Everybody ‘knows’ that ‘stepmothers are notoriously wicked. Anyone, with any cultural literacy … knows that stepmothers are always out to destroy their stepchildren’ (Abrahamsen, 1995: 347). My stepdaughter, Eve, barely two at the time, was introduced to the idea of the wicked stepmother in Cinderella. Initially, she was upset, but then she was thrilled that she had a stepmother. Excitedly, she called my husband to tell him the good news. I am forever grateful to her mother, who turned a very negative portrayal of a stepmother into one of joy. This experience saddened me but also inspired me to find out how other stepmothers experience their stepmotherings and to challenge the negative perceptions and portrayals of stepmothers as this negativity hurts people. As Visher and Visher (1979: 6) argued, ‘[f] airies do not exist, and witches do not exist, but stepmothers do exist, and therefore certain fairy tales are harmful rather than helpful to large segments of the population’.

When I started my research in 2011, I thought I was doing a literature search wrong because there were very few results on stepmothers and what was available was highly negative, bar a couple of exceptions. I returned to the research on stepmothers in 2022. It was to my great surprise that the research on stepmothers has not developed significantly since then and that the stepmother in academic literature remains under-researched, negatively portrayed and poorly understood despite articulated calls to expand the field and present a more nuanced analysis of her, a call that has not been answered since the 1990s (for example, Salwen, 1990; Ganong and Coleman, 2017; Roper and Capdevila, 2020).