Feminist Fairy Tales

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Revision as of 17:42, 15 June 2017 by Robkelk (talk | contribs) (added the required tag and the required category for each ATT "work" page, added a bucketload of "context" flags, added a request for an unbiased re-write)

MOD NOTE: This writeup appears to be biased. Either additional description and explanation is required to support the position presented, or a re-write is required to remove the apparent bias.

Fairy Tales retellings are nothing new. Rewriting fairy tales to have a more female-friendly story is also nothing new since, sad to say, quite a few fairy tales are less than friendly towards women (case in point, there is an entire fairy tale genre about heroic wife-beating). So you would think that noted feminist Barbara Walker's 1996 anthology of revised and original fairy tales, rewritten to empower female readers--especially those reading in the children's section--would be something unremarkable.

You would be wrong. As it turns out, Barbara Walker is partially so noted because her "feminist" writings are outdated and baseless.

The stories were also written with an agenda in mind. Walker is a self-proclaimed atheist...but she also wants women to worship and imitate "the Mother Goddess" 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. It quickly becomes clear that Walker is not so much telling stories as propagandizing.

Tropes used in Feminist Fairy Tales include: