Here's some stuff on footbinding from the LA Times. It cites women who tell "of the pain involved in foot-binding, but also of pride in the beauty they felt they achieved." But it was beauty as defined by men. "Of course it was painful," said Wang Yixian, 78, casting back to her girlhood in Shandong province. "If you didn't bind your feet, you couldn't find a husband." And sadly,

Women who had their feet bound for most of their lives were told to stop as well, though their feet remained deformed. What they once were told was beautiful had become ridiculed as repulsive. Women who had endured pain to match male ideals of beauty were suddenly objects of derision--again by men. In either case, the women were powerless."I was a child and had no control when my feet were bound, and I had no control when I was told to unbind them," Cooper's interview subjects told her angrily.