Rapunzel, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty – these well-known stories and others, first published by the Brothers Grimm in Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, 1812), have become shorthand for what we collectively think of as fairytales. They are stories with a strong moralistic undertone in which humble and obedient women are rewarded while transgressive women suffer – all before an interchangeable background of castles, kings and sorcery.
But these stories are only one iteration of fairytales. Stories that were collected and continuously edited by men to reinforce bourgeois values, which often marginalised women.
