Harry Potter and the Feminist Rants

[willowisp]

Now that dust is settled and more people have finished the book, I'm seeing a lot of posts from people who are furious with the epilogue. We discover the fate of the four people mentioned in the cut tag, two apiece of female and male, and the gist of the rants is that those who are female have children and are married to the fathers thereof. The fury comes from there being no mention of careers or jobs outside of the house for the female characters.

[On a side note, I'm happy to see that most or all of the rants have acknowledged that staying home and being a housewife does not instantly render the woman inferior/weak. They seem to want to make it clear that they don't look down at stay-at-home moms, which is a nice change from the ridicule heaped upon stay-at-home moms in the feminist platforms I saw while growing up.]

What confuses me is that neither of the males are mentioned as having jobs either. There is no hint of "Ok, time for work, have dinner ready and the house properly cleaned by the time I get home". In fact, for all we know the husbands are stay-at-home dads and it's the wives who have careers. The thing is, the epilogue says nothing about the job status of the four people at all, and yet all of the people posting feminist rants are assuming that the men have jobs and the women are housewives.

I'm not quite sure what to make of that. Perhaps JK Rowling has given people reason to believe that all moms are stay-at-home in the witching world, and I've just completely missed it. It could also be that I misread the epilogue, although comments on the posts seem to indicate that other people got the same feeling I did; that the four characters' status as anything other than spouses and parents is left completely out of the equation.

Please note that I'm not accusing the posters of straw-man arguments. In fact, when confronted with the observation that it did not indicate the employment status of the male characters, most of the posters said something along the lines of "Oh wow, that's true". Most of them went on to say immediately that it was too bad the careers and/or activities of the female characters weren't mentioned.

I'm no great fan of the epilogue. I would have liked to see what shockwaves, if any, went through the muggle vs witching worlds as the result of the ending of the book proper. I wish we could have seen what happened to other surviving characters. It's just sad, perhaps, that even when something like job status is left ambiguous, people still believe extra clarification is needed to show that women don't default to one set path.

Comments

[potato-pope.livejournal.com]

...

Everyone views life through a particular lens. Everyone has a private crusade. And People who feel passionately will sometimes see offense where none is intended.

DON'T READ THE NEXT PART IF YOU ARE A Z0MG DON'T SPOIL ME OR I CRY TEARS OF BLOOD PERSON. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

I won't go into to much more detail for fear of spoilers, but I will note that I can only think of one confirmed homemaker mom in the book, and anyone who doubts her badassery regardless should reread the last chapter.

I did repost this because it contained *gasp* a name that would have been deemed super spoilery.

[kater-kat.livejournal.com]

Good night. Where in the... J.K. Rowling writes several strong women characters, which she never seems to put below a male. Even Mrs. Weasley, who is a stay at home mom, is a fairly strong character.

I thought the epilogue could have been more and was, to a degree, unnecessary for the points it did drive home. One could have easily assumed that the couple established in the epilogue would have worked out the way they did. I, too, would have preferred something a little more along the lines of the world as it is now, rather than such an unsurprising glimpse into a small event. And I would have liked to know about some of the other characters who survived, too.

[aelfsciene.livejournal.com]

My problem was not the epilogue in particular (at least not in this matter; I ranted about none of them having jobs, along with other things), but the series in general. HP7 really brought home that apparently, in the wizarding world, you can either be a wife and mother or a spinster with a wage-earning job. Bellatrix Lestrange is the only married and childless woman (whose husband has been dead for some time, and she's extra crazy), and there is a single example of a working mother (Marietta Edgecombe's (the Sneak from OotP) mom worked at the Ministry, and it apparently made her daughter weak-willed) in the entire, entire series.

I'm not saying that motherhood makes you weak, at all, but I'm infuriated that you seem to have a choice between that or spinsterhood. It's possible that the women in positions of power, like Amelia Bones or Umbridge or even the professors at Hogwarts actually have relationships or even husbands squirreled away somewhere, but the intimation (at least at Hogwarts) has always been that they're single and childless.

[echoweaver.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting debate that I'm coming to late because I just finished the book. This seems to already be a spoiler thread, so I'm not trying hard to censor myself.

For more reference to character futures, I found this link to an article with Rowling: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19959323/

It looks like Hermione is doing just fine from the feminist career angle, and I wouldn't have expected differently from her. Homemaking as a singular passion isn't in her personality.

To be honest, I don't see anything that indicates that female homemakers are more common than female careerists. I think the only reason we get that impression at all (and I did get it a bit early on in the series) is because the most prominent adult woman for most of the series is Molly Weasley; SHE is a homemaker, and Harry clearly reveres that. This is a Harry thing, I think, not a Rowling thing. Molly is a major part of the very kind of home he never had.

And give Tonks a break, for heaven's sake. What she was taking could clearly be considered maternity leave; I'd have to review the timeline, but I don't think the final battle could have been more than three months after Teddy's birth. I did notice and was slightly bothered that she was so explicitly excluded from decision-making after Teddy's birth while Lupin was not, but I didn't think it was a major issue, and she showed up when it really counted.

One thing I did see, especially in the epilogue, is that Rowling seems to be equating happiness with having children. It seems that it was so important to her to write the epilogue in some sense just to let us know that everyone settled down, got married to their Hogwarts sweethearts, and had children. And, of course, the names of Harry's children are the central information expressed there. It seems that it was very important to Rowling to get to write that Harry got to build the loving environment he always wanted to grow up in. This was more important to Rowling than it was to me. So, like apparently many readers, I'd rather have had more epilogue or none at all.

But it's worth pointing out that revering parenthood is not the same as insisting women be homemakers.