ABSTRACT
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.
-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
INTRODUCTION
I n 1938, nine years after the publication of her much acclaimed A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas. I t was a book that discomforted some of her family and friends, and it predictably provoked the wrath and derision of her enemies (Bell1984; Nicolson 1980). For unlike the playful and elegant Room of One's Own, which brings an incisive humor to the exposition and analysis of women's inequitable educational opportunities, Three Guineas is a passionate and scathing polemic making sustained and condemnatory comparisons between masculism and militarism; between patriarchy and fascism. I had just finished reading it for the first time when I was asked to write this chapter on women and social control. And it seemed to me, as I thought about the meanings of "social control," and the political conundrum posed in Three Guineas, that distinguishing between "social control" and "antisocial control" might be a useful way of thinking about both Virginia's conundrum and the puzzle confronting campaigners intent on remedying the wrongs done to women within the criminal justice system. I refer to the dilemma faced by all excluded and oppressed peoples-the question of how they can best penetrate an exclusionary and oppressive structure without their revolutionary objectives being nullified through incorporation into the (thereby strengthened) oppressive structure in question.
