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the racist content of the children's book, Little Black Sambo. This book has all but dropped from sight and from use in children's education. Ethnic jokes have become a source of embarrassment and recrimination, and no longer enjoy the popular acceptance that had been accorded to such fads as Polish Jokes a few decades ago. In general, stories urging subordination of and violence against ethnic, racial, or religious minorities are not found in current collections.
Trickster stories in which the weak, the downtrodden, and the disenfranchised challenge and overcome strong authority figures have long been a source of pleasure throughout the world. The peasant outwitting the landowner, the commoner manipulating the king, the weakling controlling the bully, the impoverished hoodwinking the miserly, these and many other such themes make us rejoice at the triumph of decency, equality, and justice. All the downtrodden overcome, except the woman as wife. Here, in the relations of wife and husband, we find the weak, the less powerful, the financially impoverished, the politically disenfranchised - the women - not only losing in the battle for moral justice, but forcibly being subjugated and demeaned.
Why the outrageous difference between men's relation to other men and men's relation to women? The question goes to the heart of feminist concerns, and addresses the enormous lack of fairness and equity in the marriage relationship.
In several recent works, scholars have grappled with this critical aspect of life. Demie Kurz has written that the very structure of wife/husband roles in contemporary marriage institutionalizes control of women by men. Greer Fox stresses the durability of male and female traditional roles despite more liberal mate selection practices. Based on a study of marriage in Turkey, she finds that behavior patterns of wives and husbands after marriage conform to traditional standards, whether the marriage was based on love or on parental arrangement. This view has been reinforced recently in the United States by Hochschild and Machung. Studying families in the San Francisco area, they find that despite several decades of the feminist revolution, traditional family roles and behaviors have changed little. While opportunities for women have expanded greatly in outside gainful employment, expectations of female domestic responsibility and male dominance continue in the home.
These findings are mirrored in the present study of folkstory marriage. Love is rarely a factor in marriage stories. And the small number of roles available to folktale wives and husbands attests to the similarity of
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