Ragan, K. Introduction. In K. Ragan (Ed.), Fearless girls, wise women and beloved sisters : Heroines in folktales from around the world (pp. xxi-xxvii). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

In the introduction of K. Ragan’s book, “Fearless Girls, Wise Women And Beloved Sisters”(1998), she says that her starting point was that she used to get very angry when she was telling stories to her daughter, because the majority of the characters in the stories were men. Actually, she noticed that over 90 percent of the characters were male and that all major female characters were negative. She thought that these books were teaching to her daughter that she was nobody since most of the characters were male and there was nothing important about female characters in books. In talking with other mothers, she found out that they also felt the same way; actually some said that they were changing the pronouns from male to female, like helself. Most mothers believed that there was nothing they could do about this.
When she enlarged her search to libraries, she discovered that there was a little stock of heroines in libraries. Also the female role models were beautiful, passive an...