Virginia Woolf as Feminist

Before the Second World War and long before the second wave of feminism, Virginia Woolf argued that women's experience, particularly in the women's movement, could be the basis for transformative social change. Grounding Virginia Woolf's feminist beliefs in the everyday world, Naomi Black reclaims Three Guineas as a major feminist document. Rather than a book only about war, Black considers it to be the best, clearest presentation of Woolf's feminism.Woolf's changing representation of feminism in publications from 1920 to 1940 parallels her involvement with the contemporary women's movement (suffragism and its descendants, and the pacifist, working-class Women's Co-operative Guild). Black guides us through Woolf's feminist connections and writings, including her public letters from the 1920s as well as "A Society," A Room of One's Own, and the introductory letter to Life As We Have Known It. She assesses the lengthy development of Three Guineas from a 1931 lecture and the way in which the form and illustrations of the book serve as a feminist subversion of male scholarship. Virginia Woolf as Feminist concludes with a discussion of the continuing relevance of Woolf's feminism for third-millennium politics.

Black... provides an excellent account of the textual evolution and development of Woolf's feminism.... Black effectively combats the image of Woolf as an aloof artist by enriching our understanding of the feminist contexts in which she worked., In this convincing new study, Black (political science and women's studies, York Univ., Toronto) demonstrates that Woolf's book-length essay Three Guineas is the clearest, most explicit statement of her feminism—a philosophy Woolf referred to as the 'life of natural happiness.' Black provides a meticulously researched examination of 'Three Guineas,' contending that it is central to Woolf's large body of work. In addition, she carefully considers different versions of the text, along with Woolf's other works; her contacts with the various women's organizations promoting the suffrage movement; and her beliefs about how the world can be transformed into a peaceful society.... Highly recommended for academic libraries., Perhaps none of Virginia Woolf's works has been so little loved and ill-understood as Three Guineas.... But now, thanks to Virginia Woolf as Feminist, Naomi Black's learned, tireless argument in favor of this deliberately obdurate work, readers may come to appreciate this most uncompromising of Woolf's feminist pronouncements. Black's major and sustained claim is that Three Guineas is an intrinsically feminist work whose anti-war attitudes cannot be disassociated from Woolf's assault on masculinist privilege and domination.... These details, coupled with accurate paraphrase and citation of Woolf's arguments, give Black's study its quiet and insistent authority. Virginia Woolf as Feminist... has some new-fashioned, and urgent, literary and historical work to perform, as Black makes clear in the fervid argument she makes for Three Guineas continuing relevance for feminism in the third millennium. She admits Woolf's relative neglect of sexuality and class in her feminist writings, issues that trouble our own time, but in return asks us to consider how much Woolf has to say about women's health issues and the racial politics that also preoccupy us. In closing, she refers to the recent wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya to impress upon us how the feminist objectives underwritten by Woolf's three guineas—'democratization, education, and public professional activity'—still represent a program for political transformation., This book feels remarkably short at 200 pages, and at the end of it I feel—and this is not a criticism—that there is much more to be said about Woolf's feminism: 'We will never, in any simple sense, fully understand either Three Guineas or the feminism it represents'. This is one of those few books that I wish I had been (cap)able to write. The reason I have quoted from it so extensively is that Naomi Black expresses so clearly the arguments she is making.

Naomi Black is Professor Emerita, Political Science and Women's Studies, York University (Toronto) and Adjunct Professor, Women's Studies, Mount Saint Vincent University (Halifax). She is the author of Social Feminism, also from Cornell, coauthor of Canadian Women: A History and Feminist Politics on the Farm, and editor of Blackwell's Shakespeare Head Press edition of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas.