Scheherazade's Sisters

"Scheherazade's sisters" are those female protagonists in folktales who use trickery to save themselves and others, to find new directions for their lives, and to declare their individual autonomies, especially in societies that diminish and oppress women. Through creative strategies that depend on verbal facility, psychological acuity, and diplomatic finesse, these female tricksters--renamed trickstars--uncover the absurdity, hypocrisy, and corruption in the larger patriarchal society. Through the trickstar's efforts, "the system" is circumvented or foiled; often enlightened and usually improved. The book is a multi-cultural, comparative study which reveals universal human traits as well as gender differences in female and male tricksters and realizes the values and attitudes which shape trickstar's character and behavior.