[Vwoolf] ALL women?

[Stuart N. Clarke]

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One has to be careful even with AROO:

"All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, 
which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, 
for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.  It is 
she—shady and amorous as she was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to 
say to you to-night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits."

Up jumps (metaphorically) Jane Marcus, and SHOUTS:

What about the "Very Fine Negress"?  "Can we imagine the Negress kneeling in 
Westminster Abbey? Is she included in 'All women'?" ("A Very Fine Negress" 
in "Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race" (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers 
University Press, 2004), p. 38)

Oh, for Heaven's sake!  Never mind the Negress - what about all the 
working-class women who have worked and earned - and worked and not earned - 
with their wits or witless - for hundreds, or thousands, of years?

Virginia Woolf doesn't mean ALL women.  She means all of the sorts of women 
she is supposedly talking to "to-night" - all educated young women.

So beware!

Stuart


-----Original Message----- 
From: Jeremy Hawthorn via Vwoolf
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2022 9:56 AM
To: Palvasha von Hassell ; vwoolf at lists.osu.edu
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] Ignorance of privilege, Diana Swanson

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The thing that bothers me about Three Guineas is that when reference is made 
to the work today, its subject is often stated as it is below: "patriarchy 
and the subjugation of women . . .". But Woolf repeatedly states that her 
concern in the text is not with "women" in general, but with "the daughters 
of educated men." This I think represents very much a contraction of concern 
from that of A Room of One's Own. It is as if in the later work Woolf shares 
Forster's (admittedly partly ironic) view that the very poor (or even just 
the poor) are "unthinkable." This does not render the Woolf's case 
irrelevant, but it does reduce the ethical challenge of the book.

Jeremy H