The Women of Harry Potter

I'm a female writer, and what's interesting about the wizarding world is when you take physical strength out of the equation.A woman can fight just the same as a man can fight. A woman can do magic just as powerfully as a man do magic. and I consider that I've written a lot of a well-rounded female characters in these books.

As an author, none of the women ever gave me trouble actually. it was the men that gave me trouble, never the women. but Harry came to me as Harry and I never wanted to change that, because switching gender isn't simply putting a dress and a pretty name on a boy. is it? A lot of preoccupations and and expectations are different on men and women. So the books would've been incredibly different,I think. Considering the protagonist is a male. I don't think it was so obvious the beginning that she very much wanted to portray her female characters as very strong-willed and sort of admirable. But as the films went on I think you can really see it.

It's interesting for me with Harry .Because, throughout the series, he is so much a boy in search of a fathe. And yet at least times of stress,It's his mother that's a place of refuge. And I think that, it's not very hard to see the reason why. My mother died six months into the writing of Harry Potter and I became a mother to a daughter.so...

I just suppose that, as a woman and as a daughter, maybe I feel that that's a form of love that doesn't get explored as much as it should do, given that it every... Well, so formative everyone's life,for good or for ill. Funnily enough, I founded a charity called Lumos,  which is about institutionalized children largely in Eastern Europe. And some of the many disturbing things I found out from, being involved closely with that charity is how much measurable brain damage is done when a child is taken from its mother and placed in an institution.

And when I say "measurable", you can scan the brain and you will see that pathways haven't been made.And you can never get that back.So in fact, what I wrote about Harry having been incredibly loved in his earliest days is measurably true.That will literally have given him protection that no one can undo. His brain will have developed in a way that voldmore brain didn't. Because voldemor was, from the moment of his birth, institutionalized.

So I suppose, yeah, Lily was representative of safety in a way that a father couldn't be. Because he's constantly told, "You look just like your Father", he's got to live up to the expectations of his father,his father, his father. But Lily is something different. Lily is the person who stood by the cot and tried to stop her baby dying. So, yes, mother love is hugely important in the books

I just think it's so cool that Jo has Mrs wasley and really kind of like pays homage to this incredible mother figure, And how key her role is in keeping that family together,to her taking care of Harry, And you know, the whole of Dumbledore's Army really.

Apart from the three main characters of course, Harry, Ron and Hermione, Mrs weasley is the greatest force for good, I think, in it. She's the mother of that world, and I think that is a very female.

What impressed me with Julie was you always had the sense, I felt, that this wasn't just this warm and cozy 1950s housewife porching around her kitchen. There was real steel in there. You could say there would have to be steal in the woman who raised Fred and George.Otherwise you would go stark, staring mad. However, it was totally plausible, for me, when she stepped forward in the great hall and thought, "Right, you bitch, you're getting yours." and you thought, "yeah, she is about to get hers" Bellatrix messed with wrong woman.

It comes from her womb that feeling of defense, defending her child. She's already lost one, so it's the mother, you know, the lion, the female lion, tiger defending her babies, you know? So it's unstoppable, which is wonderful. I've doubted if that probably would've taken place had it been a man writing it.

I really enjoyed killing Bellatrix. And I really enjoyed having it be Molly that did it.And of course, you also have two very different kinds of female energy there, pitted against each other. You have Molly, who will mother the whole world. if she can, and you have Bellatrix, whose idea of love is very perverse, twisted, and that was satisfying. But there was something else I wanted to do with the way that Bellatrix ended. And this was very important to me. Very early on in writing series. I remember a female journalist saying to me that Mrs Weaslsaid--said, "Well, you know, she's just a mother. " And I was absolutely incensed by that comment. Now, I consider myself to be a feminist. And I'd always wanted to show that just because a woman has made a choice, a free choice, to say: "Well.I'm gonna raise my family. That's gonna be my choice. I may go back to a career, or I may have a career part-time, but that's my choice" Doesn't mean that that's all she can do. And as we proved there in that little battle, Molly weasley comes out and proves herself the equal of any warrior on that battlefield. And I also loved that Professor Mcgonagall got her moment to really show what she could do.

The teachers has been so repressed in how they see hogwarts, obviously from its new sort of ruling that you can see they're just itching for, you know, their fight back against evil. And I love that. For professor Mcgonagall, she just completely just show what she's made of.

I don't like the marginalization of women when the fighting breaks out. You know, we get to fight too. I really wanted that. In fact, It was an earlier draft, but I know there was-- At one point, it was Harry who took on Snape in that confrontation. And I really didn't want that to happen. In the book. Minerva McGonagall is the one who does it, and for me, it was very important that she did that.