Equal Rites

Equal Rites is a comic fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett, published in 1987. It is the third novel in the Discworld series and the first in which the main character is not Rincewind. The title is a play on the phrase equal rights.

The plot begins with a mistake made at speed. The wizard Drum Billet knows he is about to die and travels to the place where an eighth son of an eighth son is being born, since that child is destined to become a wizard; he discovers too late that the baby is a girl, and the transfer has already happened. That single error supplies the novel's whole conflict, because the institutions of the Discworld have no category for a female wizard.

The book introduces Granny Weatherwax, who reappears in several later Discworld novels, while the protagonist Eskarina Smith does not return until I Shall Wear Midnight, published twenty-three years later. Pratchett based Esk on his daughter Rhianna Pratchett. The series was already commercially established by this point. The humour is aimed at the institutions rather than at the girl: the wizards who will not have her are the joke, and the book never treats her ambition as the problem.