How Much Does Your Princess Cost?

In the produce section of the grocery store last week I bumped into a princess. Even though it was a month until Halloween, a little girl was dressed up in a frilly, pink gown and wearing a crown as her mother shopped for groceries. Many of my fellow grocery shoppers stopped and said, “Well, aren’t you a pretty princess?”

This is not an unusual scene. How often are things said like, “Daddy’s Little Princess” and “Don’t you look like a princess?” or “Doesn’t every parent want their daughter to be treated like a princess?” It as though the word “princess” has become interchangeable with “little girl.” During my summer vacation trip this year, I went to the ultimate capital of princesses, Disney World. There I encountered many other princesses outside of the costumed characters. In every gift shop were plastic crowns and frilly gowns. Everyday no matter how hot the weather, I saw several girls between the ages of two and nine wearing the itchy Belle or Cinderella costumes.

What may seem like innocent dress up is in actuality a booming billion-dollar business. No longer are girls limited to the crown and gown. Now little girls have the option of more than 25,000 Disney princess items including princess bedding, princess alarm clocks and princess telephones. “Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001,” (Orenstein). Now it is not enough to dress like princess; kids now need to live like a princess.

What may seem like a plethora of product options is actually quite limiting. Most of the 25,000 Disney Princess items would fall under the category of the traditional icons of femininity with pink clothing, beauty products and dolls. There are no princess sports equipment, racing cars or building blocks. Excluding Pocahontas and Mulan, who are not technically by definition princesses, all of Disney’s princesses are white. All the princesses are beautiful and thin by the American ideal.

What kind of lesson are parents buying for their daughters? The princess culture reinforces the heterosexual normative. For every princess, there is a prince charming. Often in beloved fairy tales, prince charming rescues the princess.

“Becoming a Princess” for these girls means wearing items such as gowns, crowns and other icons of femininity. There is less emphasis on an active performance of gender and more emphasis on a visual performance of gender. The girls’ femininity is defined by the products they wear. Part of femininity that girls learn is the idea of being a woman means being consumers. Girls learn that they need to buy certain products in order to be pretty. The consumer market is telling a girl that if she does not buy the princess makeup, than she is not really a princess.

The girls are rewarded for their consumerism by receiving compliments on their dress. Dressing like a princess is an approved performance of femininity, even though it involves little skill. “Perhaps the most explicit way that children’s bodies become gendered is through their clothes and other bodily ornaments,” (Martin 498). Not only does it take products to be feminine, but girls in themselves become products. “…little girls learn to value “appearance,” that is, managing themselves as ornamental objects,” (West, Zimmerman 141).

When a girl dresses up like a princess, her movements become limited. It would be hard for a girl dressed up like a princess to climb trees or to play soccer. “Adorning a body often genders it explicitly—signifies that it is a feminine or masculine body. Adornments also make girls movements smaller, leading girls to take up less space with their bodies and disallowing some types of movements,” (Martin 500). Most of Disney’s princesses speak quietly and need a kiss from a prince in order to be rescued.

The duality of gender is reinforced by companies like Disney that advertise to children. “It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a key strategy of children’s marketing (recall the mergence of ‘ tween’), that pink became seemingly innate to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few years,” (Oreinsten). Children at an early age learn that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. There is little middle ground.

Who really is profiting from all this pinkness, all this duality? Companies can make a greater profit by narrowing their target market. A toy-car blanket handed down from an older sibling will not work for a younger sister. When little girls see a bombardment of pink, they use it as an identification card. “Clothes, particularly their color, signify a child’s gender; gender in preschool is in fact color-coded. On average, about 61 percent of the girls work pink clothing each day,” (Martin 498).

Boys, for the most part, are unaffected by the princess epidemic. It is rare to see boys pretending to be princes even. For a boy to pretend to be a princess would imply behavior outside of the hegemonic masculinity. The idea of being a “princess” is often embraced by men in the gay community. For this reason, parents tend to have a negative response when their boys dress up like a princess. “But more common were negative responses to items, activities, or attributes that could be considered icons of femininity…Parents of sons reported negative responses to their sons’ wearing pink or frilly clothing; wearing skirts, dresses, or tights; and playing dress up in any kind of feminine attire,” (Kane 159-160).

The idea of being a princess does not go entirely away when a girl turns twelve. In high school, girls dress up in frilly, expensive clothing and hope to become the Prom Queen. On their wedding days, former princesses wear a gown and marry what they believe to be their Prince Charming. The popularity of Cinderella stories goes hand in hand with the American dream. Staring from a young age, girls start to believe that fairy tales come true and that the American dream comes true.

Maybe princess items are a better option than the other option available to young girls. With the over sexualized Bratz dolls and a culture that idealizes Britney Spears, parents may feel like they are making a safe bet with Cinderella (Orienstein). Maybe it is better to tell daughters to be pretty instead of being sexy.

Maybe, too, the princess epidemic is harmless. More women are graduating from four-year colleges than men, and more women are entering traditional male professions, such as math and science. Orienstein argues that the princess idea does not go away when women reach adolescent but translates into another thing that girls are supposed to be—beautiful, kind and well-liked. Now that girls can by everything, they try and be everything.


And in a survey released last October by Girls Inc., school-age girls overwhelming reported a paralyzing pressure to be “perfect”: not only to get straight A’s and be the student-body president, editor of the newspaper and captain of the swim team but also to be ‘kind and caring,’ ‘please everyone, be very thin and dress right.’ Give those girls a pumpkin and a glass slipper and they’d be in business,” (Orienstein).


In my own childhood, Milton Bradley’s Pretty Pretty Princess dress-up board game was my favorite game, and there are pictures to prove that one Halloween I was a pink, frilly princess. Despite all my exposure to classic Disney films, I grew up just fine without an obnoxious tendency to wear pink and the confidence to call myself a feminist loud and proud. I will admit, however, that I do enjoy dressing up sometimes in frilly gowns and saying things like, “I haven’t found my Prince Charming, yet.”