To borrow from bell hooks, this is Virginia Woolf disemboweling the 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy' of her times with a merciless precision.
So before I go on any further and launch into a full-fledged tirade which will be a regrettable disservice to the purpose and spirit of this essay, let us turn to Woolf's three guineas. Case in point being the initial denial of anaesthetics to expecting mothers in labour on the assumption that women must endure the worst pain known to mankind to atone for 'Original Sin', something Woolf doesn't fail to point out here. What Woolf called an 'infantile fixation' remains a prime character trait of the less fair sex still.Įven now people would rather invoke some misogynous claptrap passed off as inviolate truisms recorded in a book written centuries ago by unenlightened individuals instead of applying intellect or acquired knowledge to judge a real life scenario. The indefatigable benevolence of time has transformed many of her ardent wishes into reality not only within the confines of England but beyond.Īnd yet as I type this, there's an educated man, a graduate of India's premiere engineering institute if his profile is to be believed, insulting a feminist author on my twitter timeline by accusing her of whoring herself.Īt the expense of two dozen or more whatsapp messages and weeks worth of bickering back and forth have I managed to convince a dear friend not to use the term 'feminazi' to discredit radical feminists. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own, with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.Four score years ago Woolf envisioned a time when the very prospect of members of her sex delivering sermons from the pulpit will not elicit scorn or sneers, when the blonde-wigged, ageing torch-bearers of society would allow women to administer justice, climb the ranks of the distinguished Civil Service and teach young men in universities. During the inter-war period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. This pacifist-feminist essay is a classic whose message resonates loudly in our contemporary global situation.Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. In reflecting on her situation as the 'daughter of an educated man' in 1930s England, Woolf challenges liberal orthodoxies and marshals vast research to make discomforting and still-challenging arguments about the relationship between gender and violence, and about the pieties of those who fail to see their complicity in war-making. Three Guineas is written as a series of letters in which Woolf ponders the efficacy of donating to various causes to prevent war.
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