They won't tell you about how Red Riding was the wolf
and Snow White went back to kill the queen.
Or that Cinderella's step family mysteriously
disappeared after she became queen.

They are afraid to let you know that Aurora woke up screaming
because a strange man was kissing her without her consent.
Or how Ariel had no problem killing the two timing prince
and restoring herself to the sea.

The fairy tales we should tell
our daughter should be about strong women with real flaws
and incredible qualities.

Let's raise girls who don't just wait to be rescued,
but take destiny in their own hands
and charge to battle dragons and their enemies.

Mothers have need of sharp eyes and discreet tongues
when they have girls to manage

Don't tell your kids you had an easy birth or they won't respect you. For years I used to wake up my daughter and say, 'Melissa, you ripped me to shreds. Now go back to sleep.'

According to a recent article in the New York Times, few parents expose their children to those works in the original these days, and some of their reasons make sense. Who wants children growing up with the idea that stepmothers are wicked, ugly people are evil, women can get by on their beauty, and princesses are all white? At the same time, I worry about children who grow up thinking that every story has a happy ending and no one gets permanently hurt along the way.

Look how your children grow up. Taught from their earliest infancy to curb their love natures — restrained at every turn! Your blasting lies would even blacken a child's kiss. Little girls must not be tomboyish, must not go barefoot, must not climb trees, must not learn to swim, must not do anything they desire to do which Madame Grundy has decreed "improper." Little boys are laughed at as effeminate, silly girl-boys if they want to make patchwork or play with a doll. Then when they grow up, "Oh! Men dont care for home or children as women do!" Why should they, when the deliberate effort of your life has been to crush that nature out of them. "Women can't rough it like men." Train any animal, or any plant, as you train your girls, and it wont be able to rough it either.

When our mothers are alive and healthy, they do extraordinary things... like the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who marched in Argentinean plazas, defying the military junta dictatorship and demanding the whereabouts of their abducted children... or the Liberian mothers who faced down civil war armed only with T-shirts and courage.

there is still a kind of unique loneliness to child rearing for women. We so often do it in isolation. Add to the fact that in our competitive, perfectionist culture, in which the price woman are required to pay for freedom still seems to be martyrdom, almost everyone lies about motherhood. Part of that lying is loyalty - I can't let on that my kid is the only one on the playground who can't read or play the piano - and part of it is self-protection, since we've made hyper-motherhood a measure of female success. The preferred answer to the question "How are you?" is always "Fine," and the answer to the question "How are the kids?" is supposed to be "Great!" That's true even if the accurate answers would be "terrible" and "a mess." I think it produces its own kind of desperation, especially for women, who yearn to be emotionally open.

"And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs."

"(Young girls) are taught to not see, and instead to "make pretty" all manner of grotesqueries whether they are lovely or not. This training is why the youngest sister can say, "Hmmm, his beard isn't really that blue." This early training to "be nice" causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to "be nice" in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler."

To be a good mother — a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands. Meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers; wanting their children to love them best, and take their part, in secret, against the father, who is held up as a scarecrow.

Mothers not only navigate through life's challenges but also defy the forces of nature when it comes to protecting and caring for their children.

We are all mothers,and we have that fire within us,of powerful womenwhose spirits are so angry, we can laugh beauty into life and still make you taste the salty tears of our knowledge.

When I was a little girl and my teachers sent notes home complaining
that I was as loud as the boys, that it wasn't lady like for a girl
to be this outspoken, this raucous, instead of forcing me to tone it down
to the timber of a stage whisper, just a few notes above a whimper
you took me by the hand to the hilltop by our house,
told me to use my voice by shouting to my heart's content,
told me never to forget that I was a girl not a mouse
and if I believed I had to change myself to suit anyone else I shouldn't
that no matter what they said my voice was so important.
You then visited my school, called a meeting with my teachers
sat them all down and said that you were raising a rebel girl
to be a warrior woman, and if she could not speak,
the same way boys are allowed to, if she had to turn her voice into sighs
then how will she utter the battle cries that were needed when her warrior sisters
called upon her to help them defend the daughters of this world.

I was always very inquisitive and I wanted to ask questions about everything and how nature works and all that. But [my mother] came from this background where women were mostly supposed to get married and have a family and not really have a career, and she told me it would be difficult to get married if I pursued a career in math or science. My teachers were unfortunately not much better. They told me that physics was for geniuses, and...that it was not a very feminine career.