Stepmother

A stepmother, stepmum or stepmom is a female non-biological parent married to one's preexisting parent. Children from her spouse's previous unions are known as her stepchildren. A stepmother-in-law is a stepmother of one's spouse.

Stepparents (mainly stepmothers) may also face some societal challenges due to the stigma surrounding the "evil stepmother" character. Morello notes that the introduction of the "evil stepmother" character in the past is problematic to stepparents today, as it has created a stigma towards stepmothers. The presence of this stigma can have a negative impact on stepmothers' self-esteem.

In fiction, stepmothers are often portrayed as being wicked and evil. The character of the wicked stepmother features heavily in fairy tales; the most famous examples are Cinderella, Snow White, and Hansel and Gretel. Stepdaughters are her most common victim, and then stepdaughter/stepson pairs, but stepsons also are victims as in The Juniper Tree—sometimes, as in East of the Sun and West of the Moon, because he refused to marry his stepsister as she wished, or, indeed, they may make their stepdaughters-in-law their victims, as in The Boys with the Golden Stars. 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.

In some fairy tales, the stepdaughter's escape by marrying does not free her from her stepmother. After the birth of the stepdaughter's first child, the stepmother may attempt to murder the new mother and replace her with her own daughter—thus making her the stepmother to the next generation. 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. In the Korean Folktale Janghwa Hongryeon jeon, the stepmother kills her own stepdaughters.

In many stories with evil stepmothers, the hostility between the stepmother and the stepchild is underscored by having the child succeed through aid from the dead mother. This motif occurs from Norse mythology, where Svipdagr rouses his mother Gróa from the grave so as to learn from her how to accomplish a task his stepmother set, to fairy tales such as the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, where Aschenputtel receives her clothing from a tree growing on her mother's grave, the Russian Vasilissa the Beautiful, where Vasilissa is aided by a doll her mother gave, and her mother's blessing, and the Malay Bawang Putih Bawang Merah, where the heroine's mother comes back as fish to protect her.

The notion of the word stepmother being descriptive of an intrinsically unkind parent is suggested by peculiar wording in John Gamble's "An Irish Wake" (1826). He writes of a woman soon to die, who instructs her successor to "be kind to my children." Gamble writes that the injunction was forgotten and that she "proved a very step-mother."

The Icelandic fairy tale The Horse Gullfaxi and the Sword Gunnfoder features a good stepmother, who indeed aids the prince like a fairy godmother, but this figure is very rare in fairy tales.

Fairy tales can have variants where one tale has an evil mother and the other an evil stepmother: in The Six Swans by the Brothers Grimm and also in The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen, the heroine is persecuted by her husband's mother and in another one by her stepmother, and in The Twelve Wild Ducks, by his stepmother. Sometimes this appears to be a deliberate switch: The Brothers Grimm, having put in their first editions versions of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel where the villain was the biological mother, altered it to a stepmother in later editions, perhaps to mitigate the story's violence. Another reason for the change from a villainous mother to a villainous stepmother may have been the belief that mothers were sacred, as well as the belief that people would not believe that a mother could harbor such ill-will and animosity toward their child.