ABSTRACT
In an earlier essay, A Room of One's Own, Woolf said women are poor (Woolf 1929). In that essay she proceeded to draft a sophisticated materialist analysis of women's poverty. In Three Guineas, she extended that analysis to link women's pover· ty and consequent oppression to the same social forces that lead inevitably to war (Woolf 1938). She demonstrated that a patriarchal world, a world in which some are owners of the means of production and others are subordinated to or displaced from the system of production, is a world necessarily committed to war. In both essays, the issue is one of power. Women are powerless because women are poor, she argues. In 1938 women had been admitted to the professions for only about twenty years. Those who did occupy places in the professions found themselves bunched at the lower ends. Relative to their brothers, women were poorly paid. Professional women were so poor, Woolf noted, that they had to sell used clothing, books, and household articles at bazaars to help educated men's daughters to enter the professions.
