ABSTRACT
This essay explores the abstruse position of a seminal figure in feminist thought, Virginia Woolf, on women’s political rights and the suffrage movement. In A Room of One’s Own, a long essay written in 1929, Woolf focuses on women’s absence from history and their exclusion from public life. Even if women have won the vote, Woolf contends, they are still victims of exclusionary politics, as the ideology of exclusion is associated with control mechanisms like the family and the educational system. Woolf’s analysis of female exclusion, Kitsi-Mitakou argues, anticipates the theories of the French philosopher Louis Althusser, as expressed in his 1970s essay on “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, but her proposed plan that will supposedly establish women as active agents in history is utopic in that it fails to consider parameters like class and race which intersect with gender. In Three Guineas, a long essay composed during the rise of fascism in Europe, Woolf is perceptive enough to highlight the importance of examining how multiple forms of oppression (religious, racial, sexual, etc.) interconnect. While Woolf’s feminist agenda, though, borrows from the women’s suffrage movement, she refuses to join them, arguing instead that male oppression and fascism (two terms which are conflated in the essay) can come to an end only if the women of her class (“the daughters of educated men”) are given access to education and the professions.
