Foot binding was practiced in various forms and its prevalence varied in different regions. A less severe form in Sichuan, called "cucumber foot" () due to its slender shape, folded the four toes under but did not distort the heel and taper the ankle. Some working women in Jiangsu made a pretense of binding while keeping their feet natural. Not all women were always bound—some women once bound remained bound all through their lives, but some were only briefly bound, and some were bound only until their marriage. Footbinding was most common among women whose work involved domestic crafts and those in urban areas; it was also more common in northern China where it was widely practiced by women of all social classes, but less so in parts of southern China such as Guangdong and Guangxi where it was largely a practice of women in the provincial capitals or among the gentry. Foot binding limited the mobility of girls, so they became engaged in manual labor since childhood. It is thought that the necessity for women labour in the fields due to a longer crop-growing season in the South and the impracticability of bound feet working in wet rice fields limited the spread of the practice in the countryside of the South.