When comparing Charles Perrault's The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood and Margaret Atwood's There Was Once, one may notice a stark difference between the roles and descriptions of the female characters in the short stories.  One starts off describing women in a beautiful and delicate manner while the other wants to be as nondescript as possible while describing them.  It becomes a more modern take on  classic fairy tales as they are rewritten to embrace the changes feminism has made on society. 

In Charles Perrault's short story The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, the princess is described as being gifted, 

"The most beautiful person in the world; the next, that she should have the wit of an angel; the third, that she should have a wonderful grace in everything she did; the fourth, that she should dance perfectly well; the fifth that she should sing like a nightingale, and the sixth, that she should play all kinds of music to the utmost perfection." (pg 297)

The author's description of the princess as having the eloquence and ideals of women at the time during the late sixteen-hundreds.  In a lot of fairy tales, the prince always bases his feelings for the princess off of her looks.  The prince fell in love with the princess in Perrault's short story because she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.  When describing the prince's mother, the Queen, the author describes her as being an ogre with ogre-like tendencies.  It creates a negative connotation towards the other female character and an instant dislike of her.  In most fairy tales, the antagonist (usually also female) is called either wicked, evil, etc. in order to create a negative image in the reader's mind of the character and their intentions .  

The author paints women in a light that makes them appear to have the responsibilities as the homemaker and child-bearer as was common during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  For example, the princess in Perrault's story had children immediately after she and the prince married and went about raising them.  When they were taken away from her, she was extremely distraught over being separated from her children.   When the cook came in to kill her, she almost let him willingly in order to see them again.   Later on in the story, the Ogre-like Queen overhears one of the children crying for his mother not to whip him for misbehaving.  It is yet another example of how the princess was depicted with the ideals of women being the ones to raise the children and punish them when they deserve it .  

In Margaret Atwood's There Was Once, the author writes the short story as a sort of dialogue between two people, one is trying to narrate a story while the other keeps interrupting and changing the story.  The narrator starts off trying to tell a classic fairy tale with the usual descriptions of a beautiful girl and a wicked stepmother.  However, the second speaker has the narrator of the story change their description from, "There once was a girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest." to, "There was once a girl, as average-looking as she was well-adjusted, who lived with her stepmother, who was not a very open and loving person because she herself had been abused in childhood." .  The critic of the narrator's story claims they are tired of the same basic idealistic depictions of females and their roles in stories.  The critic wants to make the story as politically correct as possible instead of some wild fantasy.  Feminism is evident in the new description in the story because it was published in 1992 after the three major waves of feminism .  

One-by-one fairy tales are being rewritten to change the role of the sexes.  Princesses are no longer being described as youthful, beautiful, or delicate.  They are rather taking a more feminist approach and either leaving out certain parts of the stories where the female seems weak and helpless or replacing her characteristics with more gender-neutral ones.  For example, in a rewritten version of Snow White by the Merseyside Women's Liberation Movement where Snow actually works with the dwarves in the mine instead of cooking and cleaning for them.  The Queen is only jealous of Snow's livelihood instead of jealous of her beauty and the Hunter only spares her due to her potential at a successful future rather than him being in love with her .  So like with Margaret Atwood's short There Was Once, the descriptions are changed to make the princess more equal with everyone else instead of a mere object of beauty while in Charles Perrault's The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods has the usual gender stereotype description.  Another popular tool of feminism in fairy tales is omission.  Parts are added or taken away to make the story seem darker, lighter, or more feminine.  Disney added happy endings to their fairy tales while Brothers Grimm added darker elements that took away from the princesses' femininity.  Both versions of popular fairy tales are very different from the originals but tend to still keep some sort of moral message .  

Rewriting of old classic fairy tales to make them more feminist is becoming increasingly popular.  One can see that change when comparing the two works The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood by Charles Perrault and There Was Once by Margaret Atwood.  The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood uses all of the original types of descriptions of the princess, focusing mainly on her beauty and poise.  There Was Once uses a more modern description of political correctness and feminism.  Omission is another way that the short story There Was Once has changed the variation of the original description of women by leaving out wording typically used such as the word "beauty" itself.  
