Qudditch and Girls

[scooterbug8515]

Okay I have an idea for a fic percolating in my brain and I wanted to get some thoughts of others before I ran with it.

 

Females in quidditch we know that it has always been the 2nd oldest team to exist is the Harpies founded in 1203.  That said do you think in some ways women struggled to prove themselves in the game so to speak.  I'm not saying that they are any less capable than male players but like many sports people tend to look down on female teams and players (which is unfortunate).  Do ya'll think despite the long history of the Harpies this might be the case for quidditch?

 

That said, Slytherin house - gracious knows I love my house but when looking at the team roster in the books it was all male while the other houses seemed to have a mix of gender on the team roster.  Or is that just me and a perception I've made?

 

As such do you think there might be some gender prejudice in Slytherin house in regards to qudditch?  I am not saying all feel that way but some maybe.  As such do you think it would then be a struggle for a girl to make the Slytherin team?  Do you think that if she makes the team she would have to work twice as hard for her spot like girls have to do in a lot of other things?  Thanks for the help and thoughts!

[WindingArrow]

Given normal history, I could see this as a very logical inference and I was actually just thinking about the Slytherin team the other day and I think you would be right to an extent- More or less, most Slytherin girls it would seem are simply there to look pretty and marry a suitable pureblood, so it could just be that no one has ever had the aspiration to join and now, having been a male dominated team for centuries, they might look down on it simply because they've never had one.

 

In a male dominated setting, particularly with a group like Slytherin, I think the girl would have to work extra hard especially if she didn't have a friend on the team.

[scooterbug8515]

Thank you so much for your thoughts Liz!  They have really helped.  I was thinking of doing a Gwenog Jones story and in my head it makes sense for her to be a Slytherin, particularly for the story I want to tell.

[TidalDragon]

Asking what people thought the Harpies meant in terms of gender in sport was one of my favorite questions in MTA threads on the HPFF forums. The mix of answers was quite interesting, but I like to think that while they were probably born out of a need to create opportunities for female players that were not otherwise present that over time, that faded away.

 

We don't really see instances of gender inequality in sport in canon, and though the Slytherin team is all male during Harry's years at Hogwarts, I don't think that's any sort of definitive proof that they're averse to having female players. I do think it's possible that the "proper pureblood" pressure may create a paucity of witches that want to play, creating a higher than average likelihood of an all-male team, but I'm not sure a single six (6) year period is necessarily definitive, especially when we have Draco Malfoy buying his way onto the team in the same window and Marcus Flint hanging around, which could have foreclosed tryouts that would've otherwise occurred.

 

FWIW, I have a female Quidditch player on the Slytherin team in the Marauders Era in my fic Evolution. It's one story in a sea of millions, but IMO it wouldn't be out of place for a female Slytherin to make the team.

[Nix]

While I think that certainly it's possible the Slytherins weren't averse to a female on the Quidditch team, I do think it's likely that they could have been. Or maybe that the girls were brought up not to want to play Quidditch. In my own Next Gen novel my MC Sirrah Malfoy is a female and in her first year she was selected to be on Slytherin Quidditch Team as their seeker. And the players were all for that. But in her second year, for a mysterious reason that hasn't been explained yet, Sirrah stepped down and her twin brother Scorpius ended up taking her place. She says in the story at one point that she got bored and didn't want to play anymore but her friends think something behind the scenes made her step down so that Scorpius could be on the team...

 

Not really sure if that helps or not. But I think this is something you could make work either way. Even if the Harpies are one of the oldest teams in history, I could also see them having to work twice as hard to be taken seriously in the league, at least when they were starting out anyway.

[Margaret]

I think they may have originally, but by the 20th century, I would imagine that would have died out. If boys and girls have been playing against each other for 700 years, it seems unlikely it would still be an issue.

 

I think the wizarding world has way more gender equality than ours does. Boys and girls have been educated together for 1,000 years and magic means that the difference in strength is unlikely to have been the same issue anyway, so while there is definitely some gender inequality - first female Minister of Magic wasn't until about the 19th century, I believe. Way ahead of Muggles, but still hardly egalitarian. To be honest, the whole issue seems contradictory to me as boys often seem to be "protective" of girls, which makes little sense in a world where women have the same ability to defend themselves as men have.

 

To be honest, I would have expected Slytherin to have less prejudice against female players than the other houses as Muggleborns and even halfbloods would have picked up some of the attitudes from our world whereas most Slytherins are pureblood and therefore more likely to just take it for granted that male and female players being on the same team is the norm and have no idea there are any sports where that is different.

 

That said, the whole gender equality issue does strike me as quite confused in the books with some purebloods appearing to have the same stereotypes as we do despite growing up in a world where women have been sportspeople, politicians, Aurors, etc for so long that you wouldn't expect purebloods to have any different expectations based on gender. So I think whatever you want for your story, you can probably find canon to back it up.

[scooterbug8515]

It has been real interesting getting different views on the topic.  I'm with you Margaret that there is give and take on gender equality in the Wizarding world.  Things existed for a long time such as the Harpies and there were female minister's of magic (look at marauders era) but at the same time there are still things that go against it.  Like the stairs to the girls dorm turns into a slide if boys go up it.  Honestly what ever 'evil' and trouble can be had with a boy visiting a girl the same can be said of a girl visiting a boy not to mention boys who like boys and girls who like girls.  There really is no reason for the stair case turned to slide.

 

So maybe gender is a case by case scenario like it's not unheard of for a girl to be on the Slytherin quidditch team but rare. And, maybe, there are still some people who does not play fair when it comes to gender.  I think it is a mixed bag in the wizarding world like it is in our world though things are still very much not gender equal to this day in our regular world despite us making leaps and bounds from the old school of thought.

 

Again I really appreciate all the thoughts and it has given me a lot to consider in my story.  Any added opinions of course are welcome too!

[Nhaz]

We're forgetting one thing. When we say flying brooms, do we think of witches or wizards? The archetypal image is that of a witch flying on a broom.

 

The broom is a housekeeping item, and I can imagine brooms being enchanted to fly as an act of rebellion against a "stay in the kitchen" attitude. You would assume that there would be no such thing as sex discrimination in the wizarding world at any point of time. But look at how few wizards there are. It seems unlikely that magic-wielders formed separate societies from the start. Rather, I would surmise that in ancient settlements magic-wielders lived among Muggles and followed their sociaetl norms; they tended to be isolated from one another, and witches were discriminated against just as other women (possibly even more since they had inexplicable abilities which could upset the power balance - note how the term "witch" is offensive in many languages but the synonyms for "wizard" less so). So I'd guess that male supremacy was ingrained in the wizarding world from the start where it was also a norm among Muggles. Note how the staunchest wizard traditionalists known - the Gaunts - treated Merope as a servant.

 

Therefore, I assume that gender equality is a secondary event in the wizarding world, a reaction only possible after powerful witches were no longer isolated phenomena. That, however, would be something that male-dominated magical societies would have continuously tried to suppress. In these circumstances, I'd go as far as to imagine Quidditch emerging as a women-only sport, and teams such as the Holyhead Harpies as purists maintaining a female-only composition for the sake of authenticity.