From “golden lotus” to high heels

In response to Wang’s death, one day later, on July 19, Xinwenbao (新聞報) published an unsigned article titled “Abolish High Heels.”Footnote ¹⁶ This article advanced several arguments in support of banning high heels, one of which juxtaposed the high heel with the anachronistic practice of footbinding, asserting that “This kind of unhygienic and dangerous ornament, when abolished in the future, will seem to posterity as grotesque as footbinding appears to us today.”Footnote ¹⁷ Echoing the vehement anti-footbinding campaigns since the late Qing, the author concluded, “What we need is a movement to abolish high heels.”Footnote ¹⁸

Although the anonymous author may have made this comparison in passing, the analogy between footbinding and high heels is far from trivial. Indeed, beyond this specific critique, footbinding recurred then in the condemnations of high heels, forming a rhetorical trope of melancholic juxtaposition – a lament for antiquity that haunted the modern. This juxtaposition of footbinding and high heels calls to mind what Bill Brown describes as the genealogy of objects.Footnote ¹⁹ For Brown, the thingness of an object does not lie solely in what exceeds the object – its utility, aesthetics, or symbolic value, but in the latency embedded in its obsolescent forms – here, in the case of high heels, the footbinding strips and shoes. Thus, to unravel, in Brown’s terms, the thingness rather than the objecthood of the high heel, one must begin by excavating its genealogical association with the “golden lotus.”

In A Revisionist History of Footbinding, Dorothy Ko conceptualizes footbinding as “an embodied experience, a reality to a select group of women from the twelfth to twentieth centuries.”Footnote ²⁰ For Ko, the multifaceted nature of footbinding extends across its emergence, maintenance, and eventual demise, and thus resists any singular psychological, social, gendered, economic, ethnographic, or symbolic explanation. Ko is particularly critical of “a linear progression from bondage to liberation,” contending instead that the end of footbinding is not marked “by a clean break or a sense of finality but by its opposite: a lingering in-between-ness, a seesawing motion of time, sentiments, and fashion.”Footnote ²¹ Informed by Dorothy Ko, I similarly strive for a plurality of perspectives to excavate the layered meanings of high heels. In view of the genealogical association between footbinding and high heels, I am curious, at the practical level, about how women with liberated feet adapted to high heels designed for natural feet, and, at the theoretical level, about the extent to which anti-footbinding campaigns proved successful and whether high heels remained haunted by, or ultimately transcended, the hauntology of footbinding.

If “there is not one footbinding but many,”Footnote ²² there is also not one process of foot-unbinding but many. High heels could be an option for those liberated feet, but the question is that foot-unbinding cannot revert the feet to their natural condition, for footbinding is “an irrevocable bodily process once the bones are bent and new muscular habits formed.”Footnote ²³ More troubling is that high heels were never designed for formerly bound feet. The problem thus arises when deformed feet aspire to fit into high-heeled shoes.Footnote ²⁴ In a commentary on women’s “head-to-toe” dress style in Tianjin, Han Lü (寒侶) offers a vivid portrayal of those women who had once endured footbinding, then liberated their bound feet, and now found themselves swept up in the vogue for high heels:

For natural feet, high heels posed little challenge; for liberated feet, however, the transition was far from easy. As Dorothy Ko observes, “liberated feet” were often “harder to walk on and more deformed than bound feet.”Footnote ²⁷ Within this paradox, one is compelled to acknowledge the corporeal agency exhibited by those women who refused to forgo their aesthetic aspirations, even by padding their shoes with cotton and limping with visible discomfort.

A more crucial question, perhaps, is how we might, in a broader sense, understand the haunting connection between footbinding and high heels. A 1937 cartoon by a male illustrator may help reveal a tenuous continuity, or rather, a rupture between footbinding and high heels (see Figure 1). On the left side of the image stands an elderly woman marked by wrinkles. Meanwhile, a male shop attendant, standing by a cabinet emblazoned with the phrase “Modern Ladies’ Fashion Shoes” (modeng nüshi shixie 摩登女士時鞋), is seen anxiously searching for a pair of high heels that might accommodate the woman’s deformed feet. A choreography of gazes takes place here. As the caption suggests, the woman is presumably saying to the salesman, “Find me the most fashionable high-heeled shoes in Shanghai!”Footnote ²⁸ Here, I would argue that her gaze, rather than directed at the man, is indeed transfixed by the high heels on display – her desire is visually articulated before it is spoken. The clerk’s gaze, by contrast, is directed downward to the discarded lotus shoes on the ground and the misshapen foot suspended in the air. His exaggerated facial expression could be seen as either a reflection of anxiety over finding a shoe that fits or a disdainful response to the anatomical distortions wrought by footbinding. Yet more acutely, his countenance perhaps registers an incredulity at the deformed foot’s audacious aspiration to fit into the high heel.

Figure 1.

“Find me the most fashionable high-heeled shoes in Shanghai!”Footnote ²⁶ .

This visual interplay aptly captures the temporal, aesthetic, and gendered disjunctions between footbinding and high heels. At the center of the image, both visually and symbolically, is the unshod, airborne foot – emancipated from its bindings, yet still bearing their marks. Hovering in midair, unsupported and deformed, this foot embodies a state of “waiting,” one that encapsulates the ambivalent fate of the female body when navigating successive regimes of beauty, discipline, and visibility. On the one hand, the foot entails the violence inflicted upon women’s bodies. On the other, it asserts agency by confronting the male gaze unabashedly and articulating an unashamed desire for modern fashion. Nonetheless, this state of waiting is tinged with uncertainty. We do not know, and perhaps are not meant to know, whether the liberated foot would ever find a pair of high heels it covets.

If we follow the woman’s gaze toward the cabinet, what would we see? In Republican China, women’s shoes for natural feet generally fell into two categories: Western-style heels and Chinese-style flats (see Figure 2). Western heeled shoes could be divided into high heels and mid-heels and came in diverse designs – round or pointed toes, brass or iron buckles, leather, lambskin, or suede – yielding a wide array of combinations. Shanghai shoe stores defined mid-heels as shoes with heels no higher than 4 centimeters.Footnote ³⁰ This convention is corroborated by a piece titled “1½-Inch Heels Will Be ‘High’,” which reported on wartime Britain’s restrictions on high heels.Footnote ³¹ The report noted that 3-inch heels were about to become obsolete; shoes with heels of 1.5 to 2 inches, once considered “moderate,” would henceforth be deemed “high,” while “low heels” ranged between 0.5 and 1.5 inches.Footnote ³² By this logic, 1.5 inches – approximately 3.81 centimeters – roughly marked a threshold between mid-heels and high heels. But when could a heel be considered “high”? The trope “three-cun” (三寸) was frequently used when comparing high heels with footbinding: the three-cun golden lotus and the three-cun heel. Taken literally, this suggests a heel of about 10 centimeters.Footnote ³³ Yet this was perhaps less a fact than a metaphor, since the Western convention, as the report makes clear, tended to fix the high heel at 3 inches, or about 7.62 centimeters, subject to inevitable variation.

Figure 2.

Xianshi company’s latest women’s shoes: Western (high-heeled, left) and Chinese (flat, right)Footnote ²⁹ .

The three-cun heel, after all, varies from the three-cun golden lotus. While women, including themselves, their mothers, and sisters, may choose to bind their feet of their own volition to secure “a brighter future,”Footnote ³⁴ high-heel wearing is more voluntary – after all, unlike the coercive footbinding, high-heel wearing is, in most contexts, non-mandatory. This impetus for such autonomy is clear: as in the image referenced above, the “footbinding lady” seeks only the “most fashionable” pair. Nevertheless, this female autonomy was frequently reframed by men through a condescending lens as a masochistic inclination toward self-imposed suffering. It is a recurrent argument that if women have eventually been liberated from the agonies of footbinding, why voluntarily embrace a similarly constrictive and harmful practice?

The notion “liberation” is doubly loaded: it refers both to the physical unbinding of the feet and to the broader emancipation of women from patriarchal strictures. Yet this liberation is often unevenly applied: it is celebrated in the context of anti-footbinding efforts but curiously withheld when women choose to don high heels. Wang Cen (王岑) commented that “the distinction [between golden lotuses and high heels] is that the former was a shackle imposed by men, while the latter is one created by women themselves.”Footnote ³⁵ However, high heels emerged only after the foot had been unbound, and thus any “post-liberation” choice should be autonomous in nature. In following this logic, however, why is the autonomy derived from women’s self-directed embrace of high heels so readily suspect? Perhaps the truth is that women may have achieved corporeal liberation, but men have yet to liberate themselves psychologically from the desire to regulate women’s bodies. If female autonomy is deemed legitimate only when mediated through male authority, then that autonomy is inherently compromised. From footbinding to high heels, the specter of control remains.

The falling-down girl

Wang I-lü’s death was far from an isolated tragedy. In the annals of modern China, many women have been recorded as having suffered injury, disability, or even death due to high heels. Wang I-lü’s fall, therefore, takes on the weight of cultural symbolism, emblematic of an abstruse gendered intersection between fashion, corporality, and death. And Wang I-lü herself emerges less as an individual than as a symptomatic figure of a group of women – the Falling-down Girls.

The Falling-down Girls often fell from heights or slipped into lower terrain – most commonly, into water. Huang Xueqiong (黃雪瓊), for instance, recalled how her sister-in-law “sacrificed herself under high heels.”Footnote ³⁶ In 1928, after returning from an American university, Huang’s elder brother married Liang Huiyi (梁惠仪), a Jiaotong University graduate. That summer, on a family outing to Mount Mogan (莫干山), Huang’s childlike sprint toward the summit prompted her younger brother to ask Liang to carry him in chase. Liang complied, “unaware that her heels were too high and the path too uneven,”Footnote ³⁷ and fell backward. “Her bones were fractured, and her head shattered against the rocks.”Footnote ³⁸ Though Huang’s brother “wrapped her wounds in cloth and carried her down the mountain,” she died from blood loss and head trauma.Footnote ³⁹ Her husband, too, “died of grief and rage.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Huang’s account is not merely memorial but didactic. Huang expressed the hope that “my fellow sisters” might “take heed and regard this as a cautionary tale,” transforming the private grief into a public homily.Footnote ⁴¹ This tone, both admonitory and didactic, resurfaced in another report,Footnote ⁴² which recounted the story of a high-heeled woman who, en route by boat to visit her husband in Sichuan, slipped and drowned in the Jialing River (嘉陵江). The narrative concludes with a moral admonition that the dangers of high heels ultimately outweigh their elegance, and women are urged to wear them with caution.Footnote ⁴³

Death represents the most extreme consequence of falling down. Yet such depictions of death were not meant to mourn the loss of women’s lives; rather, they functioned as a strategic means of stigmatization, aimed ultimately at the abolition of high heels. This stigmatization relied on the sensationalism of death to provoke a visceral shock, leveraging horror as a deterrent. This horror is further amplified in reports of another group of falling-down women. These women were usually public figures of some renown, debutantes from prominent families, or singers and dancers of some fame, whose visibility was appropriated to conduct social regulation. For instance, Miss Zhong, the second daughter of a former vice minister of finance, was reported to have lost consciousness after tumbling down the stairs.Footnote ⁴⁴ Similarly, Jiangzhou Sima (江州司馬) recorded the fall of the famed female ballad singer Snow Beauty (雪豔花).Footnote ⁴⁵ Lin Ruxin (林如心), an actress of some fame, was also reported to have sustained injuries from falling down due to wearing high heels.Footnote ⁴⁶ Even the celebrated film star Hu Die (胡蝶) was reported to have attracted considerable attention at the Paramount when her high heel slipped off mid-dance, leaving her, as the report put it, “utterly mortified.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Before going further, it is necessary to sketch a collective portrait of the Falling-down Girls. It is evident that these women no longer conformed to the roles prescribed by Confucianism – “the sexual object and possession of the man, the child-bearing tool to carry on her husband’s family name, and the servant to the whole family.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Instead, they embodied emergent figures of womanhood that surfaced in the process of female emancipation. The public visibility of women increased as they stepped out of the confines of the family. This heightened visibility refers to women’s concrete participation in social life as much as the media discourses through which their presence was made legible. Bryna Goodman argues in her study of the suicide of a modern girl, Xi Shangzhen (席上珍), that, in Republican Shanghai, newspapers functioned as a didactic medium on female issues, constituting a “moral bulletin board of public accusations, responses, and public position taking.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In this light, the falling-down girl is not only an anecdotal stereotype of the high-heeled woman but also, more importantly, a historical construct shaped by a burgeoning print culture and co-produced through the conflicts and compromises among the competing imaginaries of modern womanhood.

Although the “new woman was herself an unstable construct,”Footnote ⁵⁰ it is nevertheless possible to discern, as Sarah Stevens argues, that female subjectivity was usually imagined through two polarized figures: the New Woman and the Modern Girl.Footnote ⁵¹ Both figures were interpellated through competing fantasies of modernity. The New Woman articulated modernity as “an admirable state of civilization, strength, and progress,”Footnote ⁵² whereas the Modern Girl instantiated modernity as “a state of danger, individual alienation, and cultural loss.”Footnote ⁵³ Correspondingly, critics tended to praise the New Woman while condemning the Modern Girl. The rhetorical appropriation of the Falling-down Girl, with its tones of mockery and half-hearted sympathy, aligns with that of the Modern Girl, which indicates an avenue to gauge the high heel through the lens of the Modern Girl.

The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group (the Group hereafter) observes that a crucial component of the Modern Girl’s iconography is the “Modern Girl commodities,”Footnote ⁵⁴ ones that “created new relationships to the body and enabled women to craft themselves as modern.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Taking this cue, in employing the Modern Girl as a “heuristic device,”Footnote ⁵⁶ we must acknowledge that the high heel, as a Modern Girl commodity, had given rise to a new corporeal relationship, one that manifests, rather literally, in the act of falling.

In addition, what remains to be explored are the socio-cultural, gendered, and political-economic logics that underlie this corporeal reconfiguration. It bears emphasizing that although high heels have indeed caused physical discomfort to women – a reality experienced even by women today – the archival representations of women who fell are, in large part, male-authored. The Falling-down Girl, therefore, is not merely a historical subject but a projection of male anxieties and desires. Madeleine Dong argues that:

Madeleine Dong’s analysis is largely true. It resonates with Dorothy Ko’s observation of footbound women’s “second voices”Footnote ⁵⁸ – namely, that women, especially illiterate women, were unable to articulate their own voices in an era when textual production was largely a male privilege and thus had to be represented by men. Yet it should be acknowledged that, in Republican China, women increasingly asserted their voices in public spheres. In the controversy surrounding Wang I-lü’s death, for instance, many authentic female voices emerged, which will be examined below.

Here, in following Dong’s logic, we have to ask: What cultural anxieties, desires, or disciplinary instincts are encoded in the male portrayals of the Falling-down Girl? It is true that “the Modern Girl was a harbinger of both the opportunities and dangers of modern life.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In the context of modern China, Madeleine Dong, in her “Who is Afraid of the Chinese Modern Girl?”, probes the “angst and titillation among the elite.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Similarly, Sarah Stevens contends that the Chinese Modern Girl “expresses male disillusionment with modernity, fears of female subjectivity, and fears of the alienation that accompanies the urban, cosmopolitan world.”Footnote ⁶¹

Intriguing as they are, almost all of the above arguments hinge on the danger of the Modern Girl, which is distinct from the danger to the Modern Girl as revealed by the Falling-down Girl. This distinction problematizes the psychological dynamics underpinning the male-authored representations, which can be clarified through another category of falling-down scenarios. These accounts frequently juxtapose the high-heeled girls with modern objects of velocity, viz., trains, trams, and bicycles. For instance, a 1924 issue of Funü zhoukan (婦女週刊) reported that a graduate of Zhejiang Provincial Women’s Normal School, Miss Yu Yuan (余嫄), was “crushed to death by a train due to wearing high heels.”Footnote ⁶² Similarly, a 1934 article in Sheying huabao (攝影畫報) explained Peking Municipal Commissioner Huang Fu’s (黃郛) resentment toward high heels: his beloved third daughter had fallen from a bicycle while wearing them, “fracturing her right leg so severely that she remained permanently disabled.”Footnote ⁶³ In addition, accounts of women slipping on tram tracks or having their heels caught in the rails – either narrowly escaping or succumbing to tram accidents – are abound.Footnote ⁶⁴

To explicate such danger to the Modern Girl, it is necessary to unpack the historical connotations of the mechanical objects. If high heels have come to signify a perilous yet alluring femininity, these vehicles of transit have been believed, consciously or not, to symbolize masculine power and velocity. The bicycle, for instance, was entangled in gendered stereotypes upon its introduction to China. Women were deemed unsuitable for cycling due to concerns that their physiological health might be impaired, which would further “impede future pregnancy and childbirth.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The train, as a machine of accelerated mobility, embodies a more complicated phenomenon. Anna Despotopoulou underscores that the emergence of the train both challenged the norm of travel as a male privilege, as evidenced in women’s travel narratives,Footnote ⁶⁶ and conversely, provoked a backlash in male-authored accounts that depicted women on the train as “victims of robbery and even murder.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Though Despotopoulou’s research centers on Victorian Britain, it sheds light on the Chinese Falling-down Girl, who likewise manifests a male-inflicted means of “regulation and control,” wherein “men tacitly or even violently attempt to compromise and limit women’s entitlement to such settings.”Footnote ⁶⁸

The masculine power embodied by high-speed machinery forms an interesting counterpoint to the corporeal vulnerability signified by women’s falls in high heels. What this juxtaposition reveals is that the Modern Girl is not only endangering but also endangered. This endangered status of women by men is more evident in the space of the tram. Offering a caustic verdict on Wang I-lü’s death, Mr. Liao Fan (了凡), for instance, exhorted “gentlemanly” men not to offer their seats to high-heeled women on crowded trams so that those women would “taste the suffering bestowed by high heels” and receive “a wake-up call.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In this way, men have become perpetrators of the dangers to the Modern Girl. What is ostensibly a female sartorial choice, unrelated to males, was nevertheless reframed as an occasion for male-inflicted corporeal discipline in the mechanic space that was marked by technological mobility. Yet having fomented such violence, males often tended to move a step back and reposition themselves as moral arbiters, adopting a paternalistic tone to warn women against the very perils that males themselves had helped to dramatize.Footnote ⁷⁰

Nonetheless, in the Republican-era male narratives, women did not always appear as victims toppled by the fast-moving vehicles. Louise Edwards’s study of “beauty pictures” demonstrates how male painters enhanced the “mobile agency” of citizen-beauties,Footnote ⁷¹ depicting them not only cycling, boarding trains, and rowing boats, but even piloting airplanes. These new modes of transportation did more than simply challenge the traditional Confucian dictum that “women’s place was confined to home;”Footnote ⁷² they also enabled women to expand their “social and spatial” reach,Footnote ⁷³ to “experience real speed and friction with the air,”Footnote ⁷⁴ and to embark on “traveling and adventuring around the world.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Edward’s findings appear to contradict the immobile falling-down girl. The crux of this construction may lie in the difference between high heels and technological vehicles as modern objects and in their respective relations to the emergent normative femininity. To better illustrate such differences, one might likewise use the New Woman as a “heuristic,” positioned against the Modern Girl, with the two forming opposite poles of a spectrum. On this spectrum, high heels signify a sartorial modernity that fashions the Modern Girl, while modern vehicles represent a mechanical modernity that underpins the figure of the New Woman. The Modern Girl was perceived as dangerous, her mobility suspect and in need of restraint, whereas the New Woman was advocated, her mobility to be expanded. And yet, sartorial modernity was not exclusively tied to the Modern Girl. As Edwards shows, the modernization of women’s clothing, together with the liberation of hands and feet that it entailed, also enabled women to “participat[e] productively in society and the household.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Such women might be labeled Modern Girls, but they in fact gravitated toward the New Woman end of the spectrum, since sartorial modernity here was imbued with the promise of productivity and social virtue.

Thus, the key to envisioning female mobility in modern China does not lie in a simple hierarchy that elevates mechanical modernity above sartorial modernity. Rather, it resides in the ends to which these modern objects were made to serve. Male discourses of women’s modernization reveal a selective utilitarianism: women might attend school, ride the tram, or even pilot an airplane, so long as such mobilities could be harnessed for the benefit of the nation and society. By contrast, when women permed their hair or slipped into high heels – gestures of self-fashioning rather than collective service – these acts were castigated as frivolous, excessive, and even dangerous. The central question of mobility, then, was never merely whether women could move, nor how far they could travel, but whether their movement could be made to embody an affirmative image of womanhood perceived by men.

Moreover, male appropriations of the falling-down girl were, unsurprisingly, in the service of a voyeuristic pleasure. A relevant example is Jin Jianfan’s (金劍凡) caricature (see Figure 3), which mocks the impracticality of women wearing high heels.Footnote ⁷⁷ Jin suggests that high-heeled women cannot run quickly and, in moments of urgency, would fall with a sound of “pa-la-ta” (clatter-thump).Footnote ⁷⁸ Beneath this cautionary rhetoric, undeniably, lies a thinly veiled eroticism – the girl’s skirt is lifted mid-fall and satisfies the male gaze. For women readers, the image may instead provoke a frisson of anticipated shame that reinforces self-regulation to avoid such incidents. This mode of graphic voyeurism and discipline was often suggested rather than overtly displayed, operating through implication and innuendo. In another cartoon (see Figure 4), a fashionable modern girl, sporting a perm and wearing a short qipao, is shown falling due to her high heels.Footnote ⁷⁹ Her thigh is prominently displayed as a group of men watch. While the caption frames their reaction as “a burst of gloating laughter,”Footnote ⁸⁰ the image evinces how women’s corporeal missteps are appropriated for the pleasure of the male spectators.

Figure 3.

Wearing high heels means you cannot run fastFootnote ⁸⁴ .

Figure 4.

The gloating roar of laughterFootnote ⁸⁵ .

This complex psychological matrix of mockery, voyeurism, and control is more vividly illustrated in Sun Qingyang’s (孫青羊) four-frame comic strip titled “The Blessings of High Heels” (see Figure 5).Footnote ⁸¹ In the first panel, a pair of high heels is enshrined, elevated to the status of a venerated object with the inscription “boundless merit.”Footnote ⁸² In the next, a gentleman in a tailored suit confides smugly to his male friend, “I have had the pleasure of embracing Miss Li on several occasions – all thanks to this object.”Footnote ⁸³

The third and fourth frames, stitched together in a cinematic montage, portray the woman’s fall – first while descending a slope with wavering balance, then while alighting from a boat, afraid of slipping into water – each time collapsing into the man’s waiting arms. What is striking here is how the male figure’s fetishistic reverence for high heels serves to mask his erotic fantasy and patriarchal control under the guise of chivalric rescue. The agency of the high heel is thus appropriated and exploited, transformed into an instrument that eroticizes the Falling-down Girl, rendering her both object of desire and subject of ridicule.

Figure 5.

The blessings of high heelsFootnote ⁸⁶ .

“Modern” is to blame

As a form of the “Modern Girl commodities,” the high heel embodies a global outlook, indicating a specter of foreign, modern, and potentially destabilizing incursion. For this reason, the anonymous contributor of “Abolish High Heels,” which is quoted above, attributes Wang I-lü’s death to an uncritical embrace of foreign modernity:

This commentary aligns with Louise Edwards’ observation of male intellectuals’ “dissatisfaction over the loss of their power over vestimentary modernity.”Footnote ⁸⁸ It also echoes Antonia Finnane’s argument that “‘modern’ must serve as an antonym to ‘Chinese’.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In this light, women’s departure from male control over dress was deemed not only a social transgression but also a challenge to both national and cultural identity. This breach of patriarchal authority thus provoked a retaliatory male backlash, framed under the banner of nationalism.

Sarah Stevens observes that the “[b]oth dangerous and seductive” Modern Girl is, in fact, a metonym for the simultaneously fearful and enthralling nature of modernity.Footnote ⁹⁰ Male ambivalence toward the Modern Girl is thus symptomatic of a broader love-hate relationship with modernity. It is this ambivalence that reveals what the males truly feared: not modernity per se but a form of modernity that might escape their control. Alternatively speaking, as long as the Modern Girl, though shaped by foreign influence, could be instrumentalized in the service of male desire, modernity might well be tolerable. This arrogant patriarchal mindset enabled men to pronounce, arbitrarily and authoritatively, whether women should or should not wear high heels. Women are objectified, rendered no different from the high heels.

Martha Nussbaum defines objectification through seven dimensions: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and the denial of subjectivity.Footnote ⁹¹ In this light, the problem was never that the Modern Girl was forbidden from wearing high heels, but rather that she was denied the autonomy to decide for herself whether or not to wear them. This foreclosure of choice renders the question of “to wear or not to wear” inherently indeterminate, for the very object of prohibition could simultaneously be mobilized as a means of regulation. This valorization is vividly staged in the “waiting hands” of the gentleman in Sun Qingyang’s cartoons, where the heel becomes a prop for male gallantry, and is further entrenched by the proliferation of sensationalized anecdotes about the origins of high heels – stories that, cloaked in irony or playful fascination, rehearse male sexual fantasies while reducing the sartorial agency of the Modern Girl to nothing more than a ruse to entice or gratify men. The existence of high heels thus is not so much a threat to male authority as a means by which that authority can be recalibrated and modernized.

There are three origin versions that prevailed. The first revolves around an eighteenth-century Englishman named Barmechin.Footnote ⁹² A libertine, Barmechin was infatuated with Harby, a maid in his father’s clothing shop, whom he implored to “glam herself up and dance in order to stir his lustful desires, ultimately using her as a plaything to gratify himself.”Footnote ⁹³ In pursuit of aesthetic enhancement, Barmechin conceived of the elevated heel and commissioned a shoemaker to craft a prototype, intending to augment the “gracefulness of Harby’s dancing.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The result of this experiment turned out to be successful, and therefore “women vying for beauty began to commission such shoes in droves,” with the intention of “attracting the male gaze and stimulating erotic arousal.”Footnote ⁹⁵

The second scenario is that high heels were invented by a short-statured woman.Footnote ⁹⁶ A representative version of this account centered on the French general Lafiteau, whose wife was a full head shorter than he. French lovers usually kiss, yet their height discrepancy rendered this practice cumbersome – “either Lafiteau had to kneel, or his wife had to stand on tiptoe.”Footnote ⁹⁷ In response, the general’s wife affixed wooden blocks to the heels of her shoes and thereby invented the first high-heeled shoes. This design facilitated kissing, strolling together, and dancing, and thus soon gained popularity.

The third posited that high heels originated in torrid, sandy terrains beyond China, devised by women to reduce the contact surface between their feet and the scorching earth. Er (耳) situated the origin in the Arab world, where the scorching desert heat far exceeded that of ordinary terrain.Footnote ⁹⁸ To avoid burning the soles of their feet, women elevated their heels. European women later adopted the practice upon observing that wearing high heels caused the “chest to protrude, the hips to tilt backward, the posture to curve sinuously, and one’s gait to become gracefully alluring.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Similarly, Xu Xiu (徐秀) contended that high heels originated in Persia to reduce the oppressive heat of desert sands.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Xu further metaphorized Shanghai as a realm of extravagant and unattainable splendor – a figurative “hot land” where “our modern girls likewise came to favor high heels.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

The three imaginaries almost invariably rely on a narrative archetype in which diminutive or vulnerable women please men through high heels. The subtext is that, although high heels, a Western import, symbolize modernity, such objects are ultimately seen as mere instruments for women to gratify men. Male supremacy constitutes the global norm: even though the Modern Girl may be Westernized, her Westernization does not alter the fundamental purpose of serving male desire. Consequently, in contrast to the weighty indictments and moral admonitions concerning the danger to/of the Modern Girl, these narrations, imbued with sexual fantasy, often adopt a tone of playful mockery, wherein men abandoned anxiety in favor of amusement.

Beyond an immediate gendered tension, the high heel readily lent itself to nationalist appropriation. This dynamic intensified in the late 1930s when China was once again embroiled in military conflicts. There emerged discourses that conflated femininity, consumption, and national survival. Male intellectuals and social commentators increasingly mobilized wartime scarcity to issue moral injunctions against women’s fashion. Leather, for instance, was reclassified as a strategic wartime material, with its proper allocation directed toward military use rather than the production of high-heeled shoes. Leather-made high heels thus came to signify a form of national disloyalty, and women were accordingly urged to renounce them in the name of patriotic duty. In addition, some critics argued that the importation of foreign commodities such as high heels was merely a means for imperialist countries to expand their market in China – a modern vanity that masked the financial ambitions of imperialist expansion.Footnote ¹⁰²

Consequently, to curb modern vanity and uphold patriotic duty, female modernity was further rearticulated through a discourse of labor, discipline, and corporeal utility. A “truly modern” woman, it was argued, must first “cultivate a robust body” and second “develop habits of manual work.”Footnote ¹⁰³ This new ideal necessitated a determined abandonment of “outdated high heels and cumbersome long qipaos.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Such articulations of modernity are deeply embedded in patriarchal and statist imperatives, positioning high heels as a charged symbol within what Lydia Liu identifies as the complex interplay between the female body and the nationalist discourse.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In addition, when the modern is to blame, there surfaces another set of tensions. Sarah Stevens has gauged the relationship between the Modern Girl and the urban landscape.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While I do not intend to pursue that line of inquiry in full here, it is crucial to note that high heels were often imagined as spatially bounded, belonging exclusively to the city and its metropolitan imaginary. In a piece of criticism, the author Zheng (征) urges modern girls to relinquish high heels, reasoning that high-heeled urban women should “remain mindful of their sisters in the interior regions, who have not even attained the basic liberation of unbinding their feet,” and that those who have been “liberated” must now “cast off these new shackles.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This high heel/footbinding juxtaposition, coupled with the coastal urban woman/interior woman dichotomy, constructs what we might call a gendered cartography of the foot. Within this cartography, on the one hand, high heels are found circulated outward from treaty ports and coastal metropolises to the interior and rural regions in a slow, uneven contagion – a trend echoing Dorothy Ko’s study of the end of footbinding, which unfolded not as a single rupture but as a prolonged oscillation between sentiments, temporal fluctuations, and fashion dictates.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ On the other hand, when invoked in a moralizing tone, this cartography imposed a nationalist burden on women. Modernity is no longer a space for individual expression or bodily autonomy; rather, it must align with the collective and serve as an exemplary model for women across the nation’s vast terrain.

Women’s bodies were thus drafted into the service of national virtue, spatialized across a moral geography of coast and interior, city and countryside. As the Modern Girl became increasingly saturated with anxieties about “superficial Westernization, hedonism, even avarice,”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ urban femininity was cast as morally compromised. Particularly alarming to critics was the perceived diffusion of these urban tendencies into the countryside. For instance, an anonymous author expressed alarm at refugee women from Pingdong (平東) counties, whose encounter with high-heeled city dwellers led them to adopt what he described as the “frivolous” habits of the metropolis.Footnote ¹¹⁰ His fear is not only that these women have been transformed, but that their return to the countryside would export urban moral decay to spaces still idealized as uncorrupted. High heels were therefore rendered symbols of excessive modernity, while bound feet, formerly the emblem of patriarchal oppression, were nostalgically refigured as markers of rural authenticity and feminine virtue. While the urban is feminized and pathologized, the rural is masculinized and sentimentalized, becoming a defensive stronghold for a wounded patriarchy as well as a last refuge from the encroachment of cosmopolitan womanhood.

To conclude, an essay on Dagongbao entitled “Modeng (摩登)? Maodun (矛盾)?” offers some insight.Footnote ¹¹¹ The bulk of this commentary is hackneyed, but the concept of maodun, which literally means the coexistence of irreconcilable opposites in a state of tension, may prompt further reflections on the epistemology of gender that high heels both manifest and obscure. As analyzed, high heels emerge as loci of profound maodun. However, the true maodun may extend beyond what this commentary delineates as sartorial contradictions. It may also crystallize, as aforementioned, in the dissonances between the New Woman and the Modern Girl and between the city and the countryside, in the ambivalent psyche of men – who denounced high heels even as they found themselves seduced by them – and perhaps further, in the collision between consumerist material culture and gendered subjectivities, or in the fraught dialectic between nationalistic sentiments and cultural imperialism.

To wear or not to wear?

Counteracting the negative appraisals shown above, the first commentary in defense of Wang I-lü appeared two weeks after her death. On July 29, 1939, Xinwenbao published an article titled “Wang I-lü Did Not Wear High Heels,” which reads as follows:

The letter offers an alternative account of Wang I-lü’s death. It is signed by Sun Huizhen, whose name indicates her female identity. Sun claimed that she was Wang’s classmate, a detail that lends her narrative additional credibility. Moreover, the epistolary format enhances the authenticity of the testimony. In Sun’s account, Wang was portrayed as a diligent and ascetic student who eschewed high-heeled shoes, as opposed to the Modern Girl.

This narrative finds further corroboration in an essay titled “Defending I-lü Against Slander.”Footnote ¹¹³ The author, Li Jianyi (李健儀), who likewise identified herself as Wang’s classmate, offered a more elaborate portrait of Wang’s life. Li claimed that “In our three or four years as classmates, I never once saw Wang wear high heels or perm her hair,” and asserted that Wang possessed “none of the vices typical of the modern girl.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Beyond her academic excellence, Wang was praised for her perseverance and discipline. Wang was said to have participated in military training in Caohejing (漕河涇), a suburban area of Shanghai. Moreover, after the outbreak of the Battle of Shanghai on August 13, 1937, Wang served as a volunteer nurse and tended to the injured soldiers.

These two writings, both authored by women, serve to illuminate the threshold upon which Wang I-lü as a female student stood, somewhere between the Modern Girl and the New Woman. Perry Link observes the girl student “did more than go beyond proper women’s roles” and, indeed, “carried within it the interest of a paradox.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Chen Pingyuan reflects on how, in the late Qing and early Republican era, the female student emerged as a “mobile landscape” that drew the gaze of male urban spectators, her identity drifting ambiguously between that of the prostitute and the New Woman.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Zhang Yun unpacks this further: on the one hand, as female education expanded, the girl student was increasingly “integrated into the modernization agenda,”Footnote ¹¹⁷ imagined as an ideal vessel for both traditional virtue and modern knowledge; on the other, this exposure to the modern, often Western, culture rendered her a destabilizing figure, one that threatened to unmoor the Confucian gender order from within. The girl student thus embodies a hybridity, and it is probably this hybridity that rendered Wang I-lü’s death narratively flexible, generating the discordant narratives.

Given the ambiguous role of the girl student, Wang’s classmates’ objections warrant further discussion. On the surface, their aversion functioned as a defense of Wang’s posthumous dignity, articulated through reasons for disapproving high heels. Li Jianyi, for instance, conceded that most Shanghai women delighted in high heels, yet cast herself among the rare few who loathed high heels as a “fashionable folly that squanders money and imperils health.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Yet, placed within the longer history of women’s emancipation, another reading emerges: in repeatedly vindicating Wang in the press, Wang’s classmates were indeed vindicating female students as a whole, ensuring that women’s newly gained access to public education would not be curtailed.Footnote ¹¹⁹

In contrast to what Dorothy Ko terms the “second voices,”Footnote ¹²⁰ the testimonies cited above might be more fittingly described as firsthand voices – unmediated expressions spoken directly by women themselves. These firsthand voices emerged alongside women’s gradual ascent in social standing, which made it possible for them to articulate their own views, both for and against, on the wearing of high heels. Beyond those mentioned, others too voiced their dissenting voices. Xiu Juan (秀娟), for instance, argued that high heels ought to be abolished and compared them to footbinding – both unsanitary, Westernized, and physiologically harmful.Footnote ¹²¹ From Li Jianyi to Xiu Juan, it is observed that women’s arguments against high heels do not differ substantially from those proposed by men. These critiques tend to converge on several key points: high heels are unhygienic, emblematic of excessive Western modernity, detrimental to health, and contrary to the ideals of women’s emancipation.

Yet alongside the opponents, there were female “defenders of high heels.”Footnote ¹²² Lifei Nüshi (麗菲女士), for example, listed the common objections to high heels and proceeded to dismantle them one by one. Most pointedly, she challenged the comparison to footbinding by posing a rhetorical question: “If one looks at the bare feet of women who wear high heels, do they resemble the grotesque, disfigured feet of our country’s bound women?”Footnote ¹²³ In this deft rejoinder, Lifei Nüshi not only severed the symbolic link between the two practices but also satirized the moralism that cloaks itself in feminist concern while seeking to police the female body anew. Moreover, Lifei Nüshi enumerated the advantages of wearing high heels. They enhance the aesthetic appeal of the feet, she argued, and help to correct imperfections in the legs. Her reasoning is steeped in an unabashedly feminine sensibility – her attention to beauty, to elegance, and to the visual harmony of the body reveals a concern absent from male critiques.

It is perhaps this pursuit of beauty that explains the popularity of high heels among women at the time. Zhang Yun observes that ever since the 1910s, the girl student, who favored Western clothing, emerged as a new style authority in cities such as Shanghai, supplanting courtesans and prostitutes who had once dictated fashion.Footnote ¹²⁴ This shift points to a broader redistribution of sartorial fashion. It is said that the decline of the prostitution industry and the emergence of dancing girls changed the footwear fashion in wartime Shanghai.Footnote ¹²⁵ Whereas prostitutes often wore ornate embroidered shoes, dancing girls, more aligned with Westernized tastes, usually purchased high heels from foreign shops. This change of fashion not only led to the dancing girl’s ascent as fashion’s new muse but also resulted in the fall of traditional shoe markets. Beyond girl students and dancing girls, other figures, such as film stars and performing artists, further amplified the heel’s allure. Despite the fact that heels made women prone to fall down, their adoption of high heels gave them public visibility and transformed them into a desirable commodity.

In addition, pictorials and advertisements also played a pivotal role in shaping new ideals of femininity. High heels, as a particularly charged commodity, bore clear traces of the consumerist logic of commodifying the female body. A 1934 issue of Sheying huabao, for example, featured a close-up of a film actress in open-toe heels, accompanied by the caption, “The hollowed shoe reveals vivid toenails – how could hands monopolize beauty? How could men not fall at her feet?”Footnote ¹²⁶ Fashion columns, too, tracked seasonal trends. The 1937 Furen huabao (婦人畫報), for instance, introduced that year’s early spring footwear, with detailed descriptions of popular high-heeled styles.Footnote ¹²⁷ Meanwhile, as Dal Lago argues, high-heeled modern girls appeared frequently in calendar posters and pictorials, which functioned as venues not only for “introduc[ing] modern commodities to China’s urban market,”Footnote ¹²⁸ but also, more significantly, for appropriating women as “marketable and disposable merchandise,” whose “association with luxury items” was naturalized and, in turn, reinforced the desirability of the modern commodities.Footnote ¹²⁹

In speaking of commodification, it is necessary to address the price of high heels. In the newspapers of the time, there were anecdotes of marital discord – quarrels sparked by modern wives who, in pursuit of fashion, spent extravagantly on high heels, seemingly indifferent to their husbands’ financial strain.Footnote ¹³⁰ In addition, there were accounts of female students who, out of consideration for their families, chose not to indulge in such luxuries.Footnote ¹³¹ These narratives offer a glimpse into the high cost of high heels and further direct our attention to the question of affordability.

Based on advertisements in Shanghai newspapers, we can roughly compile a price list (see Table 1). The table suggests that the price of high heels remained relatively stable between 1925 and 1940, averaging around 5 yuan per pair. Starting in the 1940s, however, prices rose sharply. Notably, although price estimates over this roughly 25-year span are only approximate, given the multiple wars and shifts in monetary policy that occurred, comparing high heels with rice (rightmost column) still yields two observations. First, the price of high heels fluctuated roughly in tandem with that of rice, which supports the reliability of the data. Probably, the inflation of high heels is firstly attributed to the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, after which foreign aid was disrupted and the currency system faltered. This was further exacerbated by the subsequent civil war, during which the Republican government’s currency policies triggered hyperinflation, causing the price to soar. Second, high heels were indeed expensive. If we take 1939, just before the onset of hyperinflation, as a baseline, we can estimate that the average daily grain consumption per Shanghai resident was 0.219 kg, costing approximately 0.0386 yuan.Footnote ¹³² This means that a single pair of high heels cost about 100 times the average daily grain expenditure. By this measure, high heels were a luxury item.

Table 1.

The price of high heels from 1925 to 1949 in ShanghaiFootnote ¹³³

The steep cost of high heels may have served to deepen the controversy surrounding their wear. Their elevated price, by making them rare and coveted, may have added to their allure, yet this same exclusivity also made them an easy target of criticism, cast as frivolous indulgences and symbols of superficial vanity. Such vanity was understood as contravening the traditional patriarchal expectations of women, who were required to observe the “Three Obediences and Four Virtues,” one of which demanded modesty in appearance and thus adherence to frugality. Thus, the question of whether a woman should wear high heels transcended mere matters of fashion or personal preference; it was inextricably linked to the issue of affordability, which in turn partly became a mechanism for men to police women and prevent them from succumbing to vanity when women’s purchasing power increased.

Beyond pricing, policy factors also played a role. Let’s shift our perspective from the coastal metropolis of Shanghai to the inland city of Taiyuan. On May 1, 1935, the Public Security Bureau of Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, issued an ordinance declaring that “all prostitutes are required to wear a peach-blossom badge, have permed hair, wear high-heeled shoes, and their sleeves must not extend beyond the elbow.”Footnote ¹³⁴ This act of sartorial segregation, aimed at “differing prostitutes from decent women,”Footnote ¹³⁵ has transfigured the high heel from a Modern Girl commodity into a visual shorthand for sex work and, by extension, a signifier of moral degeneracy, vanity, and urban corruption. The policy echoed the New Life Movement, launched by Chiang Kai-shek in 1935, which sought to refashion the everyday through a Confucian-inflected regime of propriety, righteousness, integrity, and shame. The implicit connection between this policy and the Movement can be attested by the Bulletin of the Shanxi New Life Movement Promotion Association, in which articles condemning high heels can be seen.Footnote ¹³⁶ In this way, the high heel has transcended mere adornment to become a flashpoint in the struggle over national virtue and bodily decorum.

Empowerment in which way?

When Wang I-lü’s death is employed as an event for analyzing the high-heeled women, another female figure in this incident – Wang I-lü’s elder sister, Wang I-hui (王以徽) – warrants further attention. Identified as the court clerk at the Second Special District Court, Wang I-hui was firstly reported to accompany Wang I-lü to a teacher’s residence.Footnote ¹³⁷ Yet a subsequent report, published two days later on July 18, appears to revise the account: it was not Wang I-hui but two other sisters, Wang I-de (王以德) and Wang I-ts’ung (王以純), who were present during that fateful visit to I-lü’s classmate.Footnote ¹³⁸ Wang I-hui, it seems, only became involved after Wang I-lü’s death, when she petitioned the authorities to waive the autopsy and took responsibility for managing the body.

Although available information is limited, the news coverage of this incident allows us to piece together a preliminary sketch of the Wang family. The father of the four sisters is reported to have held a position in the Department of Judicial Administration at the Second Special District Court,Footnote ¹³⁹ which serves as an indicator of bureaucratic respectability and some degree of social standing. Both Wang I-lü and Wang I-hui appear to have received a relatively advanced education, at least at the secondary level, which suggests not only the family’s relative affluence but also its progressive views regarding women’s education. In addition, a valuable detail appears in the Eastern Times Photo Supplement.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ There we can find a photograph of Wang I-hui (see Figure 6), captioned with a brief but telling description: “Miss Martha Wang, graduate of Bridgeman [sic.] Memorial School, Shanghai.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Bridgman Memorial School, established in 1843 by missionary Elijah Coleman Bridgman, was the first institution in Shanghai dedicated to the education of girls. Wang I-hui thus was positioned within a lineage of Chinese women shaped by missionary pedagogy, cosmopolitan aspiration, and the promise of modern femininity.

Figure 6.

Miss Wang I-hui, a graduate of Bridgman Memorial SchoolFootnote ¹⁴³ .

More crucially, in the photograph, Wang I-hui is clearly wearing high heels. This sartorial detail invites two plausible interpretations. One is that Wang I-hui deliberately chose to wear high heels and a short qipao to be photographed. The other is that this ensemble constituted her everyday attire. Given the popularity of short hair, abbreviated qipao, and high-heeled shoes among young urban women in the late 1920s and the caption in the bottom right-hand corner indicating that the image was “taken in this newspaper’s photography room”Footnote ¹⁴² rather than in a commercial photo studio equipped with props, the latter explanation seems more persuasive. It is likely that this outfit reflects Wang I-hui’s habitual style as an educated young woman from a well-off and socially respectable family.

Yet in the end, whether Wang I-hui wore high heels as a matter of daily routine is no more important than the unresolved question of whether Wang I-lü was wearing heels on the day she died. Even if we were to establish that Wang I-hui wore high heels nearly a decade earlier, such a fact would offer no definitive evidence about Wang I-lü’s sartorial choices. And yet, Wang I-hui deserves our attention not for what she might reveal about her sister’s footwear, but for what she herself represents. Unlike Wang I-lü, who was a girl student, Wang I-hui stands for another figure equally entangled with the iconography of the high heel: the career woman. Though we cannot ascertain whether Wang I-hui had assumed the position of court clerk by 1929, the portrayal of her as a career woman in reports surrounding Wang I-lü’s death, when placed alongside the photograph in which she wears high heels, already invites reflection on the association between career women and high heels.

Career women usually wear high heels,Footnote ¹⁴⁴ and to understand such a sartorial choice, we might need to firstly figure out their true identity. Just as women are heterogeneous, with no clear boundaries between individuals and groups, the career woman is likewise multifaceted. In order to circumvent a reductive understanding of the career woman, we’d better situate her alongside her kindred counterparts to explore how a career woman could be simultaneously the New Woman, the girl student, and the Modern Girl.

The New Woman comes first. Though frequently cast as a figure still tethered to familial duties, the New Woman also referred to those who embraced modern education and forged independent careers in defiance of traditional domestic roles.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Likewise, the origins of the career woman can be traced to the female student, a transitional figure whose pursuit of knowledge marked the first step toward selfhood. With education came employment, and with employment, a measure of financial freedom. Lien argues that “a visible and measurable earning power granted them some autonomy in spending; they also felt relatively self-confident in their ability.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ This economic independence, modest though it may have been, enabled women to afford high heels, which were not merely accessories of fashion but markers of aspiration.

The Modern Girl also serves as a facet of the career woman. Madeleine Dong revisits Yang Gonghuai’s (楊公懷) 1939 commentary, “Career Women in Shanghai,” to probe the relationship between the “Modern Girl look” and female employment.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In a time when women began to step beyond the domestic sphere, Yang nevertheless painted a bleak portrait: in a male-dominated society, female professionals were undervalued, exploited, and often reduced to mere “vases”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ – decorative, dispensable, and mute. Their lives, Yang lamented, were marked by a bitterness. This bitterness stemmed, first, from structural scarcity: job opportunities were limited, and those that did exist demanded not only intellect and refinement but also beauty. Employers were “especially concerned with maixiang (selling appearance 賣相)” when hiring women, forcing women to become hyper-conscious of their looks.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ There thus emerged the stylized professional: “permed hair, the latest fashions, high heels rising over three inches, powdered faces, and crimson rouge.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The second and more insidious source of the bitterness was the sexual harassment the career woman endured, often from superiors, sometimes even from clients. And yet, constrained by economic need and social expectations, they had little choice but to endure it. In light of this, the “Modern Girl look” serves not merely as a way of stylish self-fashioning but as a double-edged sword for the career woman. On the one hand, it offered a strategic allure for securing employment in a market where desirability was currency. On the other, it exposed them to suspicion, objectification, and abuse.

Of course, wages matter. Yang noted that salaries for career women ranged from a meager few yuan to, at best, twenty or thirty yuan a month,Footnote ¹⁵¹ which was scarcely enough to sustain a household, let alone to finance the aesthetic demands of professional life. A single pair of high heels, costing around five yuan, constituted a luxury and, of course, a burden. A career woman’s monthly earnings were therefore often not even enough “to cover the cost of clothes and cosmetics.”Footnote ¹⁵² In this light, the polished surface of the Modern Girl look indeed concealed a deeper strain.

Conclusion: a hauntology of foot fetishism

By deploying the high heel as an object and Wang I-lü’s death as an event, this article contributes methodologically through a microhistorical and object-oriented approach. Such a bottom-up perspective departs from prior scholarship that privileges highly visible figures while neglecting the ordinary. Wang I-lü has thus transfigured into a figure of symbolic significance, and the high heel has served as a site of contestation over the competing visions of femininity, corporeality, and modernity.

The high heel’s contested significance naturally leads to a broader inquiry into the female foot in the longue durée of women’s footwear. In imperial China, footbinding persisted for centuries as an embodied practice that, as Dorothy Ko argues, was not reducible to the control of women’s bodies but entangled with aspirations for beauty, status, erotic appeal, cultural identity, and wealth.Footnote ¹⁵³ The anti-footbinding campaigns of the late Qing and early Republican periods politicized the female foot further, subsuming it into broader discourses of women’s liberation and democratic reform. With the rise of high-heeled shoes in the following decades, the female foot continued to be a cultural focal point.

This enduring fixation on women’s feet may be understood as a form of “foot fetishism.” Not merely in the narrow psycho-sexual sense but in a broader cultural register, this fetishism indexes an obsessive engagement with the female foot as a site of aesthetic, ideological, and corporeal investment. First, this libidinal fetishism embodies a Freudian tension between repression and desire, which can be most vividly illustrated by the figure of the Falling-down Girl. This figure provokes a fear of castration, understood not literally but symbolically, as a response to the destabilization of patriarchal authority by foreign modernity. In this light, footbinding, though once abolished, resurfaces in male nostalgia, while the high heel, like the Modern Girl, becomes an object of both desire and disdain. Second, the fetishism is governed by Foucauldian biopolitics. It is implicated in state projects that construe the regulation of female bodies as inseparable from the shaping of modern polity. The high heel, like the precedent-binding cloth, becomes a focal object of nationalist discourse, indexing ideological distinctions between progress and backwardness, urbanity and rurality, and patriotism and Westernization. Last but not least, this fetishism is unmistakably feminist. It not only reveals women’s desire for modern fashion but, more importantly, provides an opportunity to appreciate female diversity and to understand the varied attitudes and positions of women during the process of modernization.

A woman’s foot is never a mere physical organ; rather, it is regulated by the argued foot fetishism. Therefore, the significance of the high heel lies in its capacity to externalize this foot fetishism, rendering it visible and available for critical inquiry. While this article does not delve into the post-1949 era, the foot fetishism it traces still haunts. In narratives emerging in 1949, a more radical discourse was taking shape. The high heel came to be denounced as “a shameful emblem of how women, under the reactionary rule of bureaucratic and comprador regimes, were commodified and treated as playthings,”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ and was deemed an artifact to be eradicated. Women were called upon to cast off their heels and move from the city to the countryside – to labor, to take part in the construction of the new socialist nation. With this, the hauntology of foot fetishism turns to its next chapter.