Footbinding, Hypergamy, and Handicraft Labor: Evaluating the Labor Market Explanation of Footbinding

Abstract

Footbinding was a millennium-long practice in which ethnically, Han Chinese families would alter the feet of young girls. The leading explanation of footbinding in interdisciplinary circles is the labor market hypothesis. It posits that parents were motivated to footbind daughters to keep them spinning and weaving, thus making money for the family. Lacking direct means of testing their hypothesis, advocates of the labor market hypothesis present allegedly disconfirming evidence against the major competing explanation of footbinding, an evolutionary social sciences hypothesis according to which footbinding is positively related to hypergamous marriage. This paper presents a methodological critique of this case against a hypergamy hypothesis for footbinding. This critique uncovers erroneous assumptions, methodological problems, ad hoc data modification, inaccurate operationalization, and confounded testing of the hypergamy hypothesis and concludes that this hypothesis ought not to be rejected at this time.