Wise Women

Folk and Fairy Tales from Around the World

retold and edited by Suzanne I. Barchers, illustrated by Leanne Mullineaux

Libraries Unlimited, Englewood CO, 1990. ISBN 0-87287-816-3

Unless you are telling to a special group, odds are that your audience includes both female and male listeners. Does your repertory reflect that mix?

The great majority of available folktales, myths, and legends feature male protagonists. Even the animal stories identify the main character as "he" unless a specifically female role (mate, mother, etc.) must be filled. Some of this bias may be due to the people who produced the books we know. Male collectors may not have heard the women's stories.

Translators often used the supposedly generic English "he" where no gender was specified. Victorian editors intentionally omitted stories of unsuitably active heroines and retold other stories to tone them down (vis the Brothers Grimm's reworking of Ashenputtel and Perrault's sissifying of Cinderella). And to make matters worse, Walt Disney -- whose versions are the only ones many people know -- further weakened and stereotyped female protagonists.

In the 1970s, collections began appearing to remedy this imbalance: Rosmary Minard's Womenfolk and Fairy Tales (1975), Ethel J. Phelps's Tatterhood and other Tales (1978), and The Maid of the North: Feminist Folktales from Around the World (1981), and Toni McCarty's The Skull in the Snow and Other Folktales (1981). But if you don't have those on your shelf, Suzanne Barchers has collected many of those and some others in this new compendium of sixty-one folktales featuring women of all ages who prevail using their intelligence, courage, talent, or resourcefulness.

This is not a scholarly collection. There are no background notes explaining cultural context or listing variant sources (contrast it with Jane Yolen's Favorite Folktales from Around the World ). Although she quotes Marcia Lieberman's petulant 1972 essay, "Some Day my Prince will Come: Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale," she does not mention any of the more insightful essays on the subject which appeared later. Nor does she acknowledge awareness of the collections listed above. In her preface, Barchers tells how she had to read 4,000 tales in order to find these stories. The reader thus expects to find exotic and unfamiliar tales, but the acknowledgments section credits most of her selections to the readily available collections of Andrew Lang and Vance Randolf. And many have already appeared in the earlier collections of tales with active heroines.

Nonetheless, Barchers has done us a great service by collecting such a great number of these tales in one new book. They are all good stories. She has arranged the contents by age and role: Daughters, Sisters, Maidens, Attendants, Wives & Mothers, and Mature Women. The stories represent a very wide range of world cultures, including some which I think will be new even to the experienced folktale fan. The telling is for the most part plain and spare, both in the texts Barchers reprints and the ones she has retold. They make excellent raw material for the storyteller, although you may want to research variant versions to help flesh these out for retelling.

Like the stories in the earlier (and smaller) special collections, these stories do not put males down, nor do they simply put a female into a traditionally male role in an old story. They are good, classic folktales and fairytales which happen to feature a feisty female for a change. Take a look at your repertory list. If most of your stories feature male protagonists, here is a source for sixty-one stories to balance your act.

Reviewed July 1st, 1991 by Fran Stallings