BEFORE THE SECOND WVAVE of the wom- en's movement rolled over us, acknowl- edgment of Virginia

Woolf's role as a social critic was extremely limited. Only recently has she been hailed as a pro- phetess
who brought forth insights about women's liberation before the movement created an audience which
could recog- nize them. I would like to discuss briefly how she did this and why it was impor- tant.
Although it has been touched on light- ly by most critics,' Virginia Woolf's feminism was a heavy concern
through- out her life. To understand its unique political and literary significance we must understand how
it was qualified by three conditions in her life: her illness, her class position, and her husband's politics.
Her mental illness qualified her femi- nism by severely limiting her activity. Leonard Woolf in his
autobiography de- scribes both the illness and the "cure": her being restricted to a near vegetable
existence, a prescription Virginia re- belled against whenever she could, usu- ally paying the price of
weeks in bed or worse. Her feminism and her illness seem to have their roots in the same source, her
family.2 Although the men- tal imbalance seems also to have had physical causes, it attached itself to
cer- tain family circumstances and never let go. Two patterns stand out: one is the criticism of the father;
the other, the death of the mother. About her father Virginia Woolf wrote that had he lived longer she
would have been unable to write what she wanted to write. The shadow of his moral and intellectual
Victorian judg- ments would have cut off all life to her work: Father's birthday. He would have been 96 . ..
but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine .... No writing, no books. (WD, p. 138)
Even after his death, even as she con- tinued her battle against male authori- tarianism, she was plagued
by fear of criticism. That contradiction raged with- in her throughout her life and was indi- rectly one
cause of her suicide. She killed herself after writing Between the Acts, in the grips of the chronic
depression she felt after finishing a book before it went to the critics. Leonard Woolf describes in some
detail her hypersensitivity to criticism and how it affected her mental stability. One important
complication to this pattern: from her childhood on, Virginia deeply resented the double standard her
father used to criticize his children. She wanted to be judged by the same rigid "masculine" standards
her brothers were judged by (since obviously these were the ones that counted in her father's world),
and deeply resented anyone pam- pering her because she was a woman; yet her health and her artistic
sensitivity made her extremely vulnerable to that kind of criticism. She preferred, she told herself, to
trudge along her way, footsore and dusty, curs- ing the people who offered her a lift in case they did it
out of kindness because she was a woman, and equally cursing those who did not even trouble to notice
her." (Aileen Pippet, The Moth and the Star, p. 55) She deeply resented being channeled into a role
which simply did not fit her needs and aspirations, but she realized that the opposite role would be just
as confining for her (See To the Lighthouse for a dramatization of the masculine and feminine models
offered to her through her parents). As she grew older, she de- veloped her own feminist standards, but
she never completely outgrew that funda- mental insecurity about her own abilities. "It's a feeling of
impotence; of cutting no ice." (WD, p. 29) Women in the movement today are struggling to find ways to
help each other out of a kind of paralysis, that passivity which is a de- fense against patriarchal
judgments. In light of her agony over this, Virginia Woolf's actual production was quite courageous. Her
mother's death when she was thir- teen led to Virginia's first suicide attempt. The effect of that sudden
death on her mental health is even more complex than her father's "tyranny." It seems to have
intensified her conflict over dependence and independence which originated in her father's double
standard. Her moth- er's death removed from her, perhaps, the support she needed to grow to genuine
independence and forced her into a premature striving after the rigid independence promoted by her
father for the boys, along the lines of the Victorian ideal of "manliness," stoicism and self- reliance. It
certainly removed a maternal buffer against paternal criticism and left her more dependent than ever on
her father's judgments. Virginia Woolf seems to have been plagued by a neurotic guilt over her de-
pendency needs. Whatever the source of this-anger at her mother for abandoning her, as Aileen Pippet
suggests, or inter- nalization of her father's standards-when this issue of dependency is related to
women's oppression, the neurotic is trans- formed into the political: in a patriarchal society, dependency
can be slavery. In Three Guineas she argues that women's economic dependence, first on their fathers,
then on their husbands, makes them necessarily dependent on these men's attitudes, their values, their
ideas. To disagree would be to threaten one's financial security. And if . . . you object that to depend
upon a profession is a form of slavery, you will admit . . . that to depend upon

a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. Recall the joy with which you
received your first guinea ... and the deep breath of freedom that you drew when you realized that your
days of dependence ... were over.3 (p. 23) Virginia Woolf was one of the first feminists to use her
experience to attack (as one of the root causes of women's oppression) the nuclear family, whose
ideology was intensely adhered to during the Victorian age of her childhood. She was not only a victim of
this social struc- ture, she recognized why. The nuclear family was the structure through which persons
were socialized into the restricted roles of masculinity and feminity. Al- though its large number of
children, and relationships between them, may have eased the destructive dependency be- tween
parents and children which char- acterizes the modern nuclear family, the Victorian family was
suffocating in its smugness and inflexibility. Leslie Stephen, Virginia's father, participated in this all the
more earnestly perhaps to compen- sate for his publicly declared agnosticism. He demonstrated that one
needn't depend on the support of religion to be morally upright. The other two important conditions of
Virginia Woolf's life influencing her feminism-her position within the English intellectual aristocracy, and
Leonard Woolf's socialism-must be considered together because they influenced each other as well as
her feminism. There is no denying that Virginia Woolf was an intellectual snob, and re- mained one, to
some extent, throughout her life. As snobbery based on intellectual rather than social achievement, it
was sustained by bourgeois privileges but not identified with them. It influenced her work and her
feminism in several ways. First, it allowed her the luxury of cyn- icism about political action. In 1919 she
wrote: It seems to me more and more clear that the only honest people are the artists, and that these
social reformers and phil- anthropists get so out of hand and har- bour so many discreditable desires
under the disguise of loving their kind, that in the end there's more to find fault with in them than in us.
But if I were one of them? (WD, p. 18) Second, it allowed her to write for an elite audience and to
develop a somewhat exclusive, obscure style. And finally, her aristocratic intellectual position allowed
her to advocate, at times, vision without power, which is the kind of conclusion one comes to when
individual insights about oppression are not united to collec- tive struggles against that oppression and
when the individual can remain content with her class privileges. But even from the beginning these po-
sitions were qualified by her feminist per- spective. She was cynical about political action because it was
almost exclusively defined by the patriarchal system: chopped up into committees, hierarchies,
unexamined activity, and dominated by ego-tripping, self-deceiving "reformers." She felt that if women
fought the enemy with his own weapons, they would be- come like the enemy. She was keenly aware,
for instance, of the dangers of co- optation and refused any honors or po- sitions which would allow this
to happen (like becoming the token woman on the

290 COLLEGE ENGLISH Library Committee).4 This perspective helps explain why there is a separate
women's movement today. Her sometimes elusive, perhaps guarded style was also influenced by her
woman's insecurity at not having the formal uni- versity education her male peers enjoyed. She seems to
have been obsessed with the reactions of her Cambridge-educated readers to her first works, and to be
self- conscious about stating the obvious too obviously. It is interesting that nowhere in her writing is her
style more lucid and straightforward than in Three Guineas, the strongest expression of her feminism.
Finally, Virginia Woolf accepted the idea of vision without power because she recognized that women
had no power, that the only hope they had of changing conditions was through their necessarily
detached "outsider's" vision. She was 46 years old when women got the vote, and she knew even
before, that the vote was almost sterile in a society structured ac- cording to patriarchal 5 and
professional values: We ... are between the devil and the deep blue sea. Behind us lies the patriar- chal
system, the private house with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the
public world, the professional system, with its posses- siveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed. The
one shuts us up like slaves in a harem. The other forces us to circle, like caterpillars, head to tail, round
and round the mulberry tree, the sacred tree of property. (TG, p. 113) For instance, Virginia Woolf was
ar- dently anti-war and felt that women be- cause they were left weaponless were in the best position to
"fight" for peace, through revolutionary ideas about a truly free society. But to make ideas effective, we
must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action . . . but [I hear] a woman's voice saying
'Women have not a word to say in politics . . . All the idea-makers who are in a position to make ideas
effec- tive are men.' That is a thought that damps thinking and encourages irrespon- sibility. ("Thoughts
of Peace in an Air Raid") I feel that many misleading generaliza- tions have been made about Virginia
Woolf's social and aesthetic positions be- cause people have viewed her as some- how static. Some
critics will take a state- ment from Night and Day and synthesize it with a statement from The Years with-
out any recognition that she might have 'changed her views between 1919 and 1937. It is unfortunate
that a writer so 4In Three Guineas she prescribes how wo- men must act to avoid cooptation: You can
enter the professions and escape the risks . . on condition that you help all properly qualified people, of
whatever sex, class, or colour, to enter your profession; and further on condition that in the practice of
your profession, you refuse to be sepa- rated from poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal
loyalties.... By poverty is meant enough money to live on, ... enough to be independent, .... but no more.
By chas- tity is meant that when you have made enough to live on,.. . you must refuse to sell your brain
for the sake of money. . . . By derision . . . is meant that you must refuse all methods of advertising merit,
and hold that ridicule, obscurity and censure are preferable, for psychological reasons to fame and
praise. .. .By freedom from unreal loyalties is meant that you must rid yourself of pride of na- tionality, in
the first place, also of religious pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride, and those unreal loyalties that
spring from them. Directly the seducers come with their seductions to bribe you into captivity, tear up
the parchments. 5She believed that human beings were po- tentially androgynous-see Orlando-so refer-
ences to "male" or patriarchal values refer to how men are socialized, not to their inherent nature.