(Start @ 5:30)
We all know the story of Cinderella... Cinderella is a beautiful, innocent girl living with her abusive stepmother and stepsisters. When she hears news that the king is throwing a ball for his son to find him a wife, she is ecstatic, only to have her dreams crushed when her family tells her that she cannot go. She runs off into the woods, hysterical, when she runs into her fairy godmother! Her godmother says a couple of rhymes, sprinkles some of her magical dust and poof - poor, little Cinderella is magically turned in to the most beautiful girl in all of the land and is told that the spell would ware off at midnight. Cinderella left the ball just in time, and through a series of events and the loss of a glass slipper, the prince eventually finds Cinderella and the two live happily ever after.
It's the classic story of an archetypal princess, and is one of the most well known stories in the world. What was that girl in my panel talking about? What's so bad about Cinderella?
I found a thesis essay written by Swami Shreeji and Nancy Hewitt (Professor of Women's Studies at Rutgers University) titled “Gender Roles Indoctrinated Through Fairy Tales
in Western Civilization”. In the essay, Shreeji observed five different versions of Cinderella, all written in the late 19th century from various countries.
"In every version," Shreeji says, "Cinderella slaves over the housework, never rebels and does
not think to stand up for herself. Instead, she is the good-hearted victim. She
makes no decisions of her own." Cinderella essentially gets away with never having to think for herself sheerly because of beauty. Cinderella is even kind to her abusers and allows them to step all over her.
Even when she meets her fairy godmother (as seen in video above), Cinderella stands there like a rag doll as her godmother dresses her and transforms her. "It is utterly inhuman," Shreeji says. "She has no bad emotions
or ambition. She does not even seek to go to the ball to snag the Prince, but
merely to attend the event. She has no negative or ambiguous qualities. She is
beautiful, kind, and helpless.”
