“…I have not yet found striking and explicit tales of a mother's rivalry with her own daughter, but one could cite numerous tales of stepmothers tormenting or exihng their stepdaughters, and cruel mothers-in-law trymg to kill or harm daughters-in-law Demonic mother-goddesses, ogresses, stepmothers and mothers-in-law are mother-figures specializing m the terrible aspects of mothers toward daughters (Ramanujan, 1983, p 251) Considering the well-known role of mothers-in-law in Indian bride bumings, it seems disingenuous to interpret tales of their mistreatment of their daughters-m-law as merely symbohc More generally, what Ramanujan fails to recognize is that people related by mamage, such as mothers-in-law and stepmothers, have genuine relationship-specific conflicts of interest with their daughters-m-law and stepdaughters, conflicts which greatly surpass those between mothers and daughters Consider step-relationships (Wilson & Daly, 1987) Their essence is that they are formal analogues of genetic links In stable dyadic relationships between unrelated ammals, reciprocity is carefully monitored by both parties, and failures thereof are resented as exploitative (Taylor & McGuire, 1988, Tnvers, 1971, Wilkinson, 1984 Parents, by contrast, willmgly endure a chronic and cumulatmg imbalance m the flow of phenotypic benefits, this is hardly surpnsmg when one considers the Darwmian truism that creatures evolve to expend their very lives enhancing the expected fitness of descendants Parental investment is a valuable resource and parental psyches have evolved to allocate it discnminatively (Daly & Wilson, 1988c) So what of the stepparent'' People enter mto relationships m which they incur some obligation to play parent to someone else's children as part of the bargain of establishing a new mateship, the children enter mto the prospective stepparent's mantal decision as a cost, not a benefit (Becker, Landes, & Michael, 1977, White & Booth, 1985 Pseudoparental obligations are often overtly resented (Ambert, 1986, Messinger, 1976)-even benevolent, affectionate stepparents are unlikely to derive the same emotional rewards from their unreciprocated labors as genetic parents (Duberman, 1975) One consequence is that violence is enormously more frequent in step-relationships than m the corresponding blood relationships , 1988a, Wilson & Daly, 1987, Wilson, Daly, & Weghorst, 1980 Contra Ramanujan and other psychoanalytically onented folklonsts, then, Cinderella stones need hardly be interpreted as symbohc of the malevolence of genetic mothers Like Hall and van de Castle's (1965) dreams of hostile strangers, their exphcit content matches reality more closely than their alleged symbolic content…”