CHICAGO — For centuries, small feet were widely viewed as beautiful in Chinese culture, and marked a woman as wealthy. The average American woman wears a size eight shoe, which measures about 9.5 ...

The practice of foot binding, tightly wrapping the feet of young girls in order to reshape them and prevent them from growing too large, began sometime during the ninth or 10th century in China. Small ...

For around ten centuries, successive generations of Chinese women endured a practice when, as children, their feet were systematically broken and shaped in such a way that they resembled hooves. The ...