#wwbuilding

1. where did patriarchy originate in the real western world? & what assumptions am I working off of?

mona eltahawy called patriarchy "the oldest form of occupation", speaking to the way women & people classed as women (or gender deviant or ungendered) are treated as commodities to own. this BBC article argues that patriarchy was created as a way for the proto-state to leverage control over the population. the enforced social roles of males soldiers & female reproducers made groups bigger & more powerful.

I will take the article's assertion (it's very well sourced) that one of the first instances of patriarchy developing starts about 5,000 ago in Mesopotamia, when records show women disappearing from public life, at face value. then, ofc, in the mediterranean world we "soon" after see the Mycenaeans & Greeks & Romans, in that order, develop, all of which had patriarchal societies—tho to different extents.

as I have stated previously, the wizarding world loves Greek & Roman shit, as does the real western world (and we have! for centuries!). I like to consider their cultural norms, especially as they were interpreted during the Renaissance, when thinking about wizarding culture.

so, yes, the WW is patriarchal, since for at least 1,500 years, but probably more like 4,800 years. and for most of that time there was no wizarding world, just the World, and the WW had the same histories as the muggle world.

2. gender in late medieval and early modern england & western europe

so sorry, you've unlocked an info dump cutscene. it can be skipped.

I want you to imagine the traditional gender roles for men and women in western society. write them down, even. what should women be like? what is the inherent nature of women, if one exists, according to traditionalists? according to society at large? according to you?

in early modern england there was a HUGE shift in the perception of women and gender roles.

in "'The Good and Bad of that Sexe': Monstrosity and Womanhood in Early Modern England," by Alletta Brenner, the epistemological history of womanhood in the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the 17th centuries, is analyzed.

epistemology is about the study of knowledge, so think intellectual history, a history of what ideas and thoughts people are sharing and the patterns of those ideas and thoughts.

long story short: for about 1500 years, western culture regarded women as lesser versions of men, who are the perfect form of humans. male and female were not regarded as opposite, but two versions of the same thing. eve was made from adam’s rib, she’s a knockoff.

“Monstrosity and Womanhood” discusses two cultural differences between then & now that are significant to my argument. 1: people of the middle ages & early modern europe regarded the monstrous as a part of God’s creation, possibly frightening, but not unnatural. 2: women were regarded as too sexually driven, lustful temptresses. this is a stark contrast to the Cult of True Womanhood that we see in the 19th c, submissive, gentle, spiritually included, a soft place for her husband to find comfort in after being in the chaos of the outside world.*

(lily kind of embodies the late middles ages dangers of womanhood & it’s monstrosities in earth after rain.)

so, the answer to “what is a woman?” is changing rapidly right before the WW cuts itself off from the MW. I expect that, since the bio-essentialism of today started in the 19th century, post SoS, there is a significant difference in what the WW settles on.

the changing views on women in the MW are also influenced by and/or create the atmosphere wherein the witch trials are born. midwives and other women who transgressed their gender roles were targeted in the witch trials. the WW reacts to the witch trials by going into hiding (I don't believe this, I think it's part of the WW historical mythos used to uphold their society & it's fucking issues)

*this ideal of womanhood is only accessible by white middle and upper class women. other women are in many ways, monstrous, but they are also degendered.

3. gender in the text

in the books we see multiple examples of sexism, and a large chunk of these examples involve over-sexualization or sexual policing. our entry into WW culture, ron weasley, displays these views multiple times. he does not seem to believe that women are less intellectually or even less physically capable. he also doesn’t have a problem being defended by harry potter or hermione granger, or defending harry or hermione.

3.1 younger women

the threat of love potions is also brought up a few times throughout the books, and they are solely seen as a woman's weapon.

in Goblet of Fire, once skeeter turns on hermione, she asserts in a PUBLIC NEWSPAPER that hermione is possibly using love potions to seduce powerful men (pg 357). this is after harry's friendship with hermione is portrayed, again, in a public paper, as a romance (pg 225). hermione is pretty and smart when she's "with" harry, but when she is associated with a second man, thereby betraying the englishman who must be the hero of skeeter’s stories, she's ugly and smart enough to drug him. mrs. weasley, an adult woman and frequent caretaker of hermione, believes this and is cruel to her, a child.

over sexualization is used as a highly effective weapon against hermione. the WW easily accepts a young woman's sexuality as a threat to the men around her; she is voracious. i'm sure hermione being muggle born does not help.

merope gaunt is also accused, by dumbledore, of drugging tom riddle sr. with a love potion (pg 154 HBP). no evidence is given. we, the reader, are meant to assume the accuracy since dumbledore is making the claim. once again the sexual appetite of a young woman is dangerous. her misdeeds, brought about by choices made clouded with lust, only the short term considered, end up creating a fucking super villain. what's interesting is that this isn't only a belief of the characters in-text, it's the perspective of the author. nonetheless, dumbledore's quickness to blame a young woman's desire for driving her to violence and bringing misfortune, indicates that the sexuality of women in the WW is easily seen as dangerous.

i think this well establishes women's sexuality as a dangerous, insatiable threat in the WW culture. this is clearly a patriarchal ideology. the systematic reinforcement at the nuclear family level becomes clearer when we look at how the weasley brothers treat ginny's sexuality. they, just as men in the MW do, see their sister's sexuality as their business. however, this is not because men are a threat, but because ginny is unrestrained in her expression and exploration of her sexuality. I do not recall anyone ever worrying for ginny’s safety—women are competent and intelligent enough to defend themselves. 

here are two instances from HBP where we see the brothers judging their sister and trying to control her sexuality:

fred and george are selling love potions, but not to ginny, because she's used her wiles to collect enough men. ron is also reporting on ginny’s romantic endeavors to their older, of age, brothers (pg 91 HBP). Is this to leverage additional power and to control her? Later in the book ron doesn't want people to see ginny engaging in sexual behavior because of what they might think of his sister (pg 204). being a slut is bad in the WW too. :/

So, the two young women we focus on the most have their sexuality picked apart and policed.

3.2: older women

What of the older women? 

There are women in positions of authority in the WW, but most of the women who work and have positions of authority are not mothers in canon. The women with the most authority, mcgonagall, umbridge, arguably amelia bones though she is tertiary, are not mothers and remain, in canon, romantically unattached. pre-fudge there is a woman minister, who i imagine was put into power as a part of the glass cliff phenomenon, when shit hits the fan, women are more likely to be hired to oversee the shit hit everyone, and then be blamed. 

Marriage & motherhood remove agency. The important mothers of the series, lily, petunia, narcissa, molly, to a lesser degree alice and tonks, do not have children until they are married. Half of them definitely do not work. two have jobs, tonks and alice, and they + lily are in the order, activities unspecified. 

The lack of women occupying both domestic and public spaces indicates patriarchal control. There are two options. The married mothers we see occupying both spheres are all taking part in the public sphere with their husbands. Even tonks, who works were remus does not, is in the order with him. Mothers & wives are not unchaperoned.

It is also notable how young people are when they get married and have children. This is explained by war in the text. I posit that it’s actually another element of the patriarchal control of women’s sexuality. Since women are insatiable, those that are linked to a man must be kept under a higher level of control to ensure she stays loyal to her husband. Marriage in the teen years is younger than the average in MW in the 1970s (22.8 for women, 25.1 for men). the average age of women entering into their first marriage has consistently been 24 or older in england and wales since the 1550s—it dropped in the 1950s and 60s. 

Sidenote—during WW2 the age of marriage in the UK seemed to stagnate, and then it dropped at the conclusion of the war. 

We don’t have the stats for the WW, but we know james and lily married and had harry before 21, we know from the black family tree that narcissa had draco at the average age of marriage in 1970s MW UK, which indicates a younger marriage. We do not know alice and frank’s ages. tonks actually meets the average age for women in the UK in the mid 90s, but her husband and she are half bloods. it is possible that the average age of marriage in the WW is younger than the MW, especially among the upper classes. 

4. conclusion

The main element of patriarchy in the WW is control of women’s sexuality, because women are too promiscuous to control themselves, and this poses multiple dangers. Love potions, pursuing a man to near death, tarnishing the family name, etc. This has created cultural norms of younger marriage and women, especially upper class women, not working outside of the home once they are married. Women who choose not to tie themselves to a man through marriage may be seen as inherently less sexual, as adult women who do not marry are not put through the same scrutiny as women who express sexual inclinations. 

It is possible that we don’t see the scrutiny adult, unmarried women endure because harry is a child the whole time and does not think about his professors getting their backs blown out on the weekends. It is also possible that the women we see, namely umbridge and mcgonagall, put up a non-sexual persona to avoid this scrutiny, a childish feminine and de-sexed school marm respectively. I’d edge my bets towards the latter. 

Magic allows a significant portion of reproductive labor to be automated, and in the MW reproductive labor is designated to women and made invisible as an element of maintaining the nuclear family to uphold capitalism. Therefore women in the WW are partially freed from this element of capitalist patriarchy. 

Women are not seen as less capable with magic, intellect, or physically, so their voracious sexuality creates a greater threat. The patriarchy in the WW seeks to control their sexualities, but not much else. The desire to keep pure blood families “pure” likely increases the drive to control women’s sexuality in the upper classes. I’m not seeking to make this argument here, but I believe this element of policing would have evolved in the 19th century, parallel to the evolution of the bio-essentialist ideal women of the MW. the reason I am not making this argument here is that this post is long as shit, and making the point requires a lot of details about fascism and the history of the WW and MW.  

I do think patriarchy is “weaker” in the wizarding world, but still exists. Due to the SoS and magic much of the modern elements of capitalist patriarchy did not develop in the WW, instead, elements of the early modern patriarchy were carried over and intensified. At the same time, women in the WW always had a level of agency and power unreachable to muggle women, which carried over to the SoS society. Perhaps magical men treated muggle women how we treat marginalized women in the real world, and continued to do so after the SoS ended. Perhaps the WW is a secret upper class that exploits the MW without muggle’s knowledge. Perhaps.   

1: misconceptions of magic and witchcraft in western europe

there's a huge cultural misunderstanding of how western europe thought about "magic" and "witchcraft" pre-modern era, including the function of the witch trials. laws against magic were specific, and usually involved the practicer causing certain harm or worshipping pagan gods.

folk magic was practiced across cultures and across the centuries by the lower classes. ritualized chanting, amulets, prayers to saints, rituals of protection (sometimes from witchcraft), and medicine all contained elements of knowledge beyond the observable.

most people would have considered something condemnable and witchcraft if the power came from the Devil. other practices that we lump into that specific version of witchcraft would have been miracles, or cunning, or maybe a prayer answered.

it went against church doctrine to believe magic existed in any form for much of this time, but we know that doesn't mean it wasn't still part of the cultures.

the witch trials, which peaked in the early modern era, were simply targeting women. there was a rise in unmarried women, women were marrying older, and nunneries were being shut down due to the protestant reformation. i've spoken before about how the conception of what a woman is was changing rapidly in the early modern era.

2: application in HP worldbuilding

a: inconsistencies in the text

this is why i get irritated when i see people take the persecution of magical folk as presented in HP text at face value. there is no historical basis for this until the early modern witch trials, which is stated in the text to not have a big impact on magical folk's safety.

to quote a history of magic:

"Non-magic people (more commonly known as Muggles) were particularly afraid of magic in medieval times, but not very good at recognising it. On the rare occasion that they did catch a real witch or wizard, burning had no effect whatsoever. The witch or wizard would perform a basic Flame-Freezing Charm and then pretend to shriek with pain while enjoying a gentle, tickling sensation. Indeed, Wendelin the Weird enjoyed being burned so much that she allowed herself to be caught no less than forty-seven times in various disguises."

so, which is it? Muggle suddenly turned on magical folk and scared them into hiding with their persecution, or they were no real threat. we know jkr just needed a reason for the magical world to be secret, but for those of us who choose to take this way too seriously, this is an inconsistency.

b: what this means for magical history

an inconsistency that reminds me of two components of fascism as described by Umberto Eco. one is "obsession with a plot", an obsessive fear that some outside enemy is trying to harm your group, and two, the creation of enemies who were "at the same time too strong and too weak".

not to say the WW is fascist. i think this comparison makes it clear that the mythology around magical history is a way to maintain power and control over the population. the mythology creates a justification for the SoS and later the development of pureblood supremacy, which i view as a form of nationalism.

i don't think we really know what happened to cause the SoS. i suspect it was due to the witch trials, sure, but also because of the same anxieties and upheavals that caused the witch trials. like all things, it was fucking complicated.

we have pureblood propaganda in the supplementary text in the form of the sacred 28. this was published anonymously in the 1930s. no sources. meaningless. who was included and who was excluded was arbitrary. i don't think it's a stretch to say there is more historical myth-making going on in the text. we'll never know bc jkr hates history and is horrible at writing it!

i think in the WW for middle class and upper class women there would be parallels to the MW. women with class privilege want the it to be socially acceptable for them to work out of the home while being a married woman. they want to "have it all" without losing a marker of their class privilege and gaining a marker of being lower class.

i imagine lower class wives and mothers work in the wizarding world, most likely doing reproductive labor for families that don't have house elves, and perhaps at the ministry. they also may work at the ministry in less prestigious positions. maybe, like in the middle ages, they brew ale or create other artisan goods that need hands on workmanship.

for them, economic feminism would be about protections in the workplace. since i believe women in the WW are seen as dangerously oversexed, this may have similar vibes to the #MeToo movement of modern times.

the pure blood supremacy movement increases control over women, as fascist movements do. pure blood women can't be used as sexual outlets because they must maintain their purity, and they must also be stopped from fulfilling their ravenous sexualities. the other women—especially Muggleborn women—do not need to be kept pure. and since they're already ravenous, what's the harm in fucking them?

i think this would create a widening gap between these two categories of women. not a Madonna-Whore situation, since all women are whores or about to be whores or, if their husband is sexually proficient, at the very least his whore. that's the highest position for women to achieve, if you're taking a really dark look at the situation.

of course, we see plenty of women working. even for women who aren't married and mothers i think a freedom of sexuality will be necessary. a movement for the ownership of their sexuality, and women's sexuality no longer being seen as (or even legally codified as) a threat.

based on what we see in the books in the 90s, i imagine that first there is a movement for women's equal access in the workplace, and equal protection. i think protection from sexual violence would be a harder goal to achieve. the mid-century would see a transition from the expectation that all "worthy" women stay home and open up a few acceptable career paths, with more and more careers becoming acceptable with each decade. part time work, or work after the children are at hogwarts, would become more normal among the middle class and those who want to distance themselves from the conservative faux-aristocracy.

i wouldn't be surprised if working class women and Squibs had a close collation, and that women were very involved in the Squib protests of the late 60s.

so in the WW in the 70s i think we'd see more economic feminism and workers rights, with middle class women making larger gains. their perspective is not the mainstream, which means when the marauders & co are in school it's still the default for a woman of means and good breeding to stay home once she's married. a bit of a career beforehand is a good way to save her own money and meet a man, but only those sorts of women work after marriage.

lily is that sort of woman, she's a working class Muggleborn, so while i think she'd be for women's lib, the pure blood perspective that's mainstream in wizarding feminist discourse, would not entice her. i can see peter being like "well i don't want my wife to have to work". remus does not think he'll be married and does not go around telling other people what to do. sirius sees this patriarchal mindset as a part of pure blood supremacy, but thinks there's more important things to worry about (like the sexual violence Muggleborn women face. no he does not connect that as women's lib). james says "my wife wouldn't have to work, and i'd support her doing whatever she wants" but honestly i think that he sees his future wife's potential job as more of a hobby.

of course, lily wants to work, to prove herself, and i think by the time they get together james is able to take a more introspective view. i wonder if lily working a lot might cause conflict if they survived the war? i think james would prioritize family and want access to lily most of the time, so it would be difficult for him to understand why she doesn't feel the same.

i digress.

I don't think a prudish/open dichotomy works for how I perceive sexuality functioning in the wizarding world. in the gender in HP analysis I talk about how misogyny as displayed by characters in the text is done by sexually policing women. this is done more subtly in the way that we see so many housewives and so few adult women who demonstrate sexuality outside of marriage or pursuit of marriage.

I think in the contemporary WW they still have this idea of women as oversexed beings. additionally, I don't think they view gender and sexuality exactly like we do. they don't have sexuality as an identity, since that emerged in the real world in the early 1900s. 100 years ago, heterosexuality was a disorder. in the 30s it became what we know it as today. so i don't think it's a stretch to say the WW, with their slow change, would not engage with sexual identity.

on top of that we see no sex ed in the books. now, i don't think jkr would have put sex ed in the books even if it existed. that's the issue with these being children's books. either way, there is a distinct conservatism in WW family structure. women stay home, men work, women who work are desexed.

but dating seems super acceptable for the youth at hogwarts. the trio all have crushes and romantic relationships, and this is painted as natural. the only comments come from men about women being promiscuous. it's heavily implied at the start of DH that ginny was going to sleep with harry, who was a virgin, and the way she was framing it as a gift makes me think the implication was that she was also a virgin.

i assume it is up to the parents to teach their children about sex. i can imagine molly telling ginny it's okay to have sex outside of marriage, since it's clear molly and arthur had a passionate relationship before their marriage, with the stipulation that it should be with someone you are going to marry. this fits medieval perspectives on sex—sex between a betrothed couple was socially acceptable.

when young women are criticized for dating it's about being with multiple men. it wasn't uncommon irl for lower class (which is the majority of people) women to be pregnant when they married, specifically in the early modern period. this extends into the victorian era, which pureblood culture is obviously influenced by.

within committed relationships having sex was seen as fine and normal for the commoners, but having a baby out of wedlock was The Worst, since we see literally not one bastard in the whole series. jkr goes out of her way to make sure all of the kids are conceived within marriage.

for upper class/pure blood women, virginity was important. i expect there were magical "virginity tests", that became more frequent as pure blood supremacy evolved. this is because even association with Muggle borns made a person "dirty", so knowing the woman was not discerning enough to protect her virtue would imply bad judgement & therefore dirtiness.

i think the human body was not sexualized in the same way as we do, however, because we see multiple mixed-sex places people get naked. the prefects baths, for one, and it seems like the locker rooms as well. the girl's dorms are not mixed-sex. to me this says the context dictates how the naked body is viewed. the bedroom holds an intimate context, but a public bath and locker room do not.

i like the idea that some rituals involved nudity, and that nudity was seen as a positive and natural state. when harry dies he wakes up in the afterlife naked. when voldemort is resurrected he's naked, and this seems like not a big deal. since emotional magic is powerful i think sex would be used in some rituals.

all of this to say, i think the hogwarts students would be doing a lot of hand and mouth stuff. i think penetrative sex was very significant, and carried an importance in the WW mainstream longer than it did in the MW. this is part of why i like to imagine james as a virgin when he and lily get together, and her not. it's interesting bc it reinforces the stereotype of Muggle born women being slutty, so there's that extra tension.

the idea of sacred virgins is interesting too, not for religion, but for magic ritual, and on the flip side, sacred sex workers.