Most of the quantitative data in this paper come from county surveys done from 1989 to 1992 as part of a large, joint project. They were collected by Professor Chen Zhiping, Dr. Lin Tingshui, Professor Shih Yilong, Dr. Zhou Xianghe, and Dr. Zheng Ling, all, at that time, of Xiamen University. I am grateful for the hospitality and cooperation of these and other colleagues: numerous members of Xiamen University; Professor Chuang Ying-chang and Dr. Pan Ying-hai of the Institute of Ethnology (Academia Sinica, Taiwan); and several western-based colleagues. Funded by the Luce Foundation, and headed by Arthur P. Wolf of Stanford University, the project is making available comparable data on a wide range of topics from approximately thirty-six hundred women and men over age sixty-five, from twelve widely dispersed counties, mostly in Minnan. While my participation in direct fieldwork was constrained by bureaucratic limitations, my week-long visits to fieldsites were made fruitful by the efforts of Professor Shih and Drs. Zhou and Zheng, who accompanied me to their fieldsites and generously shared expertise and information. I also thank Arthur Wolf for making available data from his extensive field work in this project.These data, drawn largely from the work of others, are used here against the background of two large surveys I conducted in China with cadres of the Women's Federation. Our work was supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, for which I offer our thanks. This material is still being analyzed, but provides detailed material on footbinding and economic contexts for five thousand Sichuan and 660 Fujian women who were over sixty-five in 1991–1992. I am most grateful for the efficient and friendly cooperation of the Women's Federation in the accumulation of this large and carefully collected data set. Another sort of acknowledgment is also due here: to the people I interviewed directly during my field visits. Some social researchers now name their informants, to give individual persons a deserved voice in the historical record. With real regret, I do not provide my informants' names in publication or in my fieldnotes. For the present, I prefer to maintain the anthropologically traditional anonymity of sources.