The author received three separate requests for a gift of one guinea-one for a women’s college building fund, one for a society promoting the employment of professional women, and one to help prevent war and “protect culture, and intellectual liberty.” This book is a threefold answer to these requests-and a statement of feminine purpose.

Marija

Three Guineas

Four score years ago Woolf envisioned a time when the very prospect of members of her sex delivering sermons from the pulpit will not elicit scorn or sneers, when the blonde-wigged, ageing torch-bearers of society would allow women to administer justice, climb the ranks of the distinguished Civil Service and teach young men in universities. The indefatigable benevolence of time has transformed many of her ardent wishes into reality not only within the confines of England but beyond.  And yet as I type this, there's an educated man, a graduate of India's premiere engineering institute if his profile is to be believed,  insulting  a feminist author on my twitter timeline by accusing her of whoring herself.  At the expense of two dozen or more whatsapp messages and weeks worth of bickering back and forth have I managed to convince a dear friend not to use the term  'feminazi'  to discredit radical feminists. What Woolf called an  'infantile fixation'  remains a prime character trait of the  less fair  sex still.   Even now people would rather invoke some misogynous claptrap passed off as inviolate truisms recorded in a book written centuries ago by unenlightened individuals instead of applying intellect or acquired knowledge to judge a real life scenario. Case in point being the initial denial of anaesthetics to expecting mothers in labour on the assumption that women must endure the worst pain known to mankind to atone for 'Original Sin', something Woolf doesn't fail to point out here.   So before I go on any further and launch into a full-fledged tirade which will be a regrettable disservice to the purpose and spirit of this essay, let us turn to Woolf's three guineas.  To borrow from bell hooks, this is Virginia Woolf disemboweling the 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy' of her times with a merciless precision. She is a force of nature in this pretend-letter - inexorable but reasonable, irate but calm, bursting with indignation but dignified, sarcastic but inoffensive - exuding wisdom and poise in every sentence. Not only does she trace the complex interrelationship between war and the lust for power and wealth, but attributes all of it to the underlying patriarchal sentiment of governing the world through tools of intimidation.     "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."    She chastises the world of academia rooted in baser interests of personal profit which jeopardize the sacrosanct search for truth and knowledge and criticizes the mode of education which delights in enforcing rigid hierarchies instead of striving to achieve synthesis and harmony.     "...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."    Composed in the format of a letter addressed to a (probably fictional) gentleman (a lawyer) who asked Woolf to help preempt war by making contributions towards the preservation of artistic and intellectual liberty, the essay tries to delve deep into the causality of inequalities both in the public and private spheres and exposes how these inequalities between the sexes and the classes cripple society and foment antipathy and hatred. She also proves how the unhealthy obsession with imperious titles, monetary rewards, uniforms and ranks in various professions encourages nepotism and power-grabbing thereby stunting the advancement of civilization.    "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."     Flaying open the anatomy of fascism, she explicates how the politics of injustice and oppression perpetuated in England is just as deserving of censure as Hitler and Mussolini's doctrines of totalitarianism, how patriotism is nothing but a shallow excuse for perpetuating violence.     "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?"    In staccato bursts of intellectual rigour, Woolf points out every single thing wrong with the world of her times (and ours too) with a devastating sort of forthrightness. This is Virginia at the height of her literary powers and probably at her argumentative best.     "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."    To conclude, this is the kind of essay which validates the existence of this narrative form like few others of its kind. ___  (*)Important to note here that Woolf resents the term 'feminist' because the subjects she elucidates with great vigour in this essay spill beyond the boundaries of an issue like gender equality.

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