Two new surveys confirm that women who take on children from an earlier marriage will almost always be seen as witches<\/p>\n
Stepmothers have always been witches. Long before the Brothers Grimm gave us Snow White\u2019s usurping queen (and long before Gal Gadot\u2019s toe-curling recent turn in the role), there was Medea, witch of classical myth. Medea is best remembered for killing her own children but, according to Ovid, she went on to acquire a stepson, the hero Theseus, and attempted to kill him too. (Poison, of course, and with an eye on his inheritance: Witchy stepmothering 101.)<\/p>\n
Two millennia after Ovid, modern women still let our lives be limited by such stories. A new survey says that 43% of single mothers<\/a> are deterred from dating other parents by \u201cnegative stereotypes of stepmothers portrayed in popular culture\u201d; 37% explicitly cite the fear that their partners\u2019 children will view them as a \u201cwicked stepmother\u201d. One should approach such a survey with caution \u2013 it is commissioned by a dating app for parents \u2013 but these findings are mirrored in academic studies the world over. A 2018 survey from New Zealand found that stepmothers altered their behaviour, fearful of setting boundaries with their stepchildren, for fear of the \u201cwicked stepmother\u201d tag.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two new surveys confirm that women who take on children from an earlier marriage will almost always be seen as witches Stepmothers have always been witches. Long before the Brothers Grimm gave us Snow White\u2019s usurping queen (and long before Gal Gadot\u2019s toe-curling recent turn in the role), there was Medea, witch of classical myth. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}