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IT'S NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO SEE the word stepmother without stifling the impulse to add its accompanying pejorative adjective. The persistent stereotype surfaces immediately, even if we ourselves are benign stepmothers. Using the most scientific method of research-an informal survey on Facebook-I polled from friends around the world for their gut feelings.
Sarah from New Jersey: "My 4-yearold thinks stepmother is akin to witch."
Laura from North Carolina: "I have negative Disney associations with stepmom that override my own experiences as a stepmom. Stepdad stays more varied, without the negative connation."
Amy from California explained how the compound word is composed in American Sign Language: fake and mother.
A friend from Venezuela responded, "Madrastra. Sounds like the Wicked Witch of the West."
Natalie, from Belarus, pronounced it macheha. "The sound of it is quite evil. And," she added, "the plant coltsfoot is called in Russian, "mother-and-stepmother," because its leaves are warm on the one side and cold on the other."
THERE'S NO WAY TO AVOID the wicked stepmother," says a friend of mine, stepmother of two who, like all the other women I spoke to for this report, requested that I not use her name. "It's a terrible trope in our culture," she added. Folklorist Maria Tatar notes that the oldest known Cinderella story actually comes from China, circa 850 b.C.e. Patricia A. Watson writes in Ancient Stepmothers: Myth, Misogyny and Reality that malevolent stepmothers appear frequently in both ancient Roman and Greek literature. No matter how far back its roots go, the modern iteration of the stepmother has gained greater momentum by Disney via those horrifyingly mean creations like the jealous queen in "Snow White," the deranged mother-substitute in "Tangled" (their version of Rapunzel), the Ur-evil stepmother in "Cinderella."
Archetypal characters like these can offer a framework for deeper understanding of our feelings. In The Stepmother in Fairytales: Bereavement and the Feminine Shadow, Jungian analyst Jacqueline Schectman explains that every person has the "stepmother" in her psyche, characterized by the punishing and withholding aspects that arise when the "good mother" aspects retreat.
But a feminist take on the stepmother figure has to point us to the demonization of a stock female figure, an image far removed from most families' experience. Countervailing present-day stepmother narratives are...