some replies which are direct but off topic

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 186202


> Shelley responds:
> I know I said earlier "male" if I looked only at the treatment of women in  society and that men are the brains while women are fined to raising babies  at home (Molly) or old spinsters teaching school (McGonagall).

Pippin:
There's no sense that Moody or Dumbledore picked Tonks and McGonagall as their proteges only because there wasn't a suitable male, or that these women have no interior life and exist only as useful or decorative adjuncts to men. It's not that they can't think, it's just that Rowling doesn't give them much to think about.

 I think JKR went so far in trying to depict the WW as  a world where   there's no struggle against the glass ceiling because it isn't there any more, that her females don't have enough to do, not as people but as characters. It makes them seem passive. The only complications they face are romantic, which makes it seem as if the men are making all the tough decisions about the war, even though no woman shrinks from exercising her authority, or has any difficulty being taken seriously because she's female. 

Molly's strong-willed and hardly confined to raising babies, as Bella discovered to her cost. But there's no sense of a struggle to achieve that. 

Hermione starts out at the top of her class and stays there. Her other projects never seriously interfere with that status, even when she works herself to exhaustion in PoA. 

Meanwhile, we're invited to sympathize with all those gorgeously conflicted men. It makes the women's jobs seem dull by comparison. As Tolkien wrote once,  it's the uncomfortable palpitating stuff that makes a good story.

Pippin