How far have we come since the days of our favorite childhood fairy tales if women still need a rescuer like the Cinderellas, Sleeping Beauties, and other helpless maidens of the past?

Womanly duties, as Joan thought of them, were fine for girls who imagined themselves as Cinderellas or Sleeping Beauties, good girls rewarded for menial housework and, in the case of Sleeping Beauty, a passivity so profound it was deaf, dumb, blind, and comatose.

They emote and are long-winded about it; they express affection and passion and have sex and revel in it; they are cruel and vengeful; they whine and complain, gossip, browbeat, and nag—in short, everything that we have always suspected is behind the refractive exteriors of the more famous Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties. […] It features a storyteller who, tired of telling the same old Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties, meets up with some fairies in a wood as he is searching for new material.

Sleeping beauty

Meaning

Noun

Name