The first literary tales emerged out of the 17th-century French salons, run by high-ranking aristocratic women, and served as a political manifesto. The salon women writers used the genre they ...created to promote a proto-feminist agenda. This included a rebellion against forced marriages and a withdrawal from the institution of marriage that circumscribed their freedom of movement, love, self-sufficiency and the right to their own literary voice. The female salon writers bestowed these rights on their fairy-tale female protagonists, creating a proto-feminist utopian world that sank into oblivion upon the authors' exclusion from the canon.
