Three Guineas

"In some ways, Three Guineas was the very late sequel to A Room of One’s Own , and it’s very well known as being Woolf’s great pacifist text. She started writing it in the late 1930s but didn’t publish it until 1938. It presents an uncompromising case for pacifism and feminism. It was well known when I read it in the ’80s and ’90s for being a proto-feminist pacifist text. Woolf is famous for the completely unconditional nature of her pacifism—she was writing it during the Spanish Civil War in ’36/’37. She lost her nephew in that war, and many on the left and in her circles were fighting to defend the Republic. So that wasn’t a popular move. She knew it wouldn’t be: I think she originally wanted to call Three Guineas something like How to be Unpopular . But the book is also well known for its great feminist cry, which is: “As a woman, I have no country…my country is the whole world”—her refusal to sign up to nationalism. “The telling of stories is a way in which we do affirm each other’s humanity” I reread it, after 2016, after the election of Trump and after Brexit , after a failure of a kind of liberalism that we all thought was pretty indestructible, although problematic, in other words at that moment when a lot of us on the left and in the centre got a real shock. And I saw that what she was also doing was providing a critique of what was already becoming liberal human rights in her time. Much of the book is an indictment of everyone’s complicity with making war, with the war machine, with capitalism, and with colonialism – whether it’s in education, or whether it’s in law. In some ways, she was saying that you’re not going to be able to have your lofty pacifism without realizing liberalism’s deep complicity with war, even when you espouse liberal values. What she’s indicting here particularly is the League of Nations and the kind of liberal internationalism that thought it could bring peace to the world. She said that failed because it failed to examine its complicity with patriarchy and in particular how patriarchy is complicit with the war machine, and with capitalism. When I read it again in 2016 I thought, ‘My goodness! This is not just feminist pacifism, although it’s great as that. It’s actually an indictment of some of the conceits we have when we think we’re doing the right thing.’ She doesn’t want to get rid of them. What she wants is to undermine a kind of self-satisfied conceit. She wants things to be better than they were. What she proposes is very interesting. She has a discourse—in the footnotes, of all places—on Antigone . She doesn’t come out and say that Antigone is the real poster girl for human rights. It’s Antigone who challenges the political law, the law of the father, and says she wants to bury her brother in the city. Antigone claims there is a law beyond the law of politics, an ethics of the family, an ethics by which we know we have to do good. And, of course, she ends up being sacrificed for doing that: her fate is to be buried alive. Woolf puts her Antigone in the footnotes—she’s buried her in this secret place. And she does that to talks about experimental human rights. She says that what Antigone was doing was responding to a specific and concrete violation. And that’s what she likes. She was saying that, actually, in terms of human rights, 19th century British feminism was there before, with these very specific struggles, arguing for the rights of women, for the rights of children, against sex laws, against poverty, and particularly against the rules as they pertained to women and property. And what she wants to do—and I think this is a lesson that a lot of human rights activists have learned recently—is to return human rights to concrete particulars in specific contexts and to be very wary of the kind of generalized human rights that assumes it can speak for all. What Woolf wants is to say that, in some way, human rights need to respond to the thing at a specific time, whether it’s an anti-Semitic boycott, or a brother not being buried properly. We don’t need a grand narrative. She could see that the League of Nations had failed in that moment, that inter-war liberalism had failed to hold the line. We are now in a position that feels very similar to the situation she was in. Yes. There’s a lot of talk about how she suffered from depression. But remember too that in the year she committed suicide, she was living on the south coast of England – close to the action. She knew that she and her husband, Leonard Woolf, who was Jewish, were on a Nazi list and she knew that a lot of people thought the Nazis would win and invade. She could see what would happen under those circumstances. Certainly, part of her depression was her thinking that the worst has happened and that she didn’t feel she had the resources not to go mad. I think the way that Virginia’s story is often told loses sight of the historical gravity and the political gravity of the situation she found herself in, in 1941."