It’s curious you should mention this old-fashioned princess scenario, because I wrote a novel using it. I come from a very non-traditional society, where you are a failure if you don’t have a career by thirty, or you stay at home to raise your children instead of having a career. So to me, it’s the old stories, the fairy tales, that are new and refreshing. The new scenario, when forced,is just as much a prison as the old. To force either choice is to pervert feminism, which should recognize the physical realities that underlie gender roles — and the old fairy tales. Which is one reason they are perpetually in print.

Children are at the center of the difference between men’s and women’s lives: the fact that it’s the woman who conceives and bears them, and it’s women alone who have the physical capacity to produce milk to feed them. This is a crucial point, historically. Today we have money and formula, but up till very recently, the mother had to have the baby near her at all times, or the baby would not get fed. This pretty much kept women out of most careers. Hence the inequality between women and men in the money-making world. Politics that ignores biology is useless.

Feminism must support all choices: to have a career instead of children, to have a career and children (that’s a tough one), to have children and no career.

You make a great point about women being each other’s worst enemies. It is women who enforce the old rules you are talking about. Women are the conservators of social tradition. It’s women who perform the genital mutilation of girls.

There has been a lot of feminist fiction that overturns fairy tales; you should seek it out. The names that come to mind are Faith Weldon and Angela Carter (though I’m not sure these names are the right ones). But don’t discard Andersen or the Brothers Grimm. They contain the ancient dreams of the human race.