Word: tatterhood
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Phelps, a writer in Rockville Centre, N.Y., spent three years sifting through thousands of fairy and folk tales looking for brave and clever heroines. She found enough for two books: Tatterhood and Other Tales (The Feminist Press; 1978) and her just published The Maid of the North (Holt, Rinehart & Winston). Here the fables are turned: women rescue men, outwit demons and fight like Cossacks. Tatterhood, named for her ragged, mud-stained clothes, batters a gang of wicked trolls and recaptures the severed head of her sister. An old Japanese woman, paddling along a stream, thinks quickly when pursuing monsters suck...
...Tatterhood, Phelps writes that "we shall never know" whether the heroine was lovely or plain, because it does not matter. Phelps also adds a brush stroke here and there to make the females more active. In "The Twelve Huntsmen," she has the prince collapse at the key moment, not the girl. The Maid of the North, in the original version, fends off a suitor by talking up the disadvantages of leaving home to join a stranger's household...
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