Books: Passive and Indifferent

THREE GUINEAS—Virginia Woolf—Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

“And a word without a meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word. . . . Let us write that word in large black letters on a sheet of foolscap; then solemnly apply a match to the paper. . . . Now let us bray the ashes in a mortar with a goose-feather pen, and declare in unison singing together that anyone who uses that word in future is a ring-the-bell-and-run-away man, a mischief maker, a groper among old bones, the proof of whose defilement is written in a smudge of dirty water upon his face.” The word Virginia Woolf thus exorcises is “feminist.” Last week, out of deference to her rhetoric, critics refrained from using it to describe her social essay, Three Guineas.

Twenty years ago, before the word “feminist” had begun to triten, Virginia Woolf considered that the proper study of mankind was sensitive, intelligent women with independent incomes. She kept to that belief till she had made herself the best-known woman novelist in England. Recently, however, world events have put even the sort of intelligent women she likes to write about in a dangerous spot; in Three Guineas she takes a stand on today’s crop of social questions.

Lying round unanswered in Virginia Woolf’s desk as the book opens are three letters requesting the gift of a sum of money. Being an intelligent woman who must make her own living, she can contribute only a guinea (about $5) to each. First guinea goes to rebuild a women’s college, is accompanied by a long letter containing her views on education. If the college is to be rebuilt on the old lines, she says, her guinea might as well go for matches to burn it down. She would like it to be a “poor college,” with no chapels, lectures or degrees, made of wood instead of stained glass and ivy, teaching music, literature, conversation, cooking. But she knows that the graduates of colleges must get jobs; she is too familiar with 19th-Century methods of educating women to be indignant about 20th-Century methods. She sends the guinea with one condition: that the young ladies not be taught too many lies about the British Empire.

The second guinea, to a society for helping women enter the professions, also has a string tied to it: the women must withdraw from the professions as soon as they can, before they start yawning at dinner. The third guinea goes to a society for prevention of war—and because Virginia Woolf is not very sure how societies go about preventing war, it has no conditions at all. She sympathizes, naturally, with its aims. But to the invitation to join its ranks she answers No. Women are different from men; they would lose their identity by going into bi-sexual societies. They must form instead a “Society of Outsiders,” with no constitution or meetings, with a passive attitude towards patriotism and complete indifference to the warlike virtues.