Speaking Out for Princesses

Disney princesses don't get to speak as much as male characters, even in animated films named for the female lead.

Thank you to Carmen Fought, linguist at Pitzer College, for analyzing speaking times of male/female characters in Disney princess films.  Thanks also to John Arthur for sending this link and to Jeff Guo for this report in the Washington Post.  

Fought and Karen Eisenhauer make the following observations:

1) "In the classic three Disney princess films, women speak as much as, or more than the men. “Snow White” is about 50-50. “Cinderella” is 60-40. And in “Sleeping Beauty,” women deliver a whopping 71 percent of the dialogue. Though these were films created over 50 years ago, they give ample opportunity for women to have their voices heard."

"By contrast, all of the princess movies from 1989-1999 — Disney’s “Renaissance” era — are startlingly male-dominated. Men speak 68 percent of the time in “The Little Mermaid”; 71 percent of the time in “Beauty and the Beast”; 90 percent of the time in “Aladdin”; 76 percent of the time in “Pocahontas”; and 77 percent of the time in “Mulan” (Mulan herself was counted as a woman, even when she was impersonating a man)."

2)  Little girls are "not born liking a pink dress. At some point we teach them. So a big question is where girls get their ideas about being girls.”

3) In terms of plots: “There's one isolated princess trying to get someone to marry her, but there are no women doing any other things,” Fought says. “There are no women leading the townspeople to go against the Beast, no women bonding in the tavern together singing drinking songs, women giving each other directions, or women inventing things. Everybody who’s doing anything else, other than finding a husband in the movie, pretty much, is a male.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/25/researchers-have-discovered-a-major-problem-with-the-little-mermaid-and-other-disney-movies/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_evening