Eva de Francisco

Fascinating and horrific at the same time. Go back to ancient China and discover how women were oppressed and how they got by.
This is the story of a woman of the Chinese high society that after the death of her mother gets to live with her grandmother and learn about medicinal remedies for women.
She is so afraid not to obey by tradition that the story is very painful to read at times. It was very interesting to see how women sacrificed differently in different cultures in the name of what men consider beautiful. The process of binding their feet amounts to torture, but only women of the best families could do it, not poor women destined to be at best “working” women or just concubines. The breaking of the toes, the physical fragility and restrictions to move around with those feet, the infections, all is described with a lot of emotion in the book.
Even though professionally, the main character of the book reaches unimaginable highs for the times, treating sick and pregnant women, and even writing and publishing a book with clinical cases, personally her world is small, and she cannot imagine it differently, more equitable, broader, freer. The book crashed my soul a bit, reminding me how painfully slow change is and how blind we are to our own problems.