Li Ju-Chen's Novel Against Foot Binding Summary from a Li Ju-Chen « Flowers in the Mirror » (C. 1800) excerpt. Excerpt taken from Estelle B. Freedman’s « The Essentialist Feminist Reader » (2007) Li Ju-Chen (1763 – 1830) was a Chinese novelist who wrote satirical novel about Chinese social customs. In the early eighteenth century, Chinese society was really cruel upon women. In order to respect Confucian ideals, women must respect obedience for their husband while these former one acquired concubines. Furthermore, women must endure physical coercion. They were grown as beautiful and weak creatures. At the end of the eighteenth century, lot of male and female authors were engaged in favor of women’s right to education. They also reported the high rate of widow suicide. One of the most cruel practice that maintained women’s obedience was foot binding. As foot was perceived as a mark of beauty, young women have their foot bound until their became more thin. It was really painful for women. It was one of the social customs that established women as lovely but weak and illiterate creatures. Li Ju-Chen’s novel Flowers in the Mirror is directly opposed to foot binding and other violent social customs imposed to women. It depicted a fictional Kingdom of Women were women stand at men’s social position and vice versa in order to highlight the absurdity and inhumanity of violent practices against women. It also points out that gender roles are not designed by a natural order but only by arbitrary social customs. In Flowers in the Mirror, we learn about a male merchant who ashore to the Kingdom of Women to sale cosmetics for “women”. The merchant try to sell his furnitures to the King himself but as he do so, he is captured by the King’s maids that tie him up. He then learns that the King wants him to became the Imperial Consort. In order to acquire this new status, he must be submitted to the violent practices that women endure in order to became himself a woman. These practices are described with many details to make the reader feel the merchant’s pain. As the torture goes on, he finally asks to be killed and wants to commit suicide. But he ends up as a beautiful lady and suffers in silence. This fiction has been really important for the fight against foot binding. It permitted to spark a wake-up call about the inhumanity and absurdity of foot binding. Unfortunately, this practice continued until the early twentieth century.