Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

Onceuponatime: The Roles

39

for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed

her a knife, and said,

“Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you will

never have to go on foot. ” So the girl cut her toe off,

and squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the

pain, and went down to the prince. Then he took her

with him on his horse as his bride. . . .

Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the

blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and

took the false bride home again, saying that she was

not the right one, and that the other sister must try

on the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, and

got her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large.

Then her mother handed her the knife, saying, “Cut

a piece off your heel; when you are queen you will

never have to go on foot. ”

So the girl cut a piece off her heel, and thrust her

foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down

to the prince, who took his bride. . . .

Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how

the blood was flowing. . . . 11

Cinderella’s stepmother understood correctly that her

only real work in life was to marry off her daughters.

Her goal was upward mobility, and her ruthlessness was

consonant with the values o f the market place.* She

loved her daughters the way Nixon loves the freedom o f

the Indochinese, and with much the same result. Love

in a male-dominated society certainly is a many-splen-

dored thing.

Rapunzel’s mother wasn’t exactly a winner either.

*

This depiction o f women as flesh on an open market, of crippling and

mutilation for the sake of making a good marriage, is not fiction; cf. C hapter

6, “Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding. ”

40

Woman Hating

She had a maternal instinct all right—she had “long

wished for a child, but in vain. ” 12 Sometime during her

wishing, she developed a craving for rampion, a vegetable which grew in the garden of her neighbor and peer, the witch. She persuaded her husband to steal

rampion from the witch’s garden, and each day she

craved more. When the witch discovered the theft, she

made this offer:

. . . you may have as much rampion as you like, on

one condition — the child that will come into the world