Malfoy family (Pottermore)

[oryx_leucoryx]

I looked up the spoilers site and found there is more detailed information about The Malfoys. Enjoy!

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

I could see them becoming slightly more egalitarian after Secrecy, in a similar way that some of the Western states in the US granted women the vote decades earlier than the rest of the country - there were so few (white) women out there, demonstrably doing difficult work, that they had to grudgingly accept that maybe women weren't quite as inferior as people said and that they needed to make a few concessions to get the women's support. If they were (secretly) importing and/or stealing Muggle goods and foodstuffs, thus freeing many witches and wizards from doing a lot of drudge labor such as farming and mining which they used to do right alongside their Muggle relatives, then they may also have had a situation where witches were freer to spend time on education etc., much like some aristocratic and middle class women historically (perhaps with some rhetoric about magically educated mothers being able to teach their young sons well, which also started coming into vogue in Muggle society in iirc the 18th century - Revolutionary mothers and all that). The House-elf relocation project might have also helped a little, if a significant number of elves had previously lived on Muggle properties. (Hogwarts might have had at least some human laundresses and cooks previously, for instance, if the large elf population there now is in part due to the relocations.) So perhaps a few decades into it, wizarding society could have been noticeably more equal than Muggle society.

But not totally equal. Nowhere near. How would that even happen?

[sunnyskywalker]

ETA: re the Western states analogy, I mean that the short-handedness matters. If your new British Ministry of Magic has five guys and some sheep, then suddenly hiring women in the lower civil service ranks looks like a much better idea than when you're integrated into the relatively vast Muggle government. So maybe in fact women are perfectly suited to careers doing research for the guys actually drafting legislative bills and we just never realized; what a convenient discovery!

[condwiramurs.livejournal.com]

RE shorthandedness, I agree. However, allowing women into some slots out of necessity and actually thinking of them as fully equal are two different things - so I guess I see the WW as more the former than the latter. As you say, not totally equal.