Gendered stereotypes of female goshawks

Gendered stereotypes of female goshawks are shown to be products of falconry’s history as much as descriptions of the birds themselves. Helen Macdonald follows a shift from accounts of goshawks as fearful but capable of affection to later portraits of them as temperamental and unreasonable. That shift exposes how male falconers’ expectations could become judgments about female nature, while the birds’ independent behavior was treated as a problem to explain away.

Class and the Making of Falconry’s Hierarchy

The gendered language surrounding goshawks sits within a broader hierarchy separating kinds of birds and the people who flew them. Macdonald recalls that, as a falconer, she admired falcons for their speed, grace, and apparent ease in the air, while goshawks unnerved her. The contrast was not simply about the birds’ different hunting styles. Goshawks could be flown from the fist at close range in many places; flying falcons properly required expansive open land, such as grouse moors and large estates. Access to those landscapes tended to favor the wealthy and well connected, and Gilbert Blaine described possession of the prestigious falcons as an aristocratic privilege.

The hierarchy also shaped the reputation of the austringer, the solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks. A medieval account by Gace de la Bigne ridiculed austringers as isolated and physically ungainly, while later falconry writing assigned goshawks a similarly degraded status. Gilbert Blaine contrasted the respect accorded to the peregrine with the hostile labels attached to goshawks, depicting them as difficult, fractious, and dangerous. In this scheme, the bird and its trainer were both marked as lesser: the goshawk was not the emblem of elite mastery but an inconvenient creature associated with solitary practice.

Macdonald’s account of hunting in Maine adds a useful contrast to the British class structure. There, hunting access is described as comparatively egalitarian: common law allows people to hunt across the land, and deer hunting touches many households. This comparison concerns hunting culture rather than the gendering of goshawks directly, but it makes visible how access to land and social standing shape the values attached to hunting. The prestige of falconry’s favored birds, like the disrepute of the austringer, is not separate from the social arrangements that determine who can practice which forms of it.

The Female Goshawk as a Gendered Character

The stereotype becomes explicit when a man tells Macdonald that she and Mabel must get along because both are female. Macdonald rejects the assumption that shared sex explains the hawk’s behavior. The remark nevertheless leads her to examine what falconry books have said about female goshawks. Their descriptions repeatedly characterize the birds as proud, moody, sulky, contrary, or disposed to frustrate their keepers. Macdonald recognizes a familiar pattern: behavior that inconveniences the human handler is presented as evidence of a defective temperament in the female bird.

The manuals’ judgments do more than criticize an animal’s disposition. They make the goshawk’s conduct seem inexplicable, as if her reactions arose from an innate feminine volatility rather than from the conditions of training or the falconer’s own actions. Macdonald points out that these writers rarely ask whether harsh handling might contribute to a hawk’s fear, resistance, or departure. By treating the bird’s response as her fault, the accounts protect the falconer from scrutiny and make control seem like the only reasonable aim.

Macdonald’s reading does not claim that a hawk is a woman, or that the two share an identity. Rather, the analogy exposes how easily gendered assumptions travel from human social life into descriptions of animals. The claim that women and female goshawks are naturally difficult turns difference into a ready-made explanation. It obscures the particular bird—her responses, needs, and independent will—by replacing observation with a familiar stereotype.

An Earlier Countertradition

When Macdonald reads seventeenth-century accounts, she finds a markedly different vocabulary. Simon Latham describes goshawks as naturally wary but also sociable and capable of familiarity. Their responses, in this account, depend in part on treatment: rough handling can provoke objection, while kindness and consideration can foster attachment. The bird remains shy, self-willed, and sometimes difficult; she is not reduced to a monster of irrationality. Her qualities can coexist rather than being sorted into a single verdict.

Edmund Bert’s account makes the relationship more plainly reciprocal. He presents the falconer as responsible for meeting the hawk’s needs and describes himself as her friend and playfellow. Macdonald is careful not to turn these older writers into uncomplicated champions of women; she recognizes that their society was not one in which women enjoyed equality. What matters to her is the kind of relationship they describe with their hawks: one that seeks to please and befriend an animal whose otherness is accepted, rather than treating her as a defect to be corrected.

The contrast between the periods does not prove that earlier falconers always behaved well or that every later description was false. It does show that the supposedly self-evident character of the female goshawk has a history. The same bird could be described as fearful yet affectionate, or as inherently aggravating, depending on the writer’s assumptions about temperament, authority, and the falconer’s responsibility.

Mabel and the Limits of Projection

After reading the manuals beside Mabel, Macdonald recognizes how much human meaning has accumulated around the goshawk. For centuries, hawks have been caught and brought into people’s homes without becoming domesticated. Their proximity to human beings has therefore not erased their wildness; instead, it has made them symbols of qualities people want either to master or to preserve. The gendered stereotype belongs to this ambivalence: the female goshawk is admired as powerful and beautiful but condemned when her independence resists the keeper’s wishes.

Macdonald’s exchange with Mabel does not resolve that tension by making the hawk a human companion in disguise. It prompts a different emphasis: the bird is a particular, self-willed animal whose behavior cannot be fully accounted for by a human label. Against descriptions that convert resistance into female pathology, the older language of attentiveness and friendship offers a model of falconry in which the keeper’s conduct matters too. The stereotype is thus not only an insult directed at female goshawks; it is a way of avoiding the harder question of what a human owes an animal who remains wild.