Virginia Woolf's Essay 'Three Guineas'

When one reads Virginia Woolf’s 1938 essay ‘Three Guineas’, one is immediately struck by the passion with which she advocates her beliefs. She draws a clear line around femininity and expels war from it’s realms with an absolute certainty. Her critique of the patriarchy is sharp, precise, and hits the nail right on the head. So what is one supposed to make of the angry letter that Agnes Smith, an unemployed weaver from Huddersfield, wrote to Woolf on reading her essay? Smith’s nine page letter describes the 'the sick hopelessness' of being doomed to work when she wanted to stay on at school and learn, and in its face, Woolf’s snide remarks about the ‘profession of marriage’ or even her incisive diatribe against income inequality appear pale,

Woolf’s claim in ‘Three Guineas’ that “…the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other,” is largely restricted to her self conscious approach to sexual politics.She believes that the Victorian household is governed by a regime of power and fear where the patriarch is always male and she argues that her class of people, i.e. ‘the daughters of educated men’, are the most unfortunate and powerless because they are unable to take up even paid work, but fortunate at least, that they aren’t a part of the ‘great patriarchal machine’. I’m sure that if Woolf should attend Dr. Michael Kimmel’s talk on gender bias she would have unabashedly supported his statement — ‘privilege is invisible to those who have it’ in the context of men not being aware of their own male privilege. But one is left to wonder if perhaps that irony wold be lost on her, if she would still refuse to see her own power position as the ‘daughter of an educated man’, free to read all day in the library, her economic aspirations not a necessity but a right she seeks to fight

The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was ratified in 1920, soon after she published ‘Night and Day’ in 1919. In spite of having practically grown up alongside the suffrage movement and her wholehearted support of it, she seems oblivious to the reality of the working class woman. Woolf’s ideas about employment and income seem hopelessly childish to the reader. In ‘Night and Day,' the suffragist Mary Datchet, daughter of a clergyman, the stereotype of the ‘New Woman’ doesn’t start work until 10.00 am, doesn’t get paid, but has expensive lunches and lives in central London in rooms which are spacious enough to host meetings, none of which she would be able to afford without the financial backing of her family. Ralph Denham also doesn’t start work until 10.00 am, and seems to have endless amounts of free time for extended walks through London, for afternoon teas, and for visiting people in what would normally be working hours. William Rodney, apparently a poor government clerk seems to have enough money to live in style and the Hilbery family think he is an acceptable match for Katharine who is oppressed by the illustrious history of the men in her family which makes her feel small and inadequate. Needless to say, the only character that appears believable is Katherine because she is modelled on the life that Woolf and women of her social strata lead.