Stepmother

[3] The character of the wicked stepmother features heavily in fairy tales; the most famous examples are Cinderella, Snow White, and Hansel and Gretel.

[6] In some fairy tales, such as Giambattista Basile's La Gatta Cennerentola or the Danish Green Knight, the stepmother wins the marriage by ingratiating herself with the stepdaughter, and once she obtains it, becomes cruel.

Such a replacement occurs in The Wonderful Birch, Brother and Sister, and The Three Little Men in the Wood; only by foiling the stepmother's plot (and usually executing her), is the story brought to a happy ending.

[14] However, historically, many women died in childbirth, their husbands remarried, and the new stepmothers competed with the children of the first marriage for resources; the tales can be interpreted as factual conflicts from history.

[15] In some fairy tales, such as The Juniper Tree, the stepmother's hostility is overtly the desire to secure the inheritance of her children.

[16] In Classic of Filial Piety, Guo Jujing told the story of Min Ziqian, who had lost his mother at a young age.

Conversely, the exemplary stepmother prefers the stepson to her own child, in recognition that his seniority makes him superior.

More subtly, Piers Anthony depicted the Princess Threnody as being cursed by her stepmother in Crewel Lye: A Caustic Yarn: if she ever entered Castle Roogna, it would fall down.

In the movie Nanny McPhee a group of children worry that their father will remarry, believing from their fairy tales that all stepmothers are an "evil breed."

When the wedding to her is called off, the father decides to marry the much kinder scullery maid, causing one child to comment that the evil stepmother personification does not apply to her.

In contrast to many other Disney-related media, the animated series Phineas and Ferb features a stepfamily in which both parents get along well with their three children (avoiding the normal tropes of evil stepparents).

[18] 438 BCE: The dying biological mother requests that her husband not remarry, for fear of her children being mistreated by a stepmother.