Disney Princesses As Strong Women

Here is a little something I made to promote the Disney Princesses as strong women…

I saw something on Pinterest today that really bothered me. When you find out what it was, you can laugh. Someone made an image with the classic Disney Princesses on it and called it Disney Fail. It told how chauvinistic it all was and that the only appealing attribute of the women was their sexuality! That was what bothered me. I think for someone to say this is actually promoting what you’re complaining about. There is more to these women than their looks or “sexuality”. They were often portrayed as strong characters, even if it is in an anti-feminist environment. This rant is not to defend Disney but to defend what I think is an important tool we can use to figure things out about ourselves. Perhaps as a child you really loved Beauty And The Beast because you admired intelligent women and wanted to be one “when you grow up”. These stories are appealing to us for a reason and that reason is not just to fan the flames of an antiquated and potentially harmful idea. I suppose it could be used for that, if you want. Like some people say, she has to be saved by the prince. But what about who these women were? How they “got their dream”? Perhaps if some of us thought more about that, instead of slapping a label on it, we’d be getting an important message. You can want love and be a strong woman. You can be attractive and be a strong woman. Also, I just think it’s sad when people can’t enjoy a beautiful story because they are so busy labeling everything. There will always be sexist thoughts out there and there will always be men who act like jerks and women who let men get away with it. Just because you scream sexism every five minutes won’t stop that from happening. Learning how to be a strong woman, no matter your environment, might. Just because it was a “man’s world” for so much of human existence didn’t keep women from being strong. Some of them were leaders of the house and could control business and even politics from their parlors because their wit and their charming hostess abilities had such sway. Some did “man’s work”, ran businesses and fought in wars long before it became popular. My main sources of this information: a book my aunt gave me as a child about women in American History and a text book from a Western Civilization course I took in college.

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