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352 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1938
"Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman's rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us; and it is difficult to judge what we do not share."
"...what should be taught in the new college, the poor college? Not the arts of dominating other people; not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital. (...) The poor college must teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practised by poor people; such as medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature. It should teach the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people's lives and minds, and the little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them. The aim of the new college, the cheap college, should be not to segregate and specialize, but to combine."
"Obviously the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers. Since the red and the gold, the brass and the feathers are discarded upon active service, it is plain that their expensive and not, one might suppose, hygienic splendour is invented partly in order to impress the beholder with the majesty of the military office, partly in order through their vanity to induce young men to become soldiers."
"Are they not both the voices of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not all agreed that the dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as well as a very ugly animal? And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, but in the heart of England. (...) And is not the woman who has to breathe that poison and to fight that insect, secretly and without arms, in her office, fighting the Fascist or the Nazi as surely as those who fight him with arms in the limelight of publicity?"
"The daughters of educated men who were called, to their resentment, (*)'feminists' were in fact the advance guard of your own movement. They were fighting the same enemy that you are fighting and for the same reasons. They were fighting the tyranny of the patriarchal state as you are fighting the tyranny of the Fascist state."
…it matters not just because women win. It matters because it means we have a seat at the table. And everybody in this room knows the basic rule, if you don’t have a seat at the table, you are probably on the menu.
—Senator Elizabeth Warren
So profound was her unconscious loathing for the education of the private house with its cruelty, its poverty, its hypocrisy, its immorality, its inanity that she would undertake any task however menial, exercise any fascination however fatal that enabled her to escape.I said A Room of One's Own is a good entry to feminism. The danger, then, of its popularity and persistent blocking out of this other works' attributes is its all too often status as both start and finish, beginning and end. That is the act of learning not speech, nor a quote, not even the alphabet, but a single letter by which one reads. If one wants to be even more explicit, scrub out "letter" and replace it with "character", for the former brings to mind the English 26 of two significant digits while the latter speaks of the 5000+ entried language of Chinese, a culture-crossing comparison that speaks not only to our fear of multitudes of thousands but our fear of other and, in short, does well to describe the mentality with which we all should approach Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own'. Feminism is not a light switch; it is a lifetime. To the Lighthouse, anyone?
We shall find there not only the reason why the pay of the professional woman is still so small, but something more dangerous, something which, if it spreads, may poison both sexes equally. There, in those quotations, is the egg of the very same worm that we know under other names in other countries. There we have in embryo the creature, Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes he has the right, given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall do.When I think of feminism, I think of destroying the patriarchy, and when I think of the patriarchy, I think of all. If The Second Sex was a room, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism a window, Three Guineas is a barometer, for a storm comes upon us through myriad physical and chemical means, and it will not spare us its wrath due to the fact of our ignorance of its methods. We are all bound by the patriarchy, but do not take that as a reason to forgo feminism for humanism. There is a history behind me of those who were of my gender, those who due to the fact of our shared gender were isolated with impunity, forced into labor with impunity, raped with impunity and murdered with impunity. To forgo feminism for humanism is to obliterate the resistance birthed by that history with impunity. To forgo feminism for humanism is to imply that the millenia of centuries do not matter, we have not really come very far at all with our ability to not only survive but propagate, to not only propagate but to control, to not only control but to enhance, to not only enhance to progress, due to the fact that this movement is for the sake of women and women, as we all know, are the half of the population of humanity that is composed of objects. To put it plainly, I for the simple fact of being a woman have a lot more to lose a lot more easily, and if you refuse to take that into respectful account, what good is your status as a human being for?
And we find, between the lines of their husbands’ biographies, so many women practicing—but what are we to call the profession that consists in bringing nine or ten children into the world, the profession which consists in running a house, nursing an invalid, visiting the poor and the sick, tending here an old father, there an old mother?—there is no name and no pay for that profession; but we find so many mothers, sisters and daughters of educated men practicing it in the nineteenth century that we must lump them and their lives together behind their husbands’ and brothers’, and leave them to deliver their message to those who have the time to extract it and the imagination with which to decipher it.Evolution is the survival of the fittest, fittest not in whatever implications of athleticism and superiority have accrued over the years but in the matter of a round block made of wood triumphing over a square block made of diamond because it is able to fit in the round hole. It is no surprise, then, that a patriarchal way of doing things, man as subject and woman as object, has percolated into every vein of social significance and common sense. It is no surprise, then, that we are compromised from the day of birth till the day we drop, so if you think this is a matter of competition or holier-than-thou, kill two birds with one stone and forget it. Not only is that the patriarchal manner of evaluation, survival of the fittest translating to utter erasure of the assumed to be useless but only, of course, after squeezing out every bit of use possible from that long forgotten name, identity, and self. Speech, thought, the way things are and the ways we fear are all geared towards those clubs men, those fashions of the military, those boys who will ever be boys, so it shouldn't surprise us how resistance is not a matter of putting your money behind your mouth but questioning why the mouth is worth so much less than the money.
If such is the real nature of our influence, and we all recognize the description and have noted the effects, it is either beyond our reach, for many of us are plain, poor and old; or beneath our contempt, for many of us would prefer to call ourselves prostitutes simply and to take our stand openly under the lamps of Piccadilly Circus rather than use it.If there are no female philosophers, we shall have to question the definitions of "philosopher" and "philosophy", for if that oh so worthy title cannot be in any way applied to a work such as this, then its worth is very little indeed. What matters is the wide range of that worth applied to the heritage, the fact, the crowd of academia and purveyors of its gates and why is it none of them will come across a work such as this, a fierce 188 pages touching upon the relations between war and freedom and feminine momentum everywhere in between, admittedly suffering from Eurocentric solipsism but that has never stopped the men. This book comes upon a difference in income, a difference in education, a picture of dead bodies, and instead of quick-fix magicking the culprit up in the form of "the economy", "today's generation", "Internet" in the mainland and "terrorism" without, we have facts, we have logic, we have a quick and keen and systematic deconstruction of everything we take for granted in just the patriarchal mix of ethos and pathos and logos we all in the Ancient Greece-informed side of things aspire to, broken down and built up and into a completely new beast of paradigm and ideology that is the only trundler down the path not dictated by the yellow brick roads of the patriarchy, and still we withhold the "philosophy". Is the tag "feminism" supposed to make up for that lack? Considering the placement of its works in the "Sexuality" and "Women's Studies" areas, leaving the "Philosophy" shelves free to take on its bags of dicks, and the respective attracted audiences, I think not.
You shall swear that you will do all in your power to insist that any woman who enters any profession shall in no way hinder any other human being, whether man or woman, white or black, provided that he or she is qualified to enter that profession, from entering it; but shall do all in her power to help them.Perhaps the word "philosophy" cannot contain it, for while survival of the fittest has been outfitted by the patriarchy accordingly, intersectionalism has not. There is a great deal in this work penned to completion 76 years ago that is all too familiar, and it is that great deal that trumps any talk of "incorrect application" and "breaks the rules" and roots the ideal of feminism firmly in the matter of the individual. Here, Woolf does not speak of a solution, nor does she summarize her main tenants into the great favorite of banking education of easily swallowed and easily vomited, but factors in the passage of time and its endless trials and errors on every scope of human effort into her composition. An weighty task that implies an insurmountable problem, but for all the pain and death and genocidal levels of infighting the human race has undergone, it still persists. Figure out the reason why we don't all just lay down and die, factor in the facts and statistics of gynephobia around the globe, keep at it long enough and find, eventually, a handful of means and a measure of hope to last you on your way.
The outsiders then would bind themselves not only to earn their own livings, but to earn them so expertly that their refusal to earn them would be a matter of concern to the work master. They would bind themselves to obtain full knowledge of professional practices, and to reveal any instance of tyranny or abuse in their professions…Broadly speaking, the main distinction between us who are outside society and you who are inside society must be that whereas you will make use of the means provided by your position—leagues, conferences, campaigns, great names, and all such public measures as your wealth and political influence place within your reach—we, remaining outside, will experiment not with public but with private means in private.I called this book a barometer. For a more accurate metaphor, forgo Prometheus and carry the fire on your own.
“Then, to, there was my belief that now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done—and occasionally what men have not done—thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women towards greater independence of thought and action…When they fail their failure must be a challenge to others.���
-Ameila Earhart
We can say that for educated men to emphasize their superiority over other people, either in birth or intellect, by dressing differently, or by adding titles before, or letters after their names are acts that rouse competition and jealousy -- emotions which, as we need scarcely draw upon biography to prove, nor ask psychology to show, have their share in encouraging a disposition towards war. (p. 21)
Next, what should be taught in the new college, the poor college? Not the arts of dominating other people; not the arts of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital. They required too many overhead expenses; salaries and uniforms and ceremonies. The poor college must teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practised by poor people; such as medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature. It should teach the arts of human intercourse; the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds, and the little art of talk, of dress, of cookery that are allied with them. (p. 34)
So, Sir, if you want us to help you to prevent war the conclusion seems to be inevitable; we must help to rebuild the college which, imperfect as it may be, is the only alternative to the education of the private house. We must hope that in time that education may be altered. That guinea must be given before we give you the guinea that you ask for your own society. But it is contributing to the same cause--the prevention of war. Guineas are rare; guineas are valuable, but let us send one without any condition attached to the honorary treasurer of the building fund, because by so doing we are making a positive contribution to the prevention of war. (p. 39)