ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Virginia Woolf, a feminist thinker. Using a novelist's technique of storytelling, Woolf describes the obstacles that have hampered the preparation of her lecture. Woolf contrasts the wealth and traditions of the long-established men's colleges at Oxbridge with the new and impoverished women's colleges by comparing her markedly different experience of dining at each. In 1910, Woolf worked for a brief period for the women's suffrage movement, most probably for a body called the People's Suffrage Federation. Attentive to the close connection between patriarchy and patriotism, Woolf links the politics of gender with the rise of fascism across Europe. In 'Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid', written as a battle rages above her home in East Sussex in 1940, Woolf sees women's absence as either directors or active combatants in World War II as an opportunity.
