Reply to comment

A Reaction to Three Guineas
I feel Woolf really reveals herself—it is as if one is looking at a work of art, and she is that work of art, possessing a vast interior landscape. Although Woolf “wanders”, she is brilliant in her wanderings, as she writes about morality, and absolute points of view--“the point of view of an educated man’s daughter.” Is she self-deprecating? The breadth of her topic is astounding. As an aside, is this astounding expansiveness simply a manifestation of her creativity or a precursor to the mental illness that plagued her? Virginia hears so many “voices.” The amalgamation of those voices might, understandably, be conducive to passivity; however, I feel “passivity” should be defined in the context of her era, and woman’s role in that era. She states, “I doubt whether at any time during the last fifty years young women have been more politically apathetic, more socially indifferent than at the present time.” Yet she is as determined as Joan of Arc. She states, “And you will agree that to oppose strong emotion needs courage; and that when courage fails, silence and evasion are likely to manifest themselves… There are two good reasons why we must try to analyse both our fear and…anger; first, because such fear and anger prevent real freedom.” I think she feels a significant loss—a theme I like to call the “Inheritance of Loss”— using the title of the latter book conceptually and not literally— is the younger generation of women passive?—I do not like to use that term pejoratively because I love to connect to that younger generation, but that very generation has not experienced that loss--that is, they have not lived through the Depression, WWII, Vietnam nor the sixties. Do they take for granted both the concrete achievements and intellectual freedom we strove to achieve?—do they even believe that discrimination and harassment exist in the workplace, sometimes especially for smart women? They do exist. These themes (discrimination and harassment) can be gratuitous and non-quantifiable. Virginia states, “Here, if indeed they consent to listen, they might very reasonably ask us to be more explicit—not indeed to define culture and intellectual liberty, for they have books and leisure and can define the words for themselves. But what, they may well ask, is meant by this gentleman’s ‘disinterested’ culture, and how are we to protect that and intellectual liberty in practice?” She was ahead of her time.

We need to educate our young women to be brave. In Virginia’s words: “However that may be, let the plural stand and continue: ‘Daughters of educated men who have enough to live upon, and read and write your own language for your own pleasure, may we very humbly entreat you to sign this gentleman’s manifesto with some intention of putting your promise into practice?’”

I think that is Bryn Mawr’s manifesto.