Ranked: Disney Princesses From Least To Most Feminist

[obamanut2012]

Thank Gawd Number 1 is........ Mulan! She is kickass.

Worth a read -- some of the entries are also pretty funny.

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"It's hard to be liberated in a clamshell bikini."

by Sonia Saraiya


I just saw Brave, and it got me thinking about the grand tradition of Disney princesses. Brave is a Pixar movie, and its heroine, Merida, is a fairy-tale feminist. Disney princesses for the most part, are not. Most need to be rescued by their male love interests; almost all the Disney Princess movies end in marriage or engagement. But that doesn't mean they're all equally regressive. There's actually a wide range, from appalling to not half bad.

Now, I know ranking anything by perceived feminism is problematic, as your professor might put it, but go with me for the sake of discussion. And lest we get carried away, rules: no sequels, prequels, or "midsequels" will be assessed, and all contestants must be officially part of the Disney Princesses franchise, a marketing juggernaut that's being sold to a five-year-old girl you know even as we speak. From least to most feminist, your Disney Princesses:

10. Aurora, Sleeping Beauty

Aurora

The early Disney films were all strange fables with beautiful scenery and women who made no choices for themselves; Sleeping Beauty is the apex of these. Aurora has no interesting qualities; she's pretty, demure, and generally kind, in the way princesses are (i.e., "to animals). Aurora's naivete leads her straight into a trap laid by Maleficent, and she promptly falls asleep for the rest of the film, until a man shows up to wake her up (and not in a "raised consciousness" kind of way).


http://www.nerve.com/entertainment/ranked/ranked-disney-princesses-from-least-to-most-feminist

[yardwork]

1. It's not surprising that the least feminist character is in a film made in the 1950s

and that there has been fairly steady progress in recent years - all the "most feminist" characters are in films made in the last 20 years.

[Gormy Cuss]

2. I was thinking the same thing.

Snow White IIRC is much older, pre-WWII. She has the look of the 1930s heroines of real life cinema. Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella are also of an era when it would have been difficult to sell a film for girls where women weren't ultimately getting a prince to take care of them.

[yardwork]

3. Snow White was released in 1937, Disney's first feature length film.

Feminism had ups and downs throughout the 20th century. The 1950s were the low point in many ways!

[obamanut2012]

4. The article comments are more interesting than the article btw

VERY informative.