Virginia Woolf’s Feminist Critique in Three Guineas
Virginia Woolf’s *Three Guineas*: A Feminist Perspective
A simple definition of feminism emphasizes that it’s about having women’s voices heard, their ideas taken seriously, and their demands for equality and basic rights incorporated into everyday ‘democratic’ life. Lana Rakow has distinguished between four feminist approaches to popular culture:
- The recovery and reappraisal approach
- The images and representations approach
- The reception and experience approach
- The cultural theory approach
Feminists have generally tried to recover works written or made by women that have been ignored. The most practical approach is the images and representations approach.
Virginia Woolf: A Relevant Feminist Voice
One of the most relevant figures within feminism is Virginia Woolf. Her 1939 critical essay, *Three Guineas*, hasn’t received much emphasis within cultural studies, with Leavis calling it “nasty,” “dangerous,” and “preposterous.” In *Three Guineas*, Woolf imagines she is replying to a letter from a successful and respectable barrister asking how the daughters of educated men might help prevent war.
Woolf practices feminist cultural criticism by offering three replies:
- A reply to an honorary treasurer’s letter asking for money to rebuild a woman’s college.
- A reply to a letter asking for a subscription to a society to help the daughters of educated men obtain employment in the professions.
- A reply to a letter asking that the daughters of educated men sign a manifesto pledging themselves “to protect culture and intellectual liberty” and join that society, which is also in need of funds.
It’s important to highlight that *Three Guineas* was written on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War, when Fascism was perceived as a real threat to world peace.
Woolf’s Critique of Patriarchy and National Identity
In her first Guinea, Woolf’s reply to the question enables her to mount a powerful cultural critique of exclusion and systematic subordination. Woolf replies that “to depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father,” thus bringing out what she saw as the patriarchal basis of British life. The patriarchy she discusses is related to patriotism, including the idea that men claim to fight out of a love of freedom and are driven by the pride they feel for their country. Later in her essay, she raises the question of national identity, where she suggests she has no country because it has made women dependent and treated them as slaves.
Sexual Difference and Representation
Sexual difference, for Woolf, is not a question of something laid down by “nature.” Her identity as a woman is very much a product of cultural differences constructed by a society historically dominated by men. Furthermore, Woolf recognizes that the men and women of her class are divided by a sense of perception.
In her Second Guinea, Woolf also showed great interest in what we now call representation, making clear how men had represented women as intellectually inferior and better fitted to domestic duties than learning.
Autobiography and Signifying Practices
Autobiography has been of particular importance to feminist approaches to understanding culture. It has two important consequences:
- The use of a singular voice recognizes itself as personal.
- Many analyses of popular cultural forms associated with women, like soap operas and romance novels, have been used to understand how women think.
We can say that Woolf was interested in what is now known as signifying practices: that is, how things are made to mean. These practices are often called signification, which describes how meanings are created, made possible, rejected, etc.