“On hot nights or on baking days,” Jacoby states, “you may see these women with uncovered breasts, or even entirely naked without embarrassment, but you will never see them with bare feet, and no male relations, except the husband, will ever see the feet and lower part of the legs of the women in the house.  These women have their modesty in their feet, and also their coquetry; to unbind the feet of a woman is for a man a voluptuous act, and the touch of the bands produces the same effect as a corset still warm from a woman’s body on a European man.  A woman’s beauty, that which attracts and excites a man, lies in her foot; in Mordvin love poems celebrating the beauty of women there is much about her attire, especially her embroidered chemise, but as regards the charms of her person the poet is content to state that ‘her feet are beautiful;’ with that everything is said.  The young peasant woman of the central provinces as part of her holiday raiment puts on great woolen stockings which come up to the groin and are then folded over to below the knee.  To uncover the feet of a person of the opposite sex is a sexual act, and has thus become the symbol of sexual possession, so that the stocking or foot-gear became the emblem of marriage, as later the ring. (It was so among the Jews, as we see in the book of Ruth, Chapter III, v. 4, and Chapter IV, vv. 7 and 8).  St. Vladimir the Great asked in marriage the daughter of Prince Rogvold; as Vladimir’s mother had been a serf, the princess proudly replied that she ’would not uncover the feet of a slave.’  At the present time in the east of Russia when a young girl tries to find out by divination whom she will have as a husband the traditional formula is ’Come and take my stockings off.’  Among the populations of the north and east, it is sometimes the bride who must do this for her husband on the wedding night, and sometimes the bridegroom for his wife, not as a token of love, but as a nuptial ceremony.  Among the professional classes and small nobility in Russia parents place money in the stocking of their child at marriage as a present for the other partner, it being supposed that the couple mutually remove each other’s foot raiment, as an act of sexual possession, the emblem of coitus.” (Paul Jacoby, Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, December, 1903, p. 793.) The practice among ourselves of children hanging up their stockings at night for presents would seem to be a relic of the last-mentioned custom.

While we may witness the sexual symbolism of the foot, with or without an associated foot-fetichism, most highly developed in Asia and Eastern Europe, it has by no means been altogether unknown in some stages of western civilization, and traces of it may be found here and there even yet.  Schinz refers to the connection between the feet and sexual pleasure as existing not only among the Egyptians and the Arabs, but among the ancient Germans and the modern Spaniards,[16]