Gender Stereotypes In Jack And The Beanstalk

Fairy tales have become so established in the present day that we almost feel as though we are born with them. Almost anyone could recite the story of Jack and the Beanstalk or Cinderella, though not many of us would be able to identify where we originally learnt the tale. Predominantly, picture books and fairy tales are used to inform and entertain children, with illustrations being particularly useful as a way of communicating beyond language barriers, helping the reader make sense of phrases and ideas. Such stories help provide escapism from a harsh society and very often appear to reflect the era in which they were written. The very first European books were hand-printed and therefore expensive, meaning that only the wealthy could afford …show more content…
Tales became more politically conservative and were very stereotypical; Friedmar Apel described the history of the fairy tale as “the history of the struggle of the imagination against its increasing suppression by reality”. For example, Charles Kingsley’s ‘Water Babies’ heavily reflected the social change in the 19th century whereby child labour was abolished. However, as the book has evolved, so have the illustrations, causing some of the original meaning of the images to become lost or altered in newer reinterpretations of the …show more content…
From the mid-1960s, Ladybird book publishers began to produce a series of simple yet informative children’s books under the name ‘Peter and Jane’. Heavily illustrated, these were extremely sexist and again emphasised a patriarchal society. In one image(Fig.4), Peter can be seen making and decorating a very extravagant toy cart, where Jane is merely watching over him. In this era Jane wouldn’t be allowed to take part in manly hobbies such as building, she would be expected to conform to her gender stereotype and help her mother with cooking and cleaning. From 1980, the Peter and Jane series stopped being printed and children’s books took a slightly less sexist