When Charles Perrault adapted his French “Puss in Boots” from earlier Italian versions by Giovan Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, he made his feline protagonist a male. The cat, however, was grammatically gendered as feminine in the Italian versions, and several critics have speculated on the reasons for the French author’s change—regarded as purely ideological. This essay examines the cat’s gender in these three tales, and Perrault’s change, from a philological as well as a feminist perspective, with an emphasis on the gender of the dying parent at the beginning of the story: a father in Basile and Perrault, but a mother with a cat-like name in Straparola.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Mazzoni, C., (2025), "Changing the Sex of Cats: Considerations on Tale Type ATU 545, “The Cat as Helper, or, Puss in Boots” between Italy and France", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Quaderni d'italianistica

Original publication: Mazzoni, Cristina. "Changing the Sex of Cats: Considerations on Tale Type ATU 545, “The Cat as Helper, or, Puss in Boots” between Italy and France." Quaderni d'italianistica 40 (2): 2020. 7-24. DOI: 10.33137/q.i..v40i2.34876. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Quaderni d'italianistica. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Quaderni d'italianistica under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.