Fearless Girls

Fearless Girls
Book recommendation!
© Melina Magdalena, September 2006

I would like to recommend Kathleen Ragan’s Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters: heroines in folktales from around the world (1998, Bantam Books) as a fantastic read for everyone I know.

My sister gave this book to my daughter in 1999, with the inscription “Happy 8th birthday! I hope you enjoy these stories about girls and women all over the world.” It has sat on her shelf for these past years, but I picked it up and read it last week from cover to cover.

This book will be very useful for teachers of English as a Second Language, as it includes authentic folk tales from cultures all over the world. What is special about these folktales is that the protagonist in every case is a woman. Many of the stories reflect predominant gendered roles inherent in the cultural values of their people of origin, but a significant number of the stories also challenge these roles, and a few stories of female tricksters are also included.

In those stories that centre around traditional cultural outlooks in which girls are married off to men in order to have babies and raise them, when misfortune strikes, or when the husband’s behaviour is less than desirable, these women heroes find truly amazing ways to turn their lives around and to be successful.

Some of the girls in these stories pose as men in order to right a wrong or prove themselves. They are proud of their ability to match the males around them, and step defiantly out from behind their masks to take their rightful places as women, at the end of these stories.

As Ragan states in her introduction, she chose the stories through an exhaustive scholarly study of folktales, and selected those tales in which the female protagonists survive the ends of their stories. She writes,
“One of the greatest dilemmas was the definition of a heroine. The following criteria served as a guideline: The main characters are female and they are worthy of emulation. They do not serve as the foil to the ‘good’ character in the story, and they are not wicked queens, Mother Miserys, or nagging mothers-in-law. A second criteria was that the tale must centre in and around the heroine.”

Telling our stories is a way of keeping our experiences alive. Folktales often develop out of real events and the interpretations of these. They inspire hope and admiration. When women are the heroes of these stories, they are painted in their true colours as ingenious, clever, loyal, resourceful and determined.

I found the stories valuable in providing windows into the cultural realities that often seemed strange and exotic to me. The book as a whole challenges me to be the very best woman I can be, to protect those around me from male abuse, and to stand up and speak for what I believe in.