How the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales Silence Women

And only those pretty much.

Well then you should be happy that one happens to be a woman.


Although i think she may have had to hide that little fact at one time.

A bunch of damn chauvinist male centered shmucks in the 1800s I tella ya.

Lets be honest here. Frankenstein sucked.

I preferred The Scarlet Letter.

i prefer the classic:

" the happy hooker goes to washington ".

(admission: I didn't read the link)

My first smart-ass reaction would be "Give the anthology a few more hundred years and it could be "The Good Book" for a new religion!"

However, weren't the social constructs of the stories somewhat of a reflection of society at the time?

If I were to write a story 50-70 years ago, nurses and teachers would be women, doctors, bosses, fighters would be men, because that's how things were and that's what I would have known.

Was it necessarily a concerted effort by authors to suppress women?

This trend in story telling is older than feudalism and it's time that it, if not outright died than, at least be tweaked in a way to give it new meaning. It's everywhere, from Disney to Classic Literature, from video games to books, these tropes of the silent desirable female woman who either gives birth or is an objective in and of themselves is utterly boring, if not also tasteless. You do not create a connection to your readers or players by giving them a generic woman objective. The journey you go through feels flatter and flatter with each iteration.

The goal of a writer should always be to, first and foremost, make your audience WANT to continue through the story being told. You do this through establishing connections between characters that run deeper than 'chase the objective because the plot demands it'. By fleshing out a character, by giving them meat to work with, by giving all of the involved parties a voice so that your narrative has more options to work with, you create investment in your audience.

I don't think it was a concerted effort by the authors. And no where does it say it is. It is a matter of what happened as a result of marketing to parents of children in a period of time marked by a belief in male superiority. It is reflective of their status quo.

But it continues to have an effect.

Besides it holds no purpose to hold the feet of long dead men to the fire. There is still something to learn from history, and that is all the justification you ever need for critically examining it. Blame is pointless at this point, but solutions do not come about unless we understand where the problems came from.

Well it might bring some grim satisfaction to some. Pun not intended Ha. However you are correct. The reality is that it is important to know the origins, histories and evolutions of things and events that shape us.

Fun Fact: Before they started writing fairy tales, The Brothers Grimm also wrote law books, a.k.a the complete opposite of fairy tales.



Hey, be nice to Mary. She was only 19 when she started writing it.

That explains a lot. Leave it to a lawyer to f*** up a good thing. Ha.

in men's defense, i lack of men respect back then , when these fairy tales were written back then.

i think more of the society and the our government, even other counties, their behaviors are the same.

there was no woman's lib back then, before " susan anthony " time, both women and men never thought the women should be equal to men back then. i am surprise the excuse back then, that bible doesn't said have anything that women has any rights than have babies and make sure that man's cave was clean and food on the table. that is it!

you wonder who is the blame for the role of the woman and the mother in these fairy tales.

the writers being men or the society back then ?