A stunning pearly blue dress dances across the palace floor. Gorgeous blonde locks, bobbing to the momentum of a song. And most importantly, a tall, charming prince guiding you through every delicate move. Every little girl's jaw plunges to the floor while watching the timeless Cinderella. While it's hard to keep track of the complete picture due to various adaptations of the story, this ancient fairy tale has reached all corners of the world, from China to the Native Americans. Little girls from every continent dream to be swooped up and saved by a charming prince, like Cinderella was. While the story of Cinderella continued to spread through generations like wildfire, a woman named Colette Dowling published a paperback named The Cinderella Complex in the late 1900s.
During this time, the second-wave feminism movement reached its pinnacle in the United States. Women were fighting for less discrimination and more equality in both the workplace and society. One New York Times magazine published in March 22, 1981 stated that "Within a year, half the women... had walked out of their
marriages and were going it alone: earning money, paying the bills, creating new social lives." Inspired by the activism occurring around her, Dowling published The Cinderella Complex. You may be wondering: how is the feminism movement related to Cinderella, a fairy tale? To answer this, Cinderella has literally discouraged feminism for decades by reinforcing gender roles and the idea that women must depend on men to succeed and truly be happy. This psychological fear of independence is coined as "The Cinderella Complex".
If you've lived under a rock your whole life and don't know the story of Cinderella, I'll give you a little summary. A pretty girl becomes an orphan, moves in with her evil stepmother and stepsisters who mistreat her (this introduces a WHOLE new topic called The Cinderella Effect, but we'll talk about that later), goes to a royal ball, falls in love with a prince, marries him, and becomes rich and blissful as a princess. Cinderella isn't the only fairy tale that follows this storyline. In Sleeping Beauty, Aurora literally just sits there sleeping, waiting for a prince to come save her through a kiss. Snow White cares for seven male dwarfs and is later saved by a man. This pattern of helplessness is so obvious that it's almost comedic. Besides the Disney princess movies, the Cinderella Complex can be found in multiple other movies, such as Titanic, Forrest Gump, Avatar, Inception, etc. One study used 6,087 movie synopses, 1,109 movie scripts, and 7,226 books to determine whether the Cinderella Complex can be found in other forms in media. They did this by reading scripts and seeing if positivity and happy language from the female lead correlated to the male's "happiness scale". Another part of the study even analyzed the words that were used to describe the male and female leads. From this, they realized that in Cinderella and the other movies that I listed, the happiness of a female immediately increased after encountering a male, and that fluctuation in happiness is more common for female characters. Men are also more likely to be described with verbs, while women are described with adjectives, like "young" and "beautiful". These results prove that in media, women are portrayed as emotional, unstable, and dependent on men to improve their happiness and life.
Is "The Cinderella Complex" fictional, something you only notice while watching a romance or drama like Titanic? Sadly, no. Gender roles and stereotypes continue to influence the mindsets and and behavior of women profesionally and socially. By the age of two, kids already can label objects as feminine or masculine. At the age of four, a young girl already infers that physical and "violent" activities, like karate and boxing, are meant for boys, while girls should pursue dainty interests, like jewlrey-making and makeup. This is based off the Gender Schema theory, a psychological claim that people are more likely to remember schema-consistent behaviors (schema meaning appearance or behavior of a person) rather than incosistent schema behaviors. For example, when a child watches a show that contains ten female nurses and one male nurse, they're more likely to assign being a nurse as a feminine job. This illustrates how important media is, especially when little girls from all over the world are watching Walt Disney movies that portray females as vulnerable and dependent on men. When the gorgeous Princess Aurora waits for the prince to wake her up from a coma, boys and girls will attribute "beauty" and "susceptibility" as a female schema, and "bravery" or "protection" as a male schema. Instead of watching the Disney classics, kids should watch movies that encourage women to be independent and powerful. For example, the female leads in Brave or Mulan play more active roles compared to Cinderella or Snow White. By changing the media that surrounds them, young kids can create their own schemas and not let gender roles confine their personal goals and beliefs.
Sources Used:
The Cinderella Complex: Word embeddings reveal gender stereotypes in movies and books
Stereotypes and Gender Roles
Comments