who only by moving can balance

March’s Discworld reread was Equal Rites, which is both a Discworld book and an entry in one of my most lifelong favorite subgenres of fantasy, Little Girls Rebelling Against Gender Roles. After nearly 40 years of this and seeing how little progress has been made in those 40 years I don’t love this quite as much as I did when I was myself a Little Girl with mixed feelings on how I was supposed to Rebel Against Gender Roles (the good and proper kind of Rebelling Against Gender Roles for girls in the ‘90s was to do sports, which I wasn’t interested in; the incorrect kind was to want to be a Catholic priest, which I was). It’s less complicated when reading pseudo-medieval fantasy novels where the things they are trying to do are not really choices for either gender, like being a knight or, in this case, a wizard.

Overall this is still very much an early Discworld book and it shows–it’s shorter, more episodic, and a little more ‘80s, having been published the same year I was born. But it’s still very funny, full of groanworthy puns and comically unflattering character descriptions. Most importantly, it introduces us to Granny Weatherwax, one of the all-time iconic characters of the Discworld, and her concept of “headology,” which I occasionally forget is not a real word outside of Discworld fans and have been known to use like I think people should know what I’m talking about. Anyway, despite being a little clunky at times, the gender politics of this one are reasonably solid, dunking on both gender essentialism and the devaluation of traditional “women’s work” (it’s amazing how many people manage to fumble one or the other of these). I had fun revisiting it.