What do the stories of Cinderella and Hindu God Rama have in common? An evil stepmother. While Cinderella’s stepmother bullies her, locks her up and stops her from going to the royal ball, Rama’s loves him very much … in the beginning but gets competitive and jealous when Rama is about to be given the throne and gets him sent into exile for 14 years to secure the throne for her own son. I am not here to debate whether or not these stories are true but to discuss why the concept of evil stepmothers so prevalent in human folklores and where are all the evil stepfathers!
Reason #1: skewed sample space
It’s a biological fact that females of the species Homo Sapiens give birth to children and not males. And childbirth is one of the deadliest things for our species. It’s only in the last century that medicine has made enough advances to keep masses of women from dying during childbirth. Before that, women died left and right. And because they use to have lots of children (because most babies died very young and family planning was not a thing), if they somehow survived the first childbirth, there was a chance that the second one would get them or the third or … With all those deaths during childbirth, it was obvious that the child, if itself somehow survived, would go on to be motherless. And the father would promptly remarry to “have a woman taking care of the children”. And thus, a lot of kids would grow up with stepmothers.
What about the stepfathers? Yes, men died too, mostly due to all those wars going on all the time (and diseases too but diseases killed men and women equally). So, there were also chances that kids would also become fatherless but widow remarriage wasn’t a popular thing (or a thing at all). Thus, stepfathers didn’t come into the picture. And while human society has progressed a bit since those times, it still has this skewedness, at least in less progressive societies where widower remarriage is much more likelier than widow remarriage. This is what scientists would call a “bad sample space”.
Even if let’s say that humans were equally likely to vilify stepmothers and stepfathers (which they are not, as we’ll see), since the sample space contains many more stepmothers than stepfathers, we are more likely to come across an example of a stepmother, evil or otherwise. And even if we had equal examples of both evil and nice, we are much more likely to remember the evil ones, which brings us to our next point –
Reason #2 Negativity bias
We look around in the newspapers, social media, news on the TV, and we feel that the world is about to end because they are full of horrible news from around the world – murders, floods, shootings, and whatnot. Guess what, there are also a lot of nice things going in the world but they just don’t get reported as often or as vehemently in the news as the bad ones. Why? Because “if it bleeds, it leads”, meaning that news of horrors and crimes sell more.
Apparently, this all goes back to the “negativity bias” in human brain. During their evolution, humans learnt to sense danger in order to be able to avoid them. In that sensing, a false negative (mistaking a dangerous situation as innocuous) was much more dangerous than a false positive (mistaking an innocuous situation for dangerous) because death only has to win once while life has to win every time. So, humans became more sensitive to bad news than good news … they say. But I think that’s just one factor.
Culture and social norms play an equal, if not bigger, role in us consuming more bad news than good. If the popular media gave a little more focus to benevolent acts of people and other positive news, we would learn to expect it and then to value it. And once that starts to happen, the media would have to report positive news in a higher proportion. “If it has positive beads, it leads” maybe they’ll say.
Anyway, coming back to the topic of stepparents, the positive instances, and there must be some, are totally overshadowed by the negative ones because of this negativity bias. Though, even then, stepmothers are vilified much more than stepfathers.
Reason #3: Skewed perception (of women and men)
In all cultures in the world, ideal mothers (and women in general) have traditionally been portrayed as kind, emotional and nurturing while ideal fathers (and men in general) as strong, disciplined, and stoic. So, a father, step or biological, who is strict is considered “normal” even if the strictness is bordering on child-abuse. Mothers aren’t treated the same way. If a mother is strict with the children, she is seen as controlling and difficult. If she is strict with her biological children, it is still “okay” but she is given no benefit of the doubt if she is this way with her stepchildren. In that case, she is immediately portrayed as evil. (By the way, the same bias can also be seen in the perception of male and female bosses at work – a strict male boss is “typical” and accepted but a strict female boss is “bossy” and difficult).
Another factor in this skewed perception of mothers and fathers is that mothers typically spend much more time with the kids than fathers do. So, mothers get the motherload (pardon the pun) of the annoyance that children can so easily cause. No matter how much you love kids, sometimes you want to strangle them because of them getting on your nerves! Of course, you can compensate those murderous impulses with the rush of love you get when they do something cute. But that is much harder to do when it’s not your own biological kid. Maybe because you haven’t developed “that bond” with the child. So, when you combine the larger number of stepmothers compared to stepfathers and the larger amount of time the mothers spend with their kids, you might get more instances of anger, shouting, or even physical violence. And that might contribute to stepmothers being seen as more evil than stepfathers.
Reason #4: Anecdotes
Apparently, the earliest examples of evil stepmothers are found in Roman times. It is believed that Livia Drusilla, a roman empress had her stepchildren killed so that her own son can ascend the throne. And in the story of Rama, the stepmother too gets Rama banished to the forests for 14 years so that her son can be the new king. And similar are the stories in the history of the Ottoman empire or any other empire in the world. Why? Because the right to rule resided with the son of a ruler. So, one of king’s wives always tried to make sure that her son became the king and not the other sons the king had with other women, creating more historical examples and anecdotes of evil stepmothers.
And then there are the German folktales by Brothers Grimm, famous today mostly thanks to the 20th and 21st century Disney movies. Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected and published German folklores and were appalled by the sheer number of stories that included evil mothers, sisters, or mother-in-laws. And in order to preserve the “sanctity of motherhood”, they changed these characters into stepmothers. And thus was born the (erroneous) concept of evil stepmothers and it is still alive and thriving thanks to the movie adaptations that continue to propagate the image of evil stepmothers.