Is Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas Radical Feminist?

This essay considers how far Woolf’s essay should be considered Radical Feminist.

Three Guineas is a Feminist essay, a polemic on the interconnectedness of Patriarchy and war. It is in the form of three letters considering how best women could promote peace. Woolf replies to an imaginary correspondent who has asked for her advice on how to prevent war. She considers donating money to women’s education, women’s access to the professions and anti-war organisations. The letters form an argument, ostensibly about how to prevent war, but in fact about how Patriarchy causes war. The essay is beautifully written as well as carefully constructed with logic and evidence. This essay considers how far Woolf’s essay should be considered Radical Feminist.

Much has been written by Feminists about Three Guineas (Woolf, 1939). There is a good introduction by Marxist Feminist Michelle Barratt in the 1993 Penguin Classics edition and an excellent study guide that draws out many of the Feminist themes on Audible by SuperSummary (2019), narrated by Molly Gallegos. A great Radical Feminist analysis of Three Guineas is by Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology (1978) and in Pure Lust (1984), which I’ll reference several times here. Daly wrote “my charting and describing are inspired by one foresister, Virginia Woolf, who in her profoundly anti-patriarchal book, Three Guineas, asks: ‘What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where, in short, is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?’”  

Woolf was excited about what she had achieved. She wrote in her diary, “I have collected enough material to blow up St Pauls”.  She was an expert at seeing under the surface – finding patterns and describing them. She has and shares with us what Mary Daly calls metapatriarchal consciousness, that is awareness outside, beyond Patriarchy. Woolf can see Patriarchy and she makes important connections. She uses five photos in Three Guineas, dotted throughout the text. They are of middle-class professional men “in their finery” – and serve to illustrate her key point, which is: “Your finest clothes are those you wear for war”. We are jolted into seeing the Patriarchy and its link to war. 

Is this Radical Feminist theory? I would argue it is. “Three Guineas” is a Radical Feminist text because Woolf calls women a “sex class”, she wants to end Patriarchy, not join it. She is abolitionist, warning against prostitution of the body and also the mind. Woolf argues we should set up women-only political institutions – the Society of Outsiders and describes Feminists as the “advance guard” of political struggle against dictatorship and tyranny.  She supports chastity. She is not elitist. She does not want middle- class women to pull up the ladder behind them as they create new organisations such as colleges or professions and says we should ensure they are open to everyone without distinction of sex, race or class.  

In saying that women are a sex class in conflict with the male sex class, Woolf rejects traditional Marxist notions of class The “daughters of educated men” are not in a class – the middle class – with their brothers and husbands because women lack education, money, access to professional work, power. Woolf evidences their poverty and lack power and declares the daughters of educated men a sex class. 

She goes on to focus on economics from a sex class position. She calls middle-class men “your class”. She distinguishes between middle-class men who are educated, powerful and their wives, daughters and sisters who were denied education (Woolf herself was kept at home while vast sums were spent on her brother’s education) and notes that although since 1919 women were legally allowed to work in professions, in reality they had been kept firmly in the lower echelons on meagre wages and with little power.  

Indeed, she lays the blame for Patriarchy and war on the middle-class men who administer it. She gives examples of them promoting war, violence, hierarchy and so forth. She accuses them of being domestic dictators and says we can’t get rid of public dictators like Hitler or Franco if we leave the tyrants of families in place. She makes the connection between the private and public sphere. She doesn’t say it, but the whole essay is informed by the insight the key Radical Feminist notion “the personal is political”.

Woolf wants to utterly uproot Patriarchy, not join it as equals  or tinker with its functioning. Having shown that education promotes war and privilege rather than prevents it, she considers whether to donate to an appeal to rebuild a women’s college: “Shall I ask them to rebuild the college on the old lines? Or shall I ask them to rebuild it, but differently? Or shall I ask them to buy rags and petrol and Bryant and May’s matches and burn the college to the ground?” 

Having suggested this radical act, she retreats and suggests setting up a “poor college” that would be open to all and aim not to “segregate and specialise, but to combine”. This aim of leaving no-one behind (she envisages males and females together in this college) is Radical Feminist, although including males is a contested area.

Radical Feminists are abolitionist. She was clearly against prostitution both of the body and brain. “It should not be difficult to transmute the old ideal of bodily chastity into the new ideal of mental chastity – to hold that if it was wrong to sell the body for money it is much more wrong to sell the mind for money.”

With a genius flash of insight, she describes the procession of professional men – now with a few women trailing along at the back and dismisses their inclusion as changing nothing, partly because rather than alter the professions, they just prop them up. Women are trapped, says Woolf. “Behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with its nullity, it’s immorality, its hypocrisy, it’s servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed.” She says we are shut up like slaves in the first and forced to process “like caterpillars” in the later around the “sacred tree of property”.  

Woolf uses evidence to back up her arguments, including fifty pages of notes and references. But she also moves beyond this, using speculation and guesswork to uncover what lies beneath. Radical Feminists’ tool in trade is thinking outside the patriarchal box, peering through the male lies and beyond the obfuscating myths. In answering the question how can women help to prevent war, she asks one: “What connection is there between the sartorial splendours of the educated man and the photograph of ruined houses and dead bodies? Obviously, the connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those that you wear as soldiers.” Mary Daly recognises this as “high creativity that sees interconnections between apparently disparate things” and adds that Woolf helps us to see that “the basic march, in measured body movements, is a death march.” 

Her suggestions for action are also Radical Feminist. We should think about the processions. We should guess. Women should work, but only enough to have a reasonable living and then do no more prostitution of brain. This is similar to Daly’s idea of “Boundary living” where we have one foot in the patriarchal institutions and one foot firmly rooted in the feminist background. Woolf is clear that you can’t stop war without stopping Patriarchy. 

She talks about violence by men, both at an international level but also targeted at women. She describes the men who attacked the women’s colleges when they asked for degrees. She talks about the war of attrition, wearing women down – and says is it not just as bad as actual violence. She does not however mention sexual abuse within the family or rape – both areas that have been core to Radical Feminist theory since the 1960s.

Woolf asserts that men like war. She lists men’s recent battles. “They were great fighters, it seems, the professional men in the age of Queen Victoria. There was the battle of Westminster. There was the battle of the universities. There was the battle of Whitehall. There was the battle of Harley Street. There was the battle of the Royal Academy.” It dawns on the reader that these are not foreign, but the battles for the bastions of patriarchal exclusion of women. “It is true that the combatants did not inflict flesh wounds; chivalary forbade; but you will agree that a battle that wastes time is as deadly as a battle that wastes blood.” She notes that most professional men are soldiers for Patriarchy, whether they fight with religious dogma, law, education, music or guns.  

She warns against joining the brother’s processions of professions and simply replicating them, using the sorry image of women trailing along at the back of the professions. Her aim that instead we should create something utterly different fits with Radical feminism. 

Woolf suggests women should set up their own institutions and form an “anonymous and secret Society of Outsiders”. Women should “bind themselves to earn their own livings”, “press for a money wage for the unpaid worker in her own class – the daughters and sisters of educated men”, “press for a wage to be paid by the State legally to the mothers of educated men” thus paying women whose profession (as she describes it) is marriage and motherhood. This is another contested area within Radical Feminism – some think that wages for housework would help to liberate women, others think it will fix women in the home.

Perhaps foreseeing safeguarding, she suggests women should “reveal any instance of tyranny or abuse in their professions.” She adds that we should refuse to work in professions hostile to freedom, “such as the making or improvement of the weapons of war.” She presents a vision of women joining the bastions of power, criticising and creating new systems.  

Woolf argues in “Three Guineas” that women see the world differently than men, having been excluded from public power. Women are unlike men they are “a different sex” have “a different tradition, a different education” which lead to “different values”. Thus, she argues that women are different from men on the grounds of both nature (our sex) and nurture (our confinement in the private sphere and exclusion from education), which I think many Radical Feminists agree with. This is particularly important right now when some feminists are saying we are only different on the grounds of nurture (and now identity).  

She says women will “dispense with the dictated, regimented, official pageantry, in which only one sex takes and active part” and with “personal distinctions – medals, ribbons, badges, hoods, gowns”. She suggests that when women get power in their profession, they should “help all properly qualified people, or whatever sex, class or colour, to enter your profession”. She is aware of distinctions of sex, race and class and rejects discrimination.  It’s infuriating that so many modern critics of feminism say that until the 1990s feminists were middle-class white women only interested in gaining the same privileges as their fathers and brothers. This quote shows how inaccurate this slur is.

She urges us to write. Rather than hope to get published by the mainstream press she says use cheap and “so far unforbidden instruments” (she suggested typewriters and duplicators – we have Zoom) to reach the public directly: “Fling leaflets down basements, expose them on stalls... find new ways of approaching the public” Add to that a refusal to attend public meetings that promote war and by these “active and passive measures you would do all in your power to break the ring, the vicious circle, the dance round and round the mulberry tree, the poison trees of intellectual harlotry.”

Woolf calls Feminists the “advance guard” against dictators and wittily adds “Should we not help her to crush him in our own country before we ask her to help us crush him abroad?” Interestingly, she suggests we do our political work in secrecy - shroud it in darkness. She also mentioned equal pay for equal work and described an economy based on scarcity. She gave us the idea of Shakespeare’s sister,  

Woolf also talks about hidden forms of Patriarchy, which she names “aroma and atmosphere”, which we might today call discrimination. There is something floating around, intangible, shifting hard to pin down that keeps women oppressed. She then writes “the cat is out of the bag and it’s a Tom”, suggesting that the smell was from a male cat. All sorts of suggestions from this one phrase – of male’s antisocial obsession with sex. Today we have a different formless, amorphous “aroma” - and the cat is out of the bag and he’s a TIM (trans identifying man). I find this essay sparks my own ideas. For instance, when Woolf describes the aroma around the word Miss: “Miss is a woman, Miss is not a son or a nephew,” it made me see that now there is funding from the Patriarchy for being a Miss, now it’s a profession, men are rushing to join in. We are seeing the professionalisation of womanhood. Of course, men will get the top jobs in it.

As well as analysis and suggested actions, Three Guineas gives us an insight into 1930’s England which acts as a bridge between the first wave Suffragettes of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries and the second wave Feminists in the 1970s and 80’s. Tragically, although some readers loved the book, the Bloomsbury set and those closest to her Vita Sackville-West (a rich aristocrat) and Leonard Woolf (her husband, an educated man) were negative. This probably contributed to the depression that in 1941 drove her to commit suicide. It’s terribly sad she didn’t have sisterhood to support her and terribly lucky for us that she wrote this brilliant essay. It’s the best book I’ve ever read and I highly recommend it.