Feminist Fairy Tales/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Anvilicious: A book cannot be subtle with a title like Feminist Fairy Tales. Apart from the obvious feminist agenda in the rewritten stories, Barbara Walker encourages women to worship and imitate "the Mother Goddess" (even as a self-proclaimed atheist) because she believes that such worship will make people behave better, stop fighting wars, become more moral, etc. Practically every story features either some reference to the benevolence, wisdom, power, etc. of the Mother Goddess or harsh criticism of those who do not worship or sufficiently appreciate this deity.
  • Fair for Its Day: by its time of publication (mid-Nineties), a feminist-oriented revision of popular stories was an unusal, welcomed thing. Nowadays, some of the ideologies permeated in the rewritten stories, like women being inherently nurturing, and the heroines being quite passive even under standards of fairy tales, are seen as retrograde and not up to date to the current state of the Feminist movements.
  • Idiot Plot: present in several, but the one in "The Weaver" (the alleged retelling of the Arachne myth) stands as one of the worst. To wit, in this one every mentioned character, named or not, has a chance to off the oppressive villain, but no one takes it, and so they keep suffering under his tyrannical rule.
  • Nausea Fuel: Cinder-Helle's pumpkin, mouse, etc are transformed into coach and horse etc by splashing her menstrual blood all over them. Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo, this ain't.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The ending of Fairy Gold, in which the statue kills a man and this is presented as a good thing.
  • Tear Jerker: Rana's story. Sometimes love truly isn't enough.
  • Unfortunate Implications: From the Westernization of traditionally non-Western fairy tales (i-.e. Aladdin to "Ala Dean"), to a character named Baron Wrathchild (probably a pun on the famous Baron Rothschild, but since Rothschild was a Jew the joke can be seen as anti-Semitic), to an aspiring witch wanting to learn the means of an oracle she knows is fraudulent so she can con people better, the book is littered with those.
  • What Do You Mean It's for Kids?: many of the rewritten tales have open mention of sexual activities (most of those in a sexual abuse context) and there is a story about magical menstrual blood. None of these references are written in a child-friendly way. Also, many of the illustrations depicts detailed frontal female nudity, in a book that seems directed to children and young teens.