Wake up Sleeping Beauty: A literary analysis of gender portrayals in traditional and modern fairy tales published from 1980--1999

Since the women's movement, traditional fairy tales have been criticized as being stereotypical towards women by portraying women as mostly beautiful, weak, and submissive. As a result of this criticism, modern fairy tales, portraying strong, capable female characters, have emerged. New research of modern tales contends that modern tales, while portraying less stereotypical females, portray men unfairly as one-dimensional and even ignorant characters.; This study is a literary analysis of 14 traditional fairy tales and 14 modern fairy tales published between 1980 and 1999 designed to answer the following questions: What are the written and visual images of men and women in modern and traditional fairy tales for children? How are these images similar and different between genders and groups of tales?; Findings indicate that modern women are portrayed as the most androgynous characters. In other words, portrayals of modern women included both “masculine” and “feminine” traits. Traditional tales tend to be more gender stereotypical with serious tones and moral lessons while modern tales tend to be less gender stereotypical with a light-hearted tone.