Megan Henstra (she/her)

design sophomore / des 3515 design research studio 1

The Indoctrination of Gender Inequality Through Fairy Tales is a project that examines our relationship to fairy tales, and the harmful effects that go unnoticed. Fairy tales have always had a strong grip on people, they date so far back that historians still have not reached a consensus as to where they originated. The very tradition of fairy tales is an anomaly in that they should have died out at multiple points in history, such as when they were passed exclusively orally, to when they were eventually transcribed, and through decades of significant political and societal changes. Their survival throughout time shows the grip that they’ve had on people and continues to have today.

Normative social control is a control mechanism used when a minority group begins to gain more rights, and rather than creating an external control force, the force in power introduces various social values that become internalized, and as a result will lessen the power of the minority group. In this case fairy tales are used to instill feminine beauty standards that in turn limits women’s personal freedom and lays the “groundwork for a circumscription of women’s potential for power and control in the world.” (Baker-Sperry & Grauerholz, 2003)

The Pervasiveness and Persistence of the Feminine Beauty Ideal in Children's Fairy Tales by Lori Baker-Sperry and Liz Grauerholz analyzes tales transcribed by the Grimm Brothers and analyzes the number of references to physical attractiveness for both female and male characters, and then tracks this against reproductions of the same stories. Through their research they were able to find a statistically significant correlation between the number of reproductions and the number of references to the female characters beauty.

Through this research I was able to identify a design opportunity to remove references to physical appearance from fairy tales. The desired audience would be adolescents ages 3-12, as professionals suggest children begin reading fairy tales at the age of 3. Theoretically this should not impact the relevancy of the stories, as male characters were described almost 3 times less than female characters, and this isn’t seen as diminishing to the story. My hope with this design opportunity is to remove harmful rhetoric that effects all children by creating unrealistic beauty standards both to live up to, as well as to expect in future partners.