For the past year I have been working with Britain’s BBC television to make a documentary series on the history of women. In the latest round of filming there was an incident that haunts me. It took ...

An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. Impact Link Foot binding, the practice of crushing young women’s feet into tiny “lotus” feet, was widespread in China for nearly a thousand years. Long seen ...

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 ...

For several hundred years, millions of Chinese girls had their bodies painfully misshapen to conform to a prevailing social expectation. Intact feet, girls were told, would damage their marriage ...