheFS of the Inner Chambers：Women andCulture in Seventeenth—Century China）等書。