From scrubbing floors and dishes to ballroom dancing in stunning frocks: The social mobility stories of Disney Princesses

I am an active advocate for social mobility and spend much of my free time volunteering for organisations to help improve just that. As part of these efforts I have been interviewed by the press, for podcasts, and by people attending panel events wanting to learn more about my background and career journey. One question that almost always comes up is what it was that made me think social mobility was even possible, as a girl who spent a large chunk of her childhood living on the breadline like thousands of others across the UK. I ponder this question as often as it is asked, and I have recounted difficult memories and tried to psychoanalyse the younger version of myself (I can already see Sigmund Freud jumping for joy at this sentence) to seek out the perfect response. Honestly, the best answer I can come up with is that I fully immersed myself into various television shows, films, and books that fed into my fantasy of escaping my little house in rural England and moving into some sort of pretty palace, without really knowing what that meant. I idolised characters who managed to achieve the dream I had, and often this cast list included the women of fairy tales as brought to life by Walt Disney.?

The pauper-to-princess, rags-to-riches, and ugly-duckling-to-swan leitmotifs in fairy tales fed my hunger to believe that anything was possible, and in this way, I owe a lot to these characters who gave me hope for the future. When I think about this more deeply and converse with friends about the problematic narratives we were weened into believing were the perfect examples of social mobility, I realise that is exactly why fairy tales are so popular (also because I studied an entire unit on the topic during my undergraduate English Literature degree…). We grow an immense attachment to characters like Belle and Cinderella because they ignite our human desire to feel; to ride the rollercoaster of emotions between utterly depressed and ecstatically happy all within 50 pages or 2 hours. This is the very nature of why people enjoy the escapism of reading books or watching on screens. We enjoy being able to fully immerse ourselves into another world containing more desirable characters and events than the ones occupying our real lives.

Disney princesses must begin their journeys in dreary circumstances for there to be a reason for us to read or watch on, and because other fairy tales in our collective subconscious have taught us what to expect from the genre, we are prepared to witness them become socially mobile. The cyclical nature of stories re-told across generations and the re-appearance of tropes presents this as a logical way to become socially mobile. However, these popular fairy tales that feature poor women who are sad but domestically capable, and frail but perpetually virtuous, are not the best way for children like me to learn about the class system and how to navigate its many inequalities.?

For many children, on either side of the wealth spectrum, the first time they are exposed to social class is in the stories they hear at bedtime, read in books or see on screen. Fictional characters are then relatable or non-relatable based on how they live up to stereotypes. The animated imagery that comes to mind clearly shows this: lower-class characters work at the literal bottom of the kingdom baking bread; butchering meat; cleaning; or serving others, whilst upper-class characters watch from above at the top of the kingdom in a lavish castle, or in a horse and a carriage riding by. The complication is that Disney rarely exposes real class antagonisms. Instead, lower-class characters are simplistic and cheerfully unambitious people who have accepted their lot, and their lives are stable unlike the reality of poverty (certainly the one I faced as a free school meals recipient). On the other hand, upper-class characters are sensitive, intelligent, and constantly under piteous threat from curses and usurpers. It is partly these traits that allow Belle and Cinderella to smoothly climb the social ladder. For Belle, this is her passion for reading that contrasts to others in her village (the ‘’there must be more than this provincial life’’ lyric springs to mind). For Cinderella, this is her emotional intelligence (the ‘’a dream is a wish your heart makes’’ lyric springs to mind).

Their other commonality is that both work in domestic service, and for different reasons their social mobility stories begin when they fall in love which transgresses the class line. Their upper-class traits redact the tension that class differences could bring to a relationship. Our mind is tricked into thinking that if the same story of a poor girl marrying rich always leads to a ‘happily ever after’, then it must be the right route to emulate. In Disney, to become socially mobile is to turn one’s life completely upside down through one human exchange which is much more dramatic than the gradual process we really go through, unless you happen to win the national lottery instead of losing at the postcode lottery. This dependency on men is a damaging depiction of what it means for working class women to enhance their prospects; neither princess becomes socially mobile through hard work (though both are hard-working) but through attracting a handsome prince.

We are presented with the notion that only those who are beautiful and virtuous can escape their circumstance, and the rest of us do not deserve it. As children we naturally identify with protagonists in books or films the most rather than side characters, and so at the time this notion of deservingness is accepted because it is beneficial to our own fantasy building (and because ‘main character energy’ is rather alluring!). But looking back with hindsight I realise the damage this causes, especially to left-behind children not given opportunities to reach their full potential and reap the rewards. This teaches us that social mobility is mostly about luck, and perhaps it is sometimes, but that should not be the case and should certainly not be exemplified. We should not be brought up needing to wait for a fairy-godmother or husband to rescue us; we should be brought up in a society that facilitates social mobility as a very achievable goal. I certainly agree that help from others is important; I am the benefactor of mentorship schemes, diversity programmes, and allyship in the workplace myself and I am very grateful for all the support I have received and continue to receive. However, reliance on another individual should not be the first and final step in becoming social mobile, and we should all be aware that these stories oversimplify the complicated and traumatic process of identity shifting that social mobility really entails.

The animated Cinderella was released in 1950, and Beauty and the Beast in 1991; Disney catered to target audiences in sociohistorical contexts when women could not become highly educated then pursue high-flying jobs in the city. Nevertheless, because of their ‘timeless’ label I consumed and was influenced by these social mobility stories in the early 2000s when it was possible for women to become socially mobile through their own means. I watched them on bulky video tapes that I would rewind and reinsert into the player linked up to my box television repeatedly until they made a strange buzzing noise (if you know, you know). The problem is that the problematic nature of the stories was not spelled out and this contributed to my naivety about what social mobility meant going into adulthood.?

Whilst of course Walt Disney’s Belle and Cinderella are intended to entertain and we should appreciate their light-heartedness, apolitical nature, and charm, we must also appreciate their problems. Their conformity to societal expectations of modesty and morality has led them to become classics in a saturated marketplace because this behaviour has been engrained into our collective conscious as being innately good. As anyone who interacts with children in any capacity will know (for me this is watching my siblings grow up), at a young and impressionable age everything they consume is a form of education as well as entertainment. When it comes to the topic of social mobility, our modern understanding of its complexities must now be considered when creating new texts. Hence, we are seeing more championship of diversity in characters of different ethnicities; sexualities; disabilities; socio-economic backgrounds and more.

Children are now taught to break glass ceilings, not fit into glass slippers.