“Sweet Unbinding: Sugarcane Cultivation and the Demise of Foot-Binding”, 2022-06 ():
Economic motives behind foot-binding, a harming custom practiced by Chinese women, are explored.
The booming sugarcane cultivation in Taiwan in the early 20th century is found to induce unbinding.
- Cane railroads, lines built exclusively for cane transportation, is used as an instrumental variable for cane cultivation.
The need for human capital improvement was a likely mechanism that delivered the effects of cane cultivation.
No evidence is found to support the increased bargaining power for women as a major mechanism.
We analyze the economic motives for the sudden demise in foot-binding, a self-harming custom widely practiced by Chinese females for centuries.
We use newly-discovered Taiwanese data to estimate the extent to which females unbound their feet in response to the rapid growth in sugarcane cultivation in the early 20th century, growth which substantially boosted the demand for female labor.
We find that cane cultivation statistically-significantly induced unbinding, with the IV estimations using cane railroads—lines built exclusively for cane transportation—support a causal interpretation of the estimated effect.
This finding implies that increased female employment opportunities can help eliminate norms that are harmful for females. Further analysis suggests that the need for human capital improvement was more likely to have driven the effects of cane cultivation, rather than the increased intra-household bargaining power for females.
[Keywords: foot-binding, social norm, gender role, sugarcane]l
…Our investigation begins with documenting the demise of foot-binding in Taiwan in the early 20th century. From the start of the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in 1895, the colonial government launched a series of public campaigns and sponsored social movements led by local elites in the hope of eradicating it. However, prior to 1905, whilst this bottom-up approach had been quite effective in discouraging parents from binding the feet of their young girls, it had failed to encourage bound females to unbind their feet. Although most females were able to partially restore their mobility and physical strength after unbinding, they had to endure substantial pain during the rehabilitation process. So females’ reluctance to unbinding during this period was likely because the benefit from unbinding was outweighed by the disutility of the procedure. It was not until 1905–101915109ya that a large wave of unbinding occurred, coinciding with the timing of sugar boom, which drastically increased demand for female labor and thus offered an additional benefit for unbinding. [All that is solid melts into thin air…]