So, there’s some amount of Harry Potter mania out there in the world this weekend, what with a new movie and the last book in the series being released. (To show you how disconnected I am from the mania, I could not tell you without recourse to the internet whether The Order of the Phoenix is the new movie or the new book.) I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books (yet), but my eldest child recently finished the first Harry Potter book and quite liked it. However, as we were discussing it this morning, we encountered one of my pet peeves:
We drive past the road where our elementary school is located, a school that shares the name of the road.
Elder offspring: That would be “Hogwarts Road” if we were learning to be witches.
Dr. Free-Ride: Don’t you mean wizards?
Elder offspring: No.
Dr. Free-Ride: You mean Hermione’s not studying to be a wizard?
Elder offspring: No, the girls are called witches.
Dr. Free-Ride: But doesn’t Hermione learn pretty much all the stuff Harry and Ron learn at Hogwarts?
Elder offspring: Yup. But they call the boys wizards and the girls witches.
Dr. Free-Ride: It kind of bugs me that if they’re really learning to do the same thing they need two different words to describe it, one for boys and one for girls. There are plenty of professions that don’t do that.
Elder offspring: Like doctors and nurses. They could be men or women.
Younger offspring: Nurses are girls, though. Cassia won’t be teaching at [our after school program] any more because she’s going to nursing school, and she’s a girl.
Dr. Free-Ride: Child, just because you know a girl who’s going to be a nurse doesn’t mean all nurses are girls. There are nursing students in some of my classes, and a lot of them are men.
Elder offspring: Besides, our doctor is a woman.
Dr. Free-Ride: Yeah, you knew that. It’s true, though, that some people think some jobs are just for men and some jobs are just for women. You shouldn’t listen to those people when you’re thinking about what you want to be when you grow up.
Elder offspring: Artist doesn’t mean a man or a woman, just someone who does art.
Dr. Free-Ride: Actor is starting to mean just someone who acts, but there are still people who call a woman who acts an “actress”.
Younger offspring: A girl actor is an “actress”.
Dr. Free-Ride: Lately, a lot of women who act want to be called actors. Something about “actress” feels almost like a condescending pat on the head. “Oh, you’re so cute trying to act as well as a man!”
Younger offspring: That’s not nice. If they want to be called actors, people should call them actors.
Elder offspring: You know, a woman wrote Harry Potter.
Dr. Free-Ride: I’m not blaming her; I’m blaming the language that she had to work with that was there before her. And maybe the language will catch up and stop making such a big deal about gender for things like jobs where it really shouldn’t matter.
Elder offspring: Girls and boys get to play quiddich, though.
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, I’m glad of that.
This may be going the other way, actually (but I sympathize with your feeling for the gender-separate terms). The definitions I’ve checked so far for ‘witch’ (admittedly only one, and wiktionary at that) give the definition as:
“A (usually female) person who is learned in and actively practices witchcraft (according to the OED, its use in the masculine is “now only dialectal”)”
So perhaps Rowling didin’t think it correct to call the male characters witches, and chose ‘wizard’ for its alliteration (though I also like ‘warlock’). At least she didn’t use Wizard and Wizardess!
I’d be rather interested to hear if this same complaint comes up in other languages. German for instance indicates the gender of the person on almost all words for occupations. (Lehrer vs. Lehrerin).
Why wizards?
Why not suggest they should all be called witches?
I like how Terry Pratchett deals with this in his Discworld series. There, witchcraft and wizardry are different sorts of things. Witchcraft is more earthy magic, controlling animals, using herbs, etc. Wizardry is more cerebral magic, teleporting, um.. I can’t think of other good examples. Anyway, there is a lot of overlap in their abilities, but the approach and lifestyles are quite different.
True, for the most part witches are women and wizards are men in Pratchett’s books. But he has one book (Equal Rites) where he deals with that issue head on, where a girl is born with much more inclination towards wizardry than witchcraft, so they try get her in the academy for wizards, and madcap hilarity ensues.
It’s hard to know what to say about Hogwarts and the use of the terms there, since they combine the elements of wizardry and witchcraft. Brooms are more often associated with witches, but wands are more wizard tools (maybe). Herbology and potions seem more like witchcraft tools, and all the book-learning is more associated with wizardry. The problem is that both boys and girls learn all this stuff there, so it does seem odd to call one a witch and the other a wizard. Maybe they should have been more neutral and called them all ‘magicians’.
I’m happy enough to call Harry and Hermione witches. My issue is that if they’re studying to take on the same occupation (as it were), one word ought to be sufficient to designate it, whether it’s done by a boy or a girl.
It’s also interesting to see how different words for “magic-user” are used in different fantasy stories. A lot of authors attribute different meanings (not just gender) to words like “witch” and “wizard”. One of my favorites, Terry Pratchett, has both witches and wizards in his comic Discworld novels, but they are very different. Wizards are all men (with the exception of the first female wizard in one of the novels) who live in the city and do magic that is very structured and shares some similarities with science. Witches, on the other hand, are all women living in very rural areas and they act more like midwives. It should be noted, however, that most of the characters and concepts in Pratchett’s books are meant to parody the stereotypes of both fantasy and society.
Whoops, Steve beat me to it.
I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books
buh. wa. wababa hamma hurk. [brain having trouble processing this statement]
no wonder you academics have a rep for being out of touch with normal society! good lord woman, EVERYone’s read Harry Potter!
oh, and go read a Discworld novel or two.
I’m glad we now have only movie stars and no longer have any ‘starlets’. That one went in the crapper years ago, where it belongs.
Odd that the occult doesn’t distinguish between witchcraft and wizardcraft. Maybe there’s not a nickle’s worth of difference.
Yeah, I know I should read a Harry Potter book, but I do a lot of reading for my job, and Harry Potter is too long to read to children at bedtime, and … since all the cool kids are doing it, I’ve been resistant.
Since my eldest has read and approved the first one, I’ll make an effort to catch up.
(Being out of touch has meant we’ve been able to avoid release-day lines at both bookstores and movie theaters, though.)
Your children might like a book by Barbara Ninde Byfield originally titled The Glass Harmonica and now called The book of Weird, in both cases subtitled “A Lexicon of the Fantastical.” It very wittily subjects the mythic and occult to the encyclopedia treatment, with fabulous illustrations. It makes a distinction between witches and warlocks, on the one hand, who gain magic powers through a deal with the Devil, and wizards, on the other, who are sages and far superior to mere Witches and Warlocks. She does use “he” exclusively for Wizards, but the book does date to 1967. Your kids may also use their critical faculties to recognize that a book that looks authoritative may not have the Whole Truth.
“Harry Potter is too long to read to children at bedtime”
Ahh, I have the best scam in the world. Eldest SpawnofDrugMonkey likes HP and yet is really too young for this type of book. Puts ESoDM to sleep in about a half a page, two max.
Don’t forget that Hardly Plotted is written for children. As doctrinaire a group as any you’ll find in a strip mall church. Things are as they are, and there’s no discussing the matter. For Eldest Offspring things are as they are because they are, she can’t consider the possibility that things might be different. Doesn’t have the equipment yet. A child of 14 can think of how things could be different, but that’s not how things are supposed to be.
In the world of children witches are girls and wizards are boys. That’s how it is/should be. With maturity comes the understanding that things can be different from what you think is right. That you can call a boy a witch and a girl a wizard.
Grad–The situation for German is a bit tougher. Like many other Western language, the grammar is gendered. That is, not only the nouns, but the articles, adjectives, verbs, etc. are conjugated differently based on the assigned gender of the noun they are associated with. German is a bit better off than, say, Spanish in this regard, in that it has three genders: male, female, and neuter. But many nouns have assigned genders based pretty much entirely in long-standing tradition. Removing this feature would involve a deep re-design of the language, which is virtually impossible to do with a living language …
Oh, and on the original topic … I find it hard to ding Rowling for this, when the whole series is so relentlessly effective progressive propaganda. (And I mean that in a good way!) While the ultimate villain behind the series is mainly power-hungry, his methods of obtaining control involve catering to people’s xenophobia and sense of superiority over other groups. The heroes, on the other hand, are defending an egalitarian mindset, where individuals are to be judged on their own merits rather than on the group they were born in. And if this mindset doesn’t always extend entirely to gender, the consistency with which it is otherwise applied is telling.
Harry Potter is too long to read?! I read mine Tom Sawyer and Lord of the Rings. Unexpurgated…
I’m a bit confused now. Somewhere along the line, I got the impression that you have two boys. But do you actually have two girls? Or a boy and a girl?
According to the OED, a male witch is a warlock. As for wizard, this is the first definition my shorter OED gives:
(italics in the original)
I’ll have to remember that one, although the sneer might be difficult to manage on a blog comment.
Bob
Typically in fantasy lit witches use earth spirits and occasionally minor demons to perform magic. They also use natural substances for medical remedies. That doesn’t sound at all like what Hermione does. I think she should be called a wizard.
Scott, that was exactly my point. Does this come up as in issue there since it is built in to the language to a much larger degree? Or is it not an issue because its built in? I can see things going either way, actually.
In Steven Karl Zoltan Brust’s Taltos series, there is witchcraft and there is sorcery. Witchcraft uses spells, chanting, herbs, whatnot, to concentrate the power of the mind, whereas sorcery involves a person’s link to the Imperial orb and use of the power of the mind directly. There are some areas, notably the Paths of the Dead, where sorcery does not work but witchcraft does. Vlad Taltos, the protagonist, is both sorcerer and witch, and so is the Court Wizard, Lord Morrollan. Wizardry involvers advamced sorcery, plus putting one’s soul safely away in an article of power.
Brust basically ignores traditional sex roles. Warriors of the house of the Dragon are male and female. Specialists in illegal magic tend to be female, and the males in the continuing criminal enterprise known as house Jhereg are males, but there are exceptions.
Biases are not dependent on language, any unfair conclusions that people may draw from gendered descriptions are things they would think anyway. Dumbing down language to cure social ills has never been an effective strategy. I like linguistic quirks like this, and stripping them out to would only make english even more androgynous and simplistic without making people behave any differently. Perceptions are not so fragile.
A child of 14 can think of how things could be different, but that’s not how things are supposed to be.
Alan K. – If I understand you correctly, I could not disagree more. A person as old as 14 looking at the world the way it is and still stuck in, “this is how things are supposed to be” can only be one who is experiencing life from the bubble of White male privilege.
Good grief, as an African American by the age of 4 I could firmly distinguish between the way things were and the way things ought to be; and as a woman, I was doing that by the age of 5. And I tell you, I am not unique in this. Being Black means getting a big, fat reality sandwich shoved down your throat very, very early in life. And let me tell you, none of us is thinking, “It’s supposed to be this way”.
It’s more than JK’s compelling plot line (straight out of Jung) that made HP one of the top selling books of all time. The use of the term “witch” and “wizard” is a marketing tool. Witch as related to earthy magic and wizard as related to philosophical magic goes beyond Terry Pratchett; it is the longstanding cultural concept. JK knows her mythology down pat, when she diverges from it is it for a reason. These books (as much as I love them) are designed to appeal to the widest most mainstream audience. Harry is a boy because if he was girl, JK would have cut her readership in half. Pre-teen girls are used to seeing their gender as the sidekick, in video games, books and movies, that doesn’t stop them. A pre-teen boy caught reading a book about a girl gets beaten up on the school yard and labeled a sissy. No compelling plotline is worth ostracism. For the same reason, the one sentence summary of the book has to favor the masculine. Wizard. Not witch. You don’t have time to explain the nuance of gender-equality language to a bully looking for a reason to hit you. “Wizard” is chosen over “warlock” because “wizard” is appealing and exciting without being overly obscure. One could also (when looking through a purely non-feminist lens) perceive “warlock” as an insult, as it is seen as secondary to the feminine “witch,” one of the few gender distinguishing terms where the feminine is used to define the masculine (i.e. you say a “warlock is a boy witch,” you don’t say “a witch is a girl warlock”).
None of this is to say I don’t agree with you, Janet, entirely. It’s just my theory on why it is the way it is.
Harry rides a broom, therefor he’s a witch.
“Witch” and “wizard” are not different names for males and females with a given profession; they are different names for males and females with a given set of inborn traits (i.e. ability to do magic), just as boy and girl are names for males and females who are young. Untrained magical children are referred to as witches and wizards, whereas college pre-med majors are not generally called doctors. Adult witches and wizards choose from a variety of professions in the magical community roughly mirroring the professions available in the Muggle community. I’m not sure whether this makes the classification any better in your view, but at least it refers to a difference in what people are (after all, males and females are different) than in what they do. Of course, in the Harry Potter books the most powerful wizards are generally men (Harry, Dumbledore, Voldemort), whereas the most intelligent ones are generally women (Hermione, McGonagall).