Gender Roles In Fairy Tales

Fairy tales bind a culture together, the old tell the young stories that have been passed down generations. They are the root and inspiration for many films, books, poems, and other works. Today, the whimsical stories are entertainment, but when they were still being written down for the first times, they were tales of warnings and lessons on morals. Even though they are not used to teach children anymore, the messages that they display still take hold on young children. Since fairy tales where told and written down when women were not considered primary members of society, the effects can be harmful to girls and enforce gender roles. A staple of the fairy tale genre is the damsel in distress, usually a princess. The princess is pictured as what the ideal image of what women should act and look like. In the older versions of the classic tale of Sleeping Beauty, the princess is passive and gentle. The princesses are solely tasked with waiting around for their prince, and following …show more content…
This has long been deep rooted that every woman should want to become a mother, and in the times of these fairy tales they did not have a choice. In Gaimbattista Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia,” Talia awakes to see two babies on her chest, and without even questioning where she is or who these babies belong too, she begins to care for them. Talia has the idea that mother hood is such an important part of who she is to become, she does not even question the fact she just wakes up with babies. In Maleficent, the women no longer wait around for their prince, but they are still expected to become a maternal figure. The fact that Maleficent becomes a maternal figure for Aurora is seen as a redeeming quality, meaning that she has finally become what she needed to become. Even in a movie from an era where women do not have to be mothers if they do not want to, mother hood is still seen as a fulfillment of a woman’s