The paper discusses the process of appropriation of popular oral stories from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, by Perrault. It analyses the images of women acclaimed and celebrated in the author's fairy tales, built and inscribed within a given context and which propose certain values. The paper also analyses the possibility of reconstructing a socio-cultural history of folk-tales. It suggests an interdisciplinary approach to fairy tales in which cultural history and the history of the material forms would indissolubly mix.