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[ noun ] the wife of your husband by a subsequent marriage
Used in print (William C. Smith, "Why Fear Ideas?"...)The stepmother , almost without exception , has been presented as a cruel ogress . Children , conditioned by this mistaken notion , have feared stepmothers , while adults , by their antagonistic attitudes , have made the role of the substitute parents a difficult one . Research , on_the_other_hand , has shown many stepmothers to be eminently successful , some far better than the real mothers . Helen_Deutsch informed us ( The_Psychology_of_Women , Vol. 2 , , 434 ) that in all cultures `` the term ' stepmother ' automatically evokes deprecatory implications '' , a conclusion accepted by many . Related terms |
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