Where the Mothers Went: A Disney Story
On Maternal Erasure and the Power in Disney’s Princess Canon
written by Ashley Mozingo, MBA | Essay Series, 2026
Most of us meet our earliest ideas about the world through stories. Before we learn the language of politics, economics, or power, we learn the language of heroes, villains, and happily-ever-afters.
If you return to many of the most familiar princess stories in Western media, the mother is often absent. She is gone before the story begins, unnamed in memory, or removed through tragedy. For years, this detail has been explained as a storytelling shortcut—an easy way to create vulnerability and movement. But patterns that repeat across generations are rarely neutral. It is a cultural pattern embedded within broader Western systems of representation that regulate how power, gender, and authority are imagined, distributed, and legitimized.
That is how conditioning works. You do not notice what you are trained not to miss. Power is quietly removed from women before girls ever learn to name it.
What Happens When You Never See Women Govern?
If girls never see women lead, they stop expecting to lead.
If they never see mothers hold authority, they stop trusting inherited wisdom.
If power always arrives through rescue, romance, or permission, they learn to wait.
This is how desire is shaped.
This is how ambition is trimmed.
This is how a population becomes easier to manage.
Maternal figures represent continuity, relational authority, and inherited wisdom. They embody power that is not granted but held. Their presence challenges Western narratives that frame power as something to be earned through suffering, competition, or conquest—traits historically coded as masculine. By removing mothers, these stories sever feminine power from lineage and place authority elsewhere: in kings, systems, magical interventions, or romantic salvation.
Mothers are fully realized women—experienced, embodied, influential. That makes them threatening to systems that rely on: Women being seen as incomplete, and authority being earned through suffering rather than lineage
So the mother is removed, minimized, or villainized.
If we grow up rarely seeing women who remain central as leaders, decision-makers, and holders of wisdom, it becomes easier to imagine power as something external.
This doesn’t just shape how girls see themselves. It shapes how everyone learns to see women: as supporters of the story, not stewards of it. Over time, this influences what feels natural in real life—who we trust with authority, whose leadership we question, and whose labor we take for granted. The boundary between story and system becomes thinner than we like to admit.
When children grow up rarely seeing maternal authority, they learn to trust power that looks nothing like care. This doesn’t stay on the screen. It shows up in workplaces that undervalue relational leadership. It shows up in politics that dismisses women in leadership, despite a LONG list of qualifications. In economies that depend on unpaid maternal labor while denying it authority.
You don’t need a conspiracy to make this work. You only need repetition.
“It’s Just a Movie” is the defense of every system. Every culture tells itself that its stories are harmless, but stories shape values. With little interference from parental figures due to disconnect and their own fatigue, no one is home to challenge these stories.
The sustained marginalization of maternal authority in globally circulated narratives contributes to a order in which care is separated from power. Feminine leadership is rendered exceptional rather than foundational. Cultural literacy, then, becomes a form of political action. The question is not whether Disney “intended” to erase mothers.
Intent is not the primary analytic category in cultural studies.
Effect is.
Essay influenced by:
Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed.).
hooks, b. (1992). "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators". In Black Looks: Race and Representation.
Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices.