pondered a good book.

I recently finished reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan set in 19th century rural China. It tells in great detail the life Chinese women led then-often full of isolation, physical mutilation, and emotional abuse-and how the women rose above much of this through their friendships and the use of a secret language-only for women. Girls were matched with "sworn sisters" from their home village, or one "old same" that matched their birth dates, birth order, parentage and other points of comparison-these girls swore to be each other's emotional "other half" until death. This relationship was stronger that marriage, and respected highly by the culture.

The description of footbinding forced me to put the book down several times. The idea of forcing my daughter to walk, sobbing and pleading, on rolled feet until her bones broke is something completely out of my ken-but these mothers were doing this so that their daughters would make good marriages and be found attractive by their husbands-who they did not meet until two days after the wedding! Measure your foot....then look at the ruler. The ideal adult woman's foot was 7 cm. long. How does your compare?

Only as the mother of a son would the new wife gain any standing in the household of her new husband. She became the servant of her mother-in-law...and was completely at her mercy. Bound to the house by her crippled feet, the daughter-in-law could only wait until she either bore sons or her mother-in-law died. And if she wasn't married to the eldest son, even then she was only one step up the ladder.

The narrator relates the most horrific events in a very matter-of-fact tone. This was how life was-children die, husbands beat wives, daughters were worthless. Nothing was going to change it, so it must be accepted. Duty and honor are the two most important things-above love, above
freedom, above joy.

I have read other books purporting to be literature about the woman's experience-
The Secret Life of Bees (loathed it),
The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (just plain stupid on any level),
Angry Housewives Eating Bonbons (chick lit),
The Painted Veil (good but not great)
The Red Tent (this one I did like)

but the only other book on this topic that I found to be on the level of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan was A Thousand Splendid Suns.