Feminist Fairy Tales

Feminist Fairy Tales is a 1996 anthology of revised and original fairy tales by feminist Barbara G. Walker.

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). Walker sought to right the wrongs by rewriting famous and lesser-known fairy tales (as well as some well known folkloric and mythology-derived tales) to empower female readers, especially those reading in the children's section.

Fairy Tales and Folkloric stories rewritten for the anthology:

Tropes used in Feminist Fairy Tales include:

Anachronism Stew: Glass windows in commoners' houses, mention of synthetic dyes, and bards playing at birthday parties and community centres, among other things.
Beauty Equals Goodness: While most of the heroic characters are non-descript or fairly average, most of the tales describe the male villains as particularly hideous. There are two tales on the anthology who try to subvert this trope, the original story "Barbidol" and "Ugly and the Beast" (a rewrite of "Beauty and the Beast"), but they are marred by flawed writing that make the characters Unintentionally Unsympathetic, resulting in a Lost Aesop.
Broken Aesop: the rewrites tend to break not only the Aesop of the originals, but also the ones expected for the plot. Egregiously seen in the rewrite of "The Emperor's New Clothes", where the con-women become ever bigger Karma Houdinis than the originals (to wit, in this version they were flat out rewarded for basically conning the biggest leader of their nation, by said leader even!).
Double Standard Abuse (Female on Male): Every male character that mishandles a female one is despited as irredeemably evil. Women doing equivalent amounts of abuse on men, however, is seen as deserved by the male at best.
Esoteric Happy Ending: Numerous, with the ending of "Jill and the Beanroot" (where Jill learn that the subterranean people are planning to overthrow humans and do nothing about it because she got enough gems to help her family and be rich forever) and "Fairy Gold" (where a innocent man killed by a sentient female statue who basically brainwashed him into being completely devoted to her is described as having had a fitting end) being the worst examples
Family-Unfriendly Aesop: The anthology is riddled with those. The most common ones: "Worship the Mother Goddess (while doing nothing else) and everything will turn okay!" and "Violence Really Is the Answer (when done by women)"
Gender Flip: some stories are gender-flipped version of the originals.
Gods Need Prayer Badly: In "How The Gods Met Their End", after the apples of youth are stolen, the Odin Expy suggests the gods can extend their lives by getting humans to worship them.
Gratuitous Rape: Almost every story features at least a mention of sexual assault.
He-Man Woman Hater: Almost all male characters, with the king and the knights in "Princess Questa", the hunter in "Snow Night", the baron in "The Waver" and the titular "White God" as the worst of the bunch
Men Act, Women Are: for an anthology of stories allegedly written to be more female-empowering, many of the female characters are actually quite passive. In some cases, like the rewrite of Snow White and Cinderella, the female characters have even less agency than in the original tales!
Straw Feminism: the tales are written in a way that looks like the author saw that trope page and used it as a check list. Extreme hatred of everything male (unless they submit to female authority), extreme worship of "feminine" attributes, rants about how men are violent and women are more suited to lead the world into a peaceful land...
Women Are Wiser: Invoked by the author with the numerous presence of female goddesses, faerie queens and women on authority positions, who are described in the text as wiser and smarter than their male counterparts, whenever objectively true or not.