Patriarchy and the messages to young girls and boys Fairy Tales Patriarchy and the messages to young girls and boys

Sleeping Beauty

Cinderella

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Beauty and the Beast

Marcia K. Lieberman: Some Day My Prince Will Come Patterns in folktales: The beauty contest is a constant and primary device.(Beautiful girls are first punished and later rewarded. They are never ignored. Good temper and meekness and associated with beauty. Ill-temper is associated with ugliness. The beautiful girl does not have to DO anything to be rewarded; she does not need to show pluck, resourcefulness and wit. Poor girls are chosen by princes because they have been seen by them. It is always the interesting special girl who is in trouble. The heroines are victims, even martyrs. Good fairies and dwarfs are non-sexualized. There are often powerful bad older women. Marriage itself is rarely depicted. Most of the heroines are the children of widows or widowers or are absent. Marcia K. Lieberman: Some Day My Prince Will Come

Lois Tyson and Fairy Tales Feminity= Passivity Folktales encourage women to tolerate familial abuse. Marriage is the only desirable reward for “right” conduct. Men musy be superproviders without emotional needs. Girls must be young beautiful and sweet in order to be worthy of romantic love. Girls must be rescued by dashing young men from dire situations. Good girls are gentle submissive, virginal and angelic. They are awakened into sexual potency by by the man who claims her Bad girls are violent, aggressive, greedy, worldly and duplicitous or monstrous, vain, petty and jealous. Lois Tyson and Fairy Tales

Work in groups to find Tyson’s and Liebermans’s Elements in Cinderella and in Beauty and the Beast. Write down answers from the group in your own notes. Exercise

Class discussion: What are the implications for young girls and boys who read these fairy tales? How do the 8 questions that Tyson poses at the end of her article apply to the folktales we have just discussed?

Homework Read: Dustlands: Blood Red Road, 39 Read and annotate the essay, “Young Women in dystopia” located under required readings on our website. You should be able to refer to a copy of it in class. Homework