Testing Feminist Fairy Tale Studies

Abstract

The defining empirical claim of classic feminist gender theory is that gender is primarily (if not exclusively) a product of nurture not nature. This thinking is distilled in De Beauvoir’s pioneering slogan, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1949, 267). Behavioral, emotional, psychological, and even physical traits stereotypically associated with males and females have little basis in biology; they are products of the socialization environments particular to given types of societies. This thinking has shaped an immense body of feminist literary criticism and theory over the past several decades.

Some of the material of this chapter was originally published in Chapter Ten of The Literary Animal, edited by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (2005).