Woolf

Woolf

1. Roots of war

   • War begins at home (in the social and cultural fabric of society)
   • Prejudice
   • Discrimination
   • oppression
   • Men

2. Strengths

   • Original, Bold, Imaginative, Intelligent
   • Valuable insight into position of women in Britsh society
   • Study of subordination and oppression and its socio-political implications
   • New understanding of politics
   • Asking original questions
     • What role does the state play in the reporduction of male dominance?
     • What is the connection between patricarchy and war?
     • To what extent should war be seen as a male practice?
     • Is patriotism a masculinist ideology which legitimizes male possessivness and dominance?
   • Timeless argument is the inequality between sexes.

3. Weaknesses

   • War occurs because men like it, want it, get pleasure, satisfaction
   • Confuses cause, reason and association: professions-uncivilized, war -uncivilized
   • Assumes too much gender unity, emotional, intellectual, political...
   • Empirically suspect - war an exclusively male activity
   • Woolf had little understanding of working-class women and thier plight.
   • Woolf tells the women what they can and cannot do, which puts her at the same position as men she is attacking

4. Wilson

   • Feminist IR classic
   • Feminism, patriotism, culture, civilization, freedom, discrimination, inequality, gender, class, power, income and influence, education and war,
   • One of the most original essays on international politics

5. Keynes 1938

   • Most women are not and do not wish to be outsiders, they glow with pride in thier country, understand the pleasure of fighting

6. Critique

   • Leavis 1938
     • The book contains some dangerous assumptions, some preposterous claims and some nasty atitutdes
     • The method is deliberate avoidance of any argument- its unity is emotional
     • In fact the release of sex hostility this kind of writing represents is self-indulgent because it provides Mrs. Woolf with a sefl-righteous glow at the cost of furnishing an easy target for unsympathetic males, and at the still greater cost of emberessing those women who are aware that the only chance of thier getting accepted as intellectual equals by intelligent men is by living down thier sex's reputation for gaving in general minds as ill-regulated as Mrs. Woolf's is here seen to be.
     • Mrs. Woolf's idea however is to abolish that kind of education altogether.
     • Mrs. Woolf wants studies to be pursued by 'the clever' and the stupid side by side, without any troublesome distinctions or standards to spoil things.
     • To judge from Three Guineas Mrs. Woolf wants the women of her class to have the priviledges of womenhood without duties and responsibilities traditionally assumed, by them, and to have the advantages of a men's education without being subsequently obliged, as nearly as men are, to justify it.
   • Bell
     • As a political writer, Woolf was a failure
   • Keynes
     • A silly argument and not well written.

7. Carroll 1978

   • Woolf: I think politicians and journalists must be the lowest of God's creatures.
   • Woolf: The world of politics doesn't deserve our attention and energies.
   • Aristotle: the distinguishing feature of the human political animal was that he alone has any sense of good and evil, or just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beigns who have this sense makes a family and a state. - Politics is much more than the world of politicians
   • Leonard Woolf: there would noever be a government if there weren't an opposition
   • Woolf recognizes in the society around her a political and social system geared to the destruction and perversion of human live and creativity. The pillars of this system were: patriarchy, property, possessiveness, dominance...
     • She saw patrirachy as the central pillar, where domestic politics, institutional politics, and state politics converge, where the PERSONAL IS INTERNATIONAL
   • Woolf saw the social system as maintained by all the interlocking institutions of society including: marriage, law, education, armies, navies, parliament, the church, the monarchy...
   • She saw then what what become a widespread idea later - PERSONAL IS POLITICAL, personal relations are the mirror of the social system and its crucible
   • Even though three guineas were givent to three different treasurers, they were all given for the smae cause.
   • Woolf saw the oppresipon and constrictions of women's lives as the foundation as well as the mirror of the whole corrupt and violent social system, and that system could not be overthrown by imitating it.
     • If women took part in the existing institutions without severe conditions they would end up as female counterparts of Mr. Ramsay
       • The great danger was that women might change our position from being victims of the patriarchical system to being the champions of the capitalist system.
   • Woolf argued to destroy the word feminism because lebles simply cound not express the real meaning of the feminist struggle.
   • Question of Woolf's class bias is a complex one. Her attitude was far from hating, despising or ignoring working women.
     • She worked actively with the Women's Cooperative Guild, hosting thier meeting at her house, and writing introduction for the Life as we Know it - collection of memoirs of working women. But she felt a sense of isolation, perheps even imprisonment, in the class of 'educated men's daughters' and a reticence based on recognition of the dangers of what is called 'defining other people's oppression for them'.
     • While she believed that her class should use whatever resources and feedom it had to begin to build a new society, she was doubtful of its right to carry any message of instruction to the class of working women.
   • Woolf yearned for harmony, wholeness, equilibrium, and that she idntifies these with peace and an end to discord and violence. The whole point of Three Guineas was not to argue for women's rights but to answer the question (how to prevent war)
   • Daily telegraph: Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. ...Woolf: And is not the women who has to brethe that poison and fight that insect secretly and without arms, in her office, fighting the Facist and the Nazi as surely as those who fight him with arms in the... Should we not help her crush him in our own country before we ask er to help us crush him abroad?
   • Being a women is not of the state but of the world. State is the structure.

8. Feldman 2004

   • It would seem that in order to justify thier separate organizational efforts, pre World War I peace-movement feminism needed a sex-specific cause and therefore relied on difference.
   • Woolf revolutionized the discourse of her time by inventing 'gender'. She did this through a sexual metaphor -androgyny- which for her meant a psychological and cultural capability to cross boundaries of traditional sex roles.
   • Androgyny is a grandparent to 'gender'. Beauvoir 1949 - One is not born but rather becomes a women.
   • Never giving up her feminist perspective, she boldly analyzed Fascism as a sex-based phenomenon, as the public face of masculinist aggression.
   • PERSONAL is not only POLITICAL its GENDERED too.
   • Woolf anticipated the socio-cultural constructivism of contemporary theory.
   • Woolf - Between the Acts - humankind is perceived as part of the animal world, and the primal instincts play a major even if parodic role
   • Woolf advocates gender (rather than sexual) difference - an argument that establishes her as the 'mother' of constructivist gender theory.

9. Gilman

   • Male social superiority is a cultural rather than nautral phenomenon, which shuld be corrected by 'changed education' and opportunity for every child.
   • The basic feminine impulse is to gather, to put together, to construct, the basic masculine impulse to scatter, to disseminate, to distroy.
   • Male aggression is not only natural, rather, it seems to be divinely ordained.

10. A Room of One's Own - Woolf's foundamental feminist essay.