Designing Women: Why Perrault Trusted His Female Readers

Fairy tales are often imagined as tools of moral discipline—especially for women. But Perrault’s tales do something more surprising: they trust women to judge.

This trust is easy to miss if we focus only on plot. It becomes clearer when we look at how Perrault frames his work. When he presented his fairy tales to Élisabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans, the niece of Louis XIV, he placed a symbolic device at the head of the dedicatory letter: a rose with thorns, accompanied by inscriptions in both Latin and French. The image alludes to beauty and power. The design is borrowed from one created for her uncle, Louis XIV, adding an element of visual intertextuality. The inscriptions say nearly the same thing in two different languages--Why? Crucially, Perrault offers no explanation.

Device for Élizabeth-Charlotte d'Orléans. Charles Perrault. Contes de ma mère l'oye. 1695.

Unlike earlier educational devices prepared for the young Dauphin that included detailed explanations of each form so their meaning could not be missed, this one leaves interpretation entirely to the princess. The letter itself states that the morals in the book may be understood more or less clearly depending on the intelligence of the reader. In other words, the work scales with discernment that Perrault (and his son, the likely co-author) assumes the princess already has.

This gesture is not incidental. During the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, Perrault and his allies repeatedly argued that women were among the most reliable judges of taste—particularly in matters of clarity, elegance, and proportion. French, they claimed, had reached maturity precisely through women’s natural and uncorrupted (by Latin) usage. To defer aesthetic judgment to a woman was not flattery; it was consistent with their Modern philosophy.

Seen this way, the fairy tales are not moral traps set for naïve readers. They are exercises in perception. When Perrault withholds explanation, he does so deliberately. Silence becomes a test of intelligence rather than an assertion of authority. The reader is invited to rise to the work.

This is why the moral verses at the end of the tales feel so compressed, so polished, and sometimes so unsettling. They are not instructions. They are instruments—designed to reflect something back to the person reading.

Perrault did not write fairy tales because he distrusted women’s judgment. He wrote them because he believed they already possessed it.

And he designed his morals accordingly.

Frontispiece. Contes de ma mère l'oye. 1695.