This has been an incredibly crappy week when it comes to thinking through a lot of the issues discussed in this book applied to contemporary society and recent news. I live in Virginia, and well, I KNOW, right? A poorly worded and meekly defended, but good bill that strengthens the privacy rights of women through their healthcare is being used in entirely bad faith and evil discussions to score cheap political points.
And so looking at this book, it’s interesting to think through Virginia Woolf’s arguments, and also their specific context, and think about some of the differences. In this book Virginia Woolf is replying to three requests for donations in long letter form. One request is to help fund women’s education, another is to fund employment security and opportunities, and a third is to discuss how to prevent war. So on the one hand, it’s tempting to see her relative comfort and privilege as an educated, middle class intellectual, but in addition she specifically discusses the more restrictive laws that prevent property ownership and other forms of civic and economic participation, and of course cultural participation, and in addition deal with the criticism of politicians who further argue against continued suffrage because of “lack of participation”.
It’s frustrating to be sure.
Anyway, this is a thoughtful and intelligent book and is also so heavily referenced in other works, like Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, that it’s almost required reading a cultural artifact as much as anything else.
(Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Guineas)