Available online 9 September 2022

An agent-based model was developed to represent demographic, marital, and economic data from the period of Chinese history during which footbinding was practiced. This general model of the Chinese social ecology is used to understand the maintenance and cessation of footbinding in the context of contested explanations from the social sciences. The Labor Market Hypothesis states that parents initiated and maintained the practice to exploit the handicraft labor of their daughters, and that footbinding ceased when cheap machined thread and cloth entered rural China. The Evolutionary Sciences Hypothesis states that footbinding assisted in achieving hypergamous marriages for daughters by raising their value on the marriage market, was maintained due to fitness concerns facing parents who feared daughters would be unmarriageable if not bound, and ceased because of influences of foreign norms. Factors including length of generations, monetary value of handicraft labor, adult sex ratio, rate of polygyny, age at marriage, inheritance and more inform this model. Since the rate of population growth and peak rate of footbinding at cessation are known, the model evaluates the two hypotheses in terms of their relative consistency with these two outcomes.

Agent-based model

Footbinding

Cultural evolution

Women

China

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc.