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WHY VIRGINIA WOOLF SHOULD BE YOUR FEMINIST ROLE MODEL

Why Virginia Woolf Should Be Your Feminist Role Model
By Maddie Crum


Writer

Jan 25, 2015, 10:09 AM EST
|Updated Dec 6, 2017

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Although Virginia Woolf is now accepted as a major writer and an early feminist,
her work wasn't embraced or widely anthologized until nearly 50 years after her
novels were published. Though many of her stories don't adhere to the informal
strictures of modernism -- she often voiced her distaste for James Joyce and
other contemporaries who wrote unabashedly about sexuality -- she's championed
today for subtly calling attention to women's issues. In her novels and her many
letters to her fellow thinkers in the Bloomsbury group, she artfully made clear
many double standards of her day. Here's why, in addition to Roxane Gay, Bey and
Lena Dunham, Virginia Woolf should be one of your feminist role models:

She was chiefly interested in the inner lives of women.
Unlike many of her literary predecessors, Woolf aimed to give credence to the
unspoken emotions and interpretations we experience daily. She did this not only
by placing more traditionally feminine themes at the forefront of her stories,
but by penning sentences with a cadence that revealed the inner workings of her
characters’ minds. A New Yorker article calls this, “The tragic lack of
correspondence between intention and expression; and what these reveal about the
nature of love.”

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While this dissonance isn’t only of interest to women, it’s true that such
“small” themes have traditionally been the subject of books by female authors,
and have lamentably been shunned by critics for their “smallness.” Woolf,
however, was too impressive to be ignored.

She lived in a time when she was granted few rights -- but turned the setback
into a strength.
When her contemporaries were authoring stories about the violent events of World
War I, Woolf, who hadn’t the opportunity to fight, instead turned her narrative
eye towards its impact on domestic life, and wrote Jacob’s Room, which revealed
the more personal impact of grief and trauma. She was criticized by female
writers of her ilk, such as Katherine Mansfield, for not addressing war and
politics more directly, but continued to do the sort of work she believed in.

She was progressive in her feminism, and even made the connection between a
patriarchal society and militarism.
Remember last week's State of the Union address, when Obama called America's
still-lacking equal pay for women exactly what it is: embarrassing? Virginia
Woolf wrote about the detriments caused by gender-influenced salaries long
before moves were made to change legislation. In A Room of One's Own, she
famously explains that without financial freedom, women cannot possess full
creative or intellectual freedom. While Woolf's essay directly evaluates the
role of education -- which was withheld from many women of her time -- she goes
on to equate schooling with income and self-sufficiency.



In a later book-length essay, Three Guineas, written on the heels of World War
II, she responded to a letter from a man asking how war could be prevented.
Woolf used this correspondence not only to call attention to her pacifism, but
also to the fact that as a woman her political ideas aren't valued. She wrote,
"behind us lies the patriarchal system; the private house, with it nullity, its
immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the
professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its
greed."

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She believed deeply in the power of the individual.
Virginia Woolf's advice on reading may be every high school English teacher's
nightmare, but it's hugely empowering nonetheless. She writes, "take no advice,
to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own
conclusions... After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of
Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than
Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself." Asserting
that there's no one correct way of interpreting a text may be controversial, but
Woolf herself, who never received a university degree, was often forced to
challenge conventions in order to succeed.

She saw sexuality -- and gender -- as fluid.
In a letter written around the same time as Three Guineas, Woolf not only
acknowledges that gender-specific traits are socialized, but implies that
gendered desires are often a source of violence. Such themes are explored
thoroughly in her fiction, including her first novel, A Voyage Out, which
mirrors her personal voyage from a more traditional upbringing to the
intellectually stimulating Bloomsbury group she became a regular fixture of.

She's already been a feminist role model for countless artists and thinkers
Including Simone de Beauvoir and Michael Cunningham, to name a few!

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