Three Guineas

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Three Guineas, published in June 1938 by Woolf's own Hogarth Press, is a feminist, pacifist, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist polemic. It shows Woolf, prior to World War II and reveals how constantly attuned she was to her political, social and cultural surroundings. She was proud of the essay, but grew increasingly worried about the reaction it would elicit from readers and reviewers: her arguments were radical and challenging.

During the 1930s Woolf filled notebooks with clippings and quotations relating to women's oppression and her fear and abhorrence of fascism also grew. She experienced developments in Europe first hand, visiting Fascist Italy in 1933, and Nazi Germany in 1935. She knew that this was not just an enemy abroad: the rise of the British Union of Fascists in London in the early 1930s convinced Woolf that she needed to look within. She also knew that, if war with Germany were to break out, she and Leonard, who was Jewish, would not survive a German invasion. The Woolfs were indeed on the Gestapo's list of targets. Woolf was a committed pacifist, a belief that made her somewhat of an outsider. Many of her formerly pacifist friends, E. M. Forster for instance, had changed their mind when confronted with Hitler. Woolf read widely about fascism and what she read disturbed her on feminist grounds. Nazi policy supported the removal of women from public life and their return to a “traditional” role as mothers and carers. Woolf was involved with many anti-fascist organisations and campaigns but sometimes questioned her involvement on feminist grounds. She felt, for example, that an anti-fascist exhibition she was asked to support had not paid enough attention to the “woman question”.

Three Guineas is structured as a series of letters. Woolf's epistolary format suggests dialogue, a conversation, which, as in A Room of One's Own, will continue. The narrator has been sent a letter by a barrister with three requests to do with the prevention of war. He asks the narrator to donate money to the cause, to sign a petition and join a society. The text is the answer to that letter. However, in answering the letter, the narrator has to return to two other requests for support which she has received, one from a society supporting women in the professions (based on the London and National Society for Women's Service), and another supporting the rebuilding of a women's college (based on the Newnham College Appeal).

Three Guineas starts with an acknowledgement of a unique event: that a man should ask a woman her opinion about possible strategies for the prevention of war. The narrator begins by delineating the difference between the correspondents. Supposedly of the same class, the great variation in the barrister and the narrator in terms of legal status, employment opportunities, financial independence and education seem to make a mockery of class labelling. Feeling rather unqualified to give advice about war, the narrator reads some male accounts of war in which, although she discovers some deviation (not all men are pro-war), her overwhelming discovery is of a love and glorification of war. This is where, according to Woolf, the woman's viewpoint is essential. Men, and in particular male children, she argues, are socialised to patriotism, competition, militarism and dominance. Women's history of exclusion from the public school system, the university and employment places them outside these kinds of motivations. Their different experience produces a different point of view.

The text continues by deliberating on how best women can exert their influence. Woolf tackles the complex question facing all marginalised groups: how can difference of view or experience be expressed to mainstream culture without the marginal becoming the centre. It is important for Woolf that women maintain their difference, but they must enter the public sphere of education and employment in order to be heard. Women need to be within and without. Women's influence is growing, the narrator points out: they are now entering the professions and there exist women's colleges, but, in 1938, many doors are still locked.

In answering this question, the narrator turns to her second letter, from the treasurer of the Rebuilding Fund. She traces the history of the struggle for the initial building of that college and of male hostility to women's higher education. She notes the continued discrepancy between male and female education. Women can only attend lectures, they cannot take degrees, for example. In a utopian moment, the narrator wonders about the benefits of poverty. She imagines a university, adventurous and experimental, which is forever changing, which eschews tradition and awards. Lectures would be replaced by conversation. Reality has its way, however, and she acknowledges that if women are to enter the professions and thereby hold positions from which they can influence the prevention of war, they must be educated. She duly donates a guinea to the rebuilding fund.

Next, the narrator turns to a letter from the treasurer of a society which helps women enter the professions. This society too is poverty stricken, glad of donations of books, fruit or cast-off clothing. When the narrator queries this, she is informed by the treasurer of the vast discrepancy between men and women's salaries in the professions, and of the resistance to women's employment. Women's purchasing power, and hence their influence, is negligible. They are not paid for their work in the home and have little access to their husband's salary. Until women have their own income, they cannot exert influence, therefore another guinea must be given to the society which encourages women's entry into the professions. The narrator falters here:

behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed. The one shuts us up like slaves in a harem; the other forces us to circle . . . round and round the mulberry tree, the sacred tree, of property.

Women can maintain their difference, Woolf argues, by following the principles of poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties. By these, she means earning only enough money to live independently and not selling one's brain for money; she means refusing honours and self-publicity, and resistance to pride. The guinea is given with these conditions, including that women help “all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class or colour” to enter their chosen profession.

Finally, the narrator turns to the barrister's letter and his request for advice on how to “protect culture and intellectual liberty”, a phrase taken from For Intellectual Liberty's manifesto, one of the anti-fascist organisations Woolf was supporting in the 1930s. Woolf urges women actively to support disinterested culture, through writing, ensuring that they are in no one's pay. The guinea is given to the barrister's society, but membership is withheld. The cause will be most effectively fought by women from without rather than within. Their society will be called the Society of Outsiders and will be “without office, meetings, leaders or any hierarchy, without so much as a form to be filled up, or a secretary to be paid.” It is relatively easy, Woolf argues, for women to remain apart from patriotism: the “our” in “our country” does not apply to women, since it has enslaved her, denied her basic legal rights including the vote, the right to own property and the right to protect herself. “Our country” ceases to be hers if she marries a foreigner. Woolf's interrogation of gender, nationality and citizenship is well ahead of its time: “As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world”.

The most radical element of the essay is Woolf's linking of fascism and patriarchy. In the tyrannical father we see the beginnings of the dictator, she argues. Hence, fascism is not a foreign enemy; it is at home in Britain, in the private house. The desire to control and exert force on women is akin to the kind of intolerance exhibited by fascist dictators. “[T]he public and private worlds are inseparably connected;” suggests Woolf, “the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.” In saying this Woolf not only opens up and politicises the codes of the nineteenth-century home, she also anticipates one of the slogans of the women's movement in the 1970s: “the personal is the political”.