Scarlett and Moll are adventuresses, trapped by circumstances and always scheming a way out. Emma is just dull or so I remember her.

In the all female high school I attended, the English class novels once we hit eleventh grade could be read, at least in part, as cautionary tales for growing girls. Hester Prynne suffered while her lover dithered; Becky Sharp suffered apparently from the slippery slope of all that follows from throwing a dictionary out of the window (served her right, too); Lydia Bennet lived in happy ignorance by being too silly to know she was causing her family suffering; Emma Bovary got migraines and failed in life because she lacked the gumption to be a good wife. I suppose today those novels are assigned in the seventh or eighth grades.

I wish I'd thought of Kate in Shady Brook. She's plucky and saved by a doomed knight errant.

Nice topic. In LucasArts' Loom, Bobbin spends the entire game looking for his mother, Lady Cygna Threadbare. There's also the old Sierra game Mixed Up Mother Goose.

Come to think off it, didn't the plot Torin's Passage revolve around you looking for mom? (and your father of course)

And then there's of course all the wonderfull portrayals of mothers in King's Quest 1-7.

Recently I've been playing Guild Wars (RPG) and casual games, been a while since I played an adventure game (though I have plenty). There are a few quests involving mothers.

Both Guild Wars: Factions and Guild Wars: Nightfall have quests in which mothers ask you to rescue their kidnapped sons. You fight your way through hordes of killers only to discover that the young men do not want to be rescued and you have to break the news to mom.

In Guild Wars: Prophecies there is a quest in which you reunite the ghosts of a father and mother with their living son, now being raised by aunt, for a brief farewell. Guild Wars ghosts know they are dead but not the status of their loved ones, unless they died together. Guild Wars ghosts can be killed again, so you have to defend the friendly ones.