Virginia Woolf. Excerpt from Three Guineas - In 1791, nearly a century before Virignia Woolf was born, Olympe de Gouges wrote in Article XIII of her "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen": "For the maintenance of public forces and administrative expenses, the contributions of women and men shall be equal; the woman shares in all forced labor and all painful tasks, therefore she should have the same share in the distribution of positions, tasks, assignments, honors, and industry" (151). Hardly surprising, Woolf echoes these same unaltered sentiments in Three Guineas.In the successive articles de Gouges goes on to plea for the right for women to hold office and to own property. But there is a fundamental and troubling question which de Gouges seemingly ignores...how is the woman to get there with no right to education? Woolf takes on this perpetually unresolved quandary in the three essays she writes in response to requests for donations for various organizations, to which she donates one guinea each, about the equivalent of twenty-one shillings (twenty shillings = one pound note). The first letter addresses the request of a lawyer for patronage, who as a man, oddly asks a woman what is to be done to stop war. The letter is importance for its call for a "disinterested influence" and its presentation of Woolf's desire to adopt an "outsider" status, her "platform and badge of honor" (xvi). Its primary focus is the lack of education for women, while men are spending 300,000,000 pounds annually upon arms. The letter primarily addresses the failure of women to progress due to patriarchial strongholds on education, finances, religion, etc. that have clung rigidly even with the passing of the Victorian era. Unwilling to simply hand out money without educating her audience, she raises several questions of her own, including how are patriocentered societies to ask uneducated women to help prevent war?--"How in your opinion are we to prevent war?" (emphases added). Indeed, how? Borrowing the term from William Makepeace Thackeray's The History of Pendennis, she cites Arthur's Education Fund as a strong culprit in the restriction of women from education (a crude fact Mary Wollstonecraft also criticizes a century before Woolf's birth). Woolf criticizes the restriction of women from occupations (they are permitted to the Bar, but their roles are comprised; she cites the rejection of women in the clergy and the military; she addresses the same complaints that de Gouges makes regarding the so-called prostitution of women's bodies as their sole form of "successful" manipulation--she sees three categories of women: working women, daughters of public-school educated men, and daughters of noblement (the "Sirens"). . .as for the latter, she writes, "For many of us would prefer to call ourselves prostitutes simply and to take our stand openly under the lamps of Piccadilly Circus rather than use it [using wiles to cajole and manipulate men in order to gain their desires]" (Three Guineas Harcourt, 1938 15).

This first letter was interesting to me because as I was reading the piece, I was also reading Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, in which she criticizes Woolf's interpretation of war photographs. Woolf deems that these photographs should incite pity among the media's audience, to coerce them to stop fighting. In contrast Sontag sees these as potential instigators of further violence and destruction and bloodshed, as the viewer reflects on the pictures, demanding revenge. She also emphasizes Woolf's refusal "to allow her interlocutor to take a 'we' for granted" (7), which drives Woolf to dissect the system that has prevented women from participating in the prevention of war, a man-made tool of imperialism and domination.

The second letter focuses on women and occupation (without education, and without funding for education, what occupation is open to them?). She begs the question why are professional women's organizations so poor although Whitaker's Almanac shows four figure incomes for most professions? The answer is obvious, of course. Woolf writes, "To earn 250 a year is quite an achievement even for a highly qualified woman with years of experience" (44). The hierarchical structure of British employment is yet relegated to male domination. She also cites women's lack of pay in the household (again, echoing de Gouges); although they share the workload, laboring in the domicile, they do not share the benefits of equal pay: "the person to whom the salary is actually paid is the person who has the actual right to decide how the salary shall be spent" (57).

The third letter calls for women to remain outsiders, non-signers. She also criticizes those feminists who are apt to celebrate small victories too soon, including the right to vote. She accuses women of not using the vote to their advantage, to enable them to earn their living; in A Room of One's Own, Woolf alleges that all a woman needs to write is a room of one's own and an allowance of 500 pounds a year (for her early twentieth century era). During this time, women were barely averaging half of this pay. Criticizing this celebration brought on by the right to vote, she writes: "The word 'feminist' is the word indicated. that word, according to the dictionary, means 'one who champions the rights of women.' Since the only right, the right to earn a living, has been one, the word no longer has meaning. And a word without meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word. Let us therefore celebrate this occasion by cremating the corpse. Let us write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a matc to the paper. Look, how it burns! What a light dances over the world! . . . the word 'feminist' is destroyed; the air is cleared; and in that clearer air what do we see? Men and women working together for the same cause" (101-02). Woolf's seemingly scathing murder of the term "feminism" is truly nothing more than a burial. For Woolf, if feminism restricts women to one miserly freedom, and offers no means for expansion and the pursuit of ALL freedom, the word is indeed moot, dead.

Also interesting here is her analogy of patriarchal tyranny is to woman as fascism is to democracy, a marriage of domestic domination to its equally oppressive global domination. I love Woolf.