Andrew's Wiki
Three Guineas

Three Letters She Answers

• How to prevent war
• How go get money for women’s education
• How to get women access into professions
• She had visited Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany – bad for feminism and for pacifism
• Originally was to have the essay alternating with fiction; later abandoned it and the fiction became…The Years, her most popular book
• Marcus: “last words as a public intellectual”
  • gender, power, and war all interconnex
• “Guineas are rare; guineas are valuable, but let us send one without any condition attached…by so doing we are making a positive contribution to the prevention of war.”
  • She doesn’t make any conditions, although she does have some suggestions about what she’d like to see

How to Prevent War? The Rhetorical Occasion

• As a “letter” in response to another one
• IT’s a man asking a woman how to prevent war – so she thinks it’s special and needs to be answered
  • She perceives her audience as a limited one: a man who has a family and successful career, public school and university education, etc: very limited
• She compares educated men, uneducated women, and says if you want our help about war, clearly impersonal forces weren’t responsible for it – because that’s what you’re knowledgeable about.
  • Instead you are saying that human nature must be responsible for war: which means that you think people have free will 105
  • women have the “unpaid education” of psychology
  • but women don’t have the fighting instinct…so how can we help: clearly she says there’s some joy you get out of killing that we don’t understand
    • the answer is reading newspapers, autobiography, and biography, to go where experience can’t take you
• Men fight b/c they are patriotic mostly 106: but why should women love England so much? It isn’t the bastion of liberty men experience it as.
• You can’t reason about war, and you can’t simply join a society or sign a cheque: “the emotion caused by the photographs would remain unappeased”

Concepts at Work

• Relativism: 108, each man his his own point of view…and even the Church doesn’t have a single unified point of view even though they’re officially in charge of morality
• Going beyond Reason
  • She looks at photos of war, that are gruesome, that are “not arguments address to the reason; they are simply statements of fact addressed to the eye” 109 (Spanish Civil War)
  • “But the eye is connected with the brain” and the nervous system combines with the data of the photo and gives you feelings of horror, disgust: “the emotion is too positive to suffer patient analysis.”
    • For Woolf, reason is not always the answer, eh?
    • What happens with photo says that you can’t reason about the causes of war
• Reimagining of space: she asks the man to think of what the world looks like through a woman’s eyes
  • the world of professional public life through a woman’s eyes
  • 117-8: the tacit sumptuary laws determining the clothing of a man in his public function: ribbons, rosettes, colors, shapes of hats and cuts of coat: what’s connex between “sartorial splendours” and the photographs of the dead she is looking at from Sp Civil War:
    • “your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers” 119 – expensive, vain, convince people to become soldiers
    • and yet it’s there for lawyers, judges, court, universities, all trying to jockey for recognition for achievement by being able to wear certain clothes and certain ornaments and have little letters attached to their names: “encouraging a disposition towards war”
• She studies women’s diaries, v cool, Whitaker’s Almanac for impersonal stats

Feminism

• Women wanted to have education for themselves: she is describing what Spivak ends up implying about middle class feminism: just getting the rights for itself
  • She sees that education is used as an ideological weapon, ie that it’s only supported if it supports the social order described by religion
• But the best way to prevent war is: subscribe money for building of colleges for daughters of educated men. That way they can earn their own money, and then they can influence AGAINST war rather than being party to it.
  • Why? When their only profession is marriage, they have to expend all their effort only in keeping their “Bodies preserved” for the husband
  • As a result, she had to exert all the influence she could to attain the means to accomplish marriage – so she must agree with the men. To agree with them she will secure the attention of the men and get a husband 137
  • And another thing: they could find ample opportunity for action outside of the home by involving herself in the activities of war – war gave her something to do.
• Women need to get fair pay so you can’t leverage your agreement to support her causes by putting restrictions on them that you will like
  • Women aren’t being paid fairly even though all agree they are at least as effective in their jobs as men even if they don’t have as good education
  • W. S. P. U. manages to achieves tons by a tiny income
    • they only have 42,000: “How much peace will 42,000 a year buy at the present moment when we are spending 300,000,000 annually upon arms?” 143
  • Women are lucky if they get 250 pounds a year yet the men’s jobs promise at least three figures a year
    • “staffed and officered by a flock of secretaries and under-secretaries so many and so nicely graded that their very names make our heads spin” 145
• Part of the disparity is the feeling that women belong in the home, which she calls an “Atmosphere” (and atmospheres v powerful and can for example create a ten volume novel) – and then she gives two quotes that give this opinion, one of them English one of them German and says they’re BOTH Dictators 151 and they are always “dangerous” and “ugly”
  • Quotes Wells: “the practical obliteration of [our] freedom by Fascists or Nazis” in order to say that this kind of attitude “in the heart of England” is what will lead to (the quote)
    • so that the woman fighting inequality: “secretly and without arms, in her office, fighting the Fascist or Nazi as surely as those who fight him with arms in the limelight of publicity?”
      • and she says we need to stop dictatorship at home before we stop it abroad 152

Class/Money

• Look at that money/peace quote and how morality and money are so closely intertwined, and the disparities reveal hypocrisy
• “Men and women who spend every day and all day in an office from the age of about 23 to the age of 60 or so deserve every penny they get.” 145
• Education as industry: “costs a round sum in hard cash, and turns the crude and raw human being into the finished product” 120
  • And she proves the power of education two ways: by looking at how important people all have university education and by looking at the INCOME of the university system
• She is quite aware that the true powers of women weren’t gained when they got the vote but when in 1919 an act of parliament opened up the professions to her: so that she could earn money herself. And that’s the real “influence.”
• she is quite aware what class she belongs to and the continual references to this class serve to remind people that she knows her view is limited, like for example when she reveals that when she says “public house” the reader should read: “(somewhere, roughly speaking, in the West End)”
  • She uses the same modernist techniques of irony and self-reflexiveness to reflect upon the “Constructed” nature of her views via class
• “hybrid age when, though birth is mixed, classes still remain fixed”
  • and she recognizes she’s a part of that same educated class as her audience
  • she considers herself as having maids but still working for her living
• Leisure: says that education requires community with friends, travel, art 103
• Disguised fury at “Arthur’s Education Fund,” which pinches the women as the expense of the education of their brothers w/includes luxuries like travel and a residence of their own
  • and 104 she says that it “changes the landscape” is important: with halls, playing grounds, university “Sacred” edifaces
• Working women could affect war by refusing to work in munitions factories etc 111 but educated class’s women have absolutely no power
  • You say they have influence, but only a fraction of educated class women have access to significant figures, influence is really just a kind of prostitution, and influence requires money which not all of us have (interesting: she doesn’t see class as raw wealth) 112 (which is true, remember Perry Anderson’s “semi” stuff): she says “the influential are the daughters of noblemen”
    • the problem with applying to Marx to literature is that literature is sensitive, more sensitive than Marx, to the complexities of class
• Okay, so now there’s a new kind of influence b/c now (1936-7) the professions are open and women have the vote…women needed financial freedom to support themselves in order to be able to express their opinions, not just the vote. 115
  • This is disinterested influence: her “charm” doesn’t determine her support by fathers or brothers or husbands
• She treats educated class’s women as a diff class from their male counterparts: see the same world “through different eyes” 116

Private Sphere Work

• Regarding that men will see to it that their families are supported, “I take you to mean that the world as it is at present is divided into two services; one the public and the other the private” 152
• working as “wives, mothers, daughters” but they are not paid
  • “Is the work of a mother, of a wife, of a daughter, worth nothing in solid cash?”
  • Whitaker’s Almanac says not
  • 153: “work all day and every day, without whose work the State would collapse and fall to pieces, without whose work you sons, Sir, would cease to exist, are paid nothing whatever.”
• You say that men are paid enough to support family…but she notes that bachelors and unmarried women don’t earn the same. Ouch. 153 Zing!
  • And plus clearly that money never gets to women in the first place; they can’t choose and spend on their own causes with their “half” of the man’s salary
• She is Denying that Women Actually Have Access to the “Common Surplus Fund”
  • Her “half” of the money is paid for stuff she can’t get: universities only for men, hunting only for men, clubs only for men, wine and cigars she doesn’t consume 154
  • The only part of the income she gets is room and board and some pocket money: that’s the reality 155
• Wars Happen B/c Women Don’t Have Money to Spend on Their Causes.
  • It Is Not Right to Say That Women Actually Get to Choose What They Spend the Husband’s Money On. 155
    • the person “To whom the salary is actually paid” is the one who gets the fruit of the money
    • how can our critics in the face of this say that women got some kind of actual power out of shopping….it was a tiny fraction spent on them…
      • what is shows is that we needn’t kid ourselves about the nature of the power that shopping accorded women. very little if you are looking from the traditional perspective of power (ie where the money goes)
• Only having your own money protects your freedom of opinion: so you must allow woman her fair share of the money without stipulating how it should be spent, and you must donate money for education to ensure that she has access to profession
  • How can you guarantee she won’t just fall into the trap of acting like men act like now? If she is a professional on economic par w/men, how to ensure she is pacifist? 157
    • She’ll probably become possessive like the men are, jealous of her profession and thus bullying
  • With money you can get a woman’s party in Parliament, support past victims of patriarchy, found women’s colleges, give women chloroform during child-birth
• We need money, so we need professions, so we need educations – but there’s a problem. Money seems to lead to war.
  • The photographs of the dead bodies in destroyed house throw a “red light” over the professions and the money you want to get with them
  • 166-7 “Extreme wealth and extreme poverty” both are to be avoided
  • Do we want wealth? the jobs ruin a close relash with children, take up all your time, no time for “friendship, travel, or art,” and will have to “profess certain loyalties” 168 they are tired and their minds are tired too
    • She notes the contemporary arguments that say that we haven’t actually been able to ENJOY the fruits of scientific and technological progress; Churchill saying we have knowledge but not wisdom and that modern man still does awful things that modern women support 171
• Hence women are “between the devil and the deep sea” w/patriarchy on one hand and dismal professionalism one the other
  • How to escape it? She responds, Have your education along with the traditional accompaniments of female unpaid for education: “poverty, chastity, derision, freedom from unreal loyalties” 178
    • poverty: still have just enough money to have some leisure, everything you need for healthy mind and body
    • chastity: won’t sell your brain for money, but practice profession for its own sake
    • derision: preferring “ridicule, obscurity, and censure” so you don’t fall to wanting praise
    • freedom: no pride of country, college, family, religion, sex pride
• Notes that unpaid for education has produced some good results
• 209: says that if the State paid wages for motherhood and work in the home, childbirth and housekeeping would look more attractive to educated class women
  • And it let the men work less b/c don’t have to support family alone and help EVERYONE.
  • It will help ensure his freedom too cuz he’ll be in less mental and moral bondage to his job
  • And that way she can assert her own opinion
  • Where will the money come? from the money you were spending on war

Money and Culture

• “Money is not only the baser ingredient. Advertisement and publicity are also adulterers. Thus, culture mixed with personal charm, or culture mixed with advertisement and publicity, are also adulterated forms of culture” 192
  • When you do things for the sake of money your work is adulterated
    • I love the sound of that word: in that context, it makes you immediately think of the BAD products some merchants sell (the milk with chalk in it)... which says that maybe there is a way to have a transaction that is fair. It’s only when the end is cheating or financial gain that it’s bad.
  • “Can we bring out the connex between them [the photos of war casualties] and prostituted culture and intellectual slavery and make it so clear that the one implies the other?” 193
    • And she says women will face derision and obscurity so they don’t have that connex
• Woolf points out that newspapers don’t reflect fact but the opinions of the board, the owners; that “you have to strip each statement of its money motive, of its power motive, of its advertisement motive, of its publicity motive” both in fact and in fiction 194 so that you don’t commit “adultery of the brain” (ie allow “admixture of baser element”)
  • We need intellectual liberty to avoid the dead bodies b/c only the TRUTH will make people understand that war is bad. 195
    • And conversely we would then BELIEVE in art.
    • Truth = we’ll think war is bad, art is good.
    • Whereas now we think the opposite b/c everything is biasted, adulterated by money and publicity 195
• Prevent war: “protecting the rights of the individual, by opposing dictatorship; by ensuring the democratic ideals of opportunity for all” 198
  • She’s on the side making Enlightenment work, not on the side of toppling it.

End

• “Another picture has imposed itself upon the foreground. It is the figure of a man; some say, others deny, that he is Man himself, the quintessence of virility, the perfect type of which all the others are imperfect adumbrations. [and then her description makes it clear this is a soldier, or…] He is called in German and Italian Fuhrer or Duce; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator. And behind him lie ruined houses and dead bodies.”
• Why paint this picture? not for “sterile” hate, but “to release other emotions…a connection…suggests that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected… It suggests that we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure.”
  • “it is evil” (the dictator) fought by “new words and new methods” and cooperation w/other people with their diff ideas
• Her aim is: “the rights of all…Justice and Equality and Liberty” 241 “To elaborate further is unnecessary, for we have every confidence that you interpret those words as we do.”
  • Her irony is gone; she relies that language is doing just fine now, that it’s not empty, b/c it’s done in the name of everyone…something she wouldn’t do in her fiction.
• She gives her three guineas w/out any conditions