ABSTRACT
The stepmother has always brought with her a more complicated history to the nurturing of another woman's child. The unravelling of the ubiquitous image of the stepmother who is not to be trusted is to be found across the history of the family and in imaginative fiction. A more important cultural detail in the Chinese Cinderella concerns the fate of the stepmother and her daughter when their envious jealousy is discovered. In the fairy story her most enduring image in our minds is the stepmother in Cinderella. The origin of the fairy story about Cinderella was not describing fantasies in the mind but was a tale that was grounded in the tragic effect upon a child when a mother dies and a stepmother takes over. The fairy story, and Cinderella's tale in particular, confronts this false belief and the painful truth is that Cinderella does mind what happens to her.
