Are Folktale Heroines Stereotyped? A Textual Study in the light of a few Bodo Folktales

Every society has its own ways of treating girls and boys or male or female and assigning them
different roles, responsibilities and attributes. All the social and cultural differentiation made
for males and females from birth onwards if ‘gendering’. Each society slowly and steadily
transforms a male or a female into a man or a woman, into masculine and feminine, with
different qualities, behaviour patterns, roles, responsibilities, rights and expectations. Ann
Oakley rightly said, ‘gender is a matter of culture, it refers to the social classification of men
and women into masculine and feminine’.