Essays virginia woolf vo.., p.16
Essays Virginia Woolf, Volume 6, page 16
‘Take the doctor’s profession next. “I have taken a good deal over £13,000 during the year, but this cannot possibly be maintained, and while it lasts it is slavery. What I feel most is being away from Eliza and the children so frequently on Sundays, and again at Christmas.”fn28 That is the complaint of a great doctor; and his patient might well echo it, for what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?
‘But is the life of a professional writer any better? Here is a sample taken from the life of a highly successful journalist: “On another day at this time he wrote a 1600-word article on Nietzsche, a leader of equal length on the Railway Strike for the Standard, 600 words for the Tribune, and in the evening was at Shoe Lane.”fn29 That explains, among other things, why the public reads its politics with cynicism, and authors read their reviews with foot rules – it is the advertisement that counts; praise or blame has ceased to have any meaning.
‘These quotations prove nothing that can be checked and verified; they merely cause us to hold opinions. And those opinions cause us to doubt and criticise and question the value of professional life: not its cash value, – that is great, – but its spiritual, its moral, its intellectual value. They make us believe that if people are highly successful in their professions they lose their sight, their sense of proportion; they are prisoners in a cave, blind, crippled; they become so set on moneymaking, honour-getting, that they become competitive, possessive, jealous, combative, and thus, so far as our psychological knowledge is to be trusted, likely to be in favour of war.
‘We, daughters of educated men, are between the devil and the deep sea. Behind us lies the patriarchal system, the private house, with its nullity, its immorality, its hypocrisy, its servility. Before us lies the public world, the professional system, with its possessiveness, its jealousy, its pugnacity, its greed. The one shuts us up like slaves in a harem; the other forces us to circle, like caterpillars head to tail, round and round the mulberry tree,fn30 the sacred tree, of property. It is a choice of evils.
‘But another answer may be staring us in the face on the shelves of your own library, once more in the biographies. This time let us turn to the lives, not of men, but of women in the nineteenth century – to the lives of professional women. But there would seem to be a gap in your library, Madam. There are no lives of professional women in the nineteenth century.
‘When Mary Kingsley says, “Being allowed to learn German was all the paid-for education I ever had,”fn31 she suggests that she had an unpaid-for education. What, then, was the nature of that “unpaid-for education” which, whether for good or for evil, has been ours for so many centuries? If we mass the lives of the obscure together behind four lives that were not obscure, but were so successful and distinguished that they were actually written, – the lives of Florence Nightingale, Miss Clough, Mary Kingsley, and Gertrude Bell,fn32 – it seems undeniable that they were all educated by the same teachers. And those teachers, biography indicates, obliquely and indirectly, but emphatically and indisputably none the less, were poverty, chastity, derision, and – but what word covers “lack of rights and privileges”? Shall we press the old word “freedom” once more into service? “Freedom from unreal loyalties,” then, was the fourth of their teachers – that freedom from loyalty to old schools, old colleges, old churches, old countries, which all those women enjoyed, and which to a great extent we still enjoy.
‘Which of the two educations, which of the two professions, the paid or the unpaid, is the better, we have not time now to consider. Thus biography, when asked the question we have put to it, – how can we enter the professions and yet remain civilised human beings, human beings who discourage war? – seems to reply: If you refuse to be separated from the four great teachers of the daughters of educated men, – poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties, – but combine them with some wealth, some knowledge, and some service to real loyalties, then you can enter the professions and escape the risks that make them undesirable.
‘Such being the answer of the oracle, such are the conditions attached to this guinea. You shall have it, to recapitulate, on condition that you help all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class, or colour, to enter your profession; and further on condition that in the practice of your profession you refuse to be separated from poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties.
‘By poverty is meant enough money to live on. That is, you must earn enough to be independent of any other human being and to buy that modicum of health, leisure, knowledge, and so on that is needed for the full development of body and mind. But no more. Not a penny more.
‘By chastity is meant that when you have made enough to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money. That is, you must cease to practise your profession; or practise it for the sake of research and experiment; or, if you are an artist, for the sake of the art; or give the knowledge acquired professionally to those who need it for nothing. But directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.
‘By derision – a bad word, but, as has been already remarked, the English language is much in need of new wordsfn33 – is meant that you must refuse all methods of advertising your merit, and hold that ridicule, obscurity, and censure are preferable, for psychological reasons, to fame and praise. Directly badges, orders, or degrees are offered you, fling them back in the giver’s face.
‘By freedom from unreal loyalties is meant that you must do all you can to rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride, and those unreal loyalties that spring from them. Directly the seducers come with their seductions to bribe you into captivity, tear up the parchments, and refuse to fill up the forms.
‘For if you agree to these terms, then you can join the professions and yet remain uncontaminated by them; you can rid them of their possessiveness, their jealousy, their pugnacity, their greed. You can use them to have a mind and a will of your own. And you can use that mind and will to abolish the inhumanity, the beastliness, the horror, the folly of war. Take this guinea, then, and use it, not to burn the house down, but to make its windows blaze. And let the daughters of uneducated women dance round the new house, the poor house, the house that stands in a narrow street where omnibuses pass and the street hawkers cry their wares, and the voices of ships come in from the river, and let them sing, “We have done with war! We have done with tyranny!” And their mothers will laugh from their graves, “It was for this that we suffered obloquy and contempt! Light up the windows of the new house, daughters! Let them blaze!”
‘Those, then, are the terms upon which I give you this guinea with which to help the daughters of uneducated women to enter the professions. It is a penny candle, no more, but may it help to set light to those photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses and ensure that no other generation shall be forced to see what we have seen.’
Such, Sir, was the letter finally sent to the Honorary Treasurer of the society for helping the daughters of educated men to enter the professions. Those are the conditions upon which she is to have her guinea. They have been framed, so far as possible, to ensure that she shall do all that is in her power to help you to prevent war. As you will see, it was necessary to answer her letter and the letter from the Honorary Treasurer of the college rebuilding fund and to send them both guineas before answering your letter, because unless they are helped, first to educate the daughters of educated men, and then to earn their livings in the professions, those daughters cannot possess an independent and disinterested influence with which to help you prevent war. The causes, it seems, are connected.
Women Must Weep – Or Unite against Warfn34
I
In the remarkable letter in which you, as an educated man, ask the daughters of educated men for an opinion as to how to prevent war, you suggest certain practical measures by which we can help you to prevent war. These are, it appears, that we should sign a manifesto pledging ourselves to ‘protect culture and intellectual liberty,’fn35 and that we should join a certain society, devoted to certain measures whose aim, needless to say, is to preserve peace – which society, like the other societies, is, needless to say, in need of funds.
We have given, so far as we are able, an opinion as to how, by the use of our influence upon education, upon the professions, we can help you to prevent war. Now we must consider how we can help you to prevent war by protecting culture and intellectual liberty, since you assure us that there is a connection between those rather abstract words and these very positive photographs from Spain – the photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses.
But if it was surprising to be asked for an opinion on how to prevent war, it is still more surprising to be asked to help you to protect culture and intellectual liberty. For have not the daughters of educated men paid into their brothers’ education fund from the year 1262 to the year 1870fn36 all the money that was to educate themselves, barring such miserable sums as went to pay the governess, the German teacher, and the dancing master? Yet here comes your letter informing them that the whole of that vast, that fabulous sum – for, whether counted in cash or in things done without, the sum that lies behind their brothers’ education fund is vast – has been wasted or wrongly applied. If the schools and universities, with their great wealth and elaborate machinery for mind training and body training, have failed, what reason is there to think that your society, sponsored though it is by distinguished names, is going to succeed, or that your manifesto, signed though it is by still more distinguished names, is going to convert?
To ask the daughters of educated men who have to earn their livings by reading and writing to sign your manifesto would be of no value to the cause of disinterested culture and intellectual liberty, because, directly they had signed it, they would have to be at the desk writing those books, lectures, and articles by which culture is prostituted and intellectual liberty is sold into slavery.
Thus, Sir, it becomes clear that we must make our appeal only to those daughters of educated men who have enough money to live upon. But what, such a woman may well ask, is meant by this gentleman’s ‘disinterested’ culture, and how am I to protect that and intellectual liberty in practice?
Let us refer her to the tradition which has long been honoured in the private house – the tradition of chastity. ‘We are asking you, Madam, to pledge yourself not to commit adultery of the brain, because it is a much more serious offence than the other.’
‘Adultery of the brain,’ she may reply, ‘means writing what I do not want to write for the sake of money. Therefore you ask me to refuse all publishers, editors, lecture agents, and so on, who bribe me to write or to speak what I do not want to write or speak for the sake of money?’
‘That is so, Madam; and we further ask that if you should receive proposals for such sales you will resent them and expose them as you would resent or expose such proposals for selling your body, both for your own sake and for the sake of others. But we would have you observe that the verb “to adulterate” means, according to the dictionary, “to falsify by admixture of baser ingredients.”fn37 Advertisement and publicity are also adulterers. Thus, culture mixed with personal charm and culture mixed with advertisement and publicity are also adulterated forms of culture. We must ask you to abjure them; not to appear on public platforms; not to allow your private face to be published, or details of your private life;fn38 not to avail yourself, in short, of any of the forms of brain prostitution which are so insidiously suggested by the pimps and panders of the brain-selling trade. And medals, honours, degrees – all the baubles and labels by which brain merit is advertised and certified – we must ask you to refuse them absolutely, since they are all tokens that culture has been prostituted and intellectual liberty sold into captivity.
‘The private printing press is an actual fact, and not beyond the reach of a moderate income. Typewriters and duplicators are actual facts and even cheaper.fn39 By using these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments you can at once rid yourself of the pressure of boards, policies, and editors. They will speak your own mind, in your own words, at your own time, at your own length, at your own bidding. And that, we are agreed, is our definition of “intellectual liberty.”’
‘But,’ she may say, ‘the public? How can that be reached without putting my own mind through the mincing machine and turning it into sausage?’fn40
‘The public, Madam,’ we may assure her, ‘is very like ourselves; it lives in rooms; it walks in streets, and is said, moreover, to be tired of sausage. Fling leaflets down basements; expose them on stalls; trundle them along streets on barrows to be sold for a penny or given away. Find out new ways of approaching the public; single it into separate people instead of massing it into one monster, gross in body, feeble in mind. And then reflect – since you have enough to live on; you have a room, not necessarily “cosy” or “handsome,” but still silent, private; a room where, safe from publicity and its poison, you could, even asking a reasonable fee for the service, speak the truth to artists, to writers, about pictures, music, books, without fear of affecting their sales, which are exiguous, or wounding their vanity, which is notorious. Are not the best critics people, and is not spoken criticism the only criticism worth having?
‘Those, then, are some of the active ways in which you, as a writer of your own tongue, can put your opinion into practice. But if you are passive, – a reader, not a writer, – then you must adopt not active but passive methods of protecting culture and intellectual liberty.’
‘And what may they be?’ she will ask.
‘To abstain, obviously. Not to subscribe to papers that encourage intellectual slavery; not to attend lectures that prostitute culture; for we are agreed that to write at the command of another what you do not want to write is to be enslaved, and to mix culture with personal charm or advertisement is to prostitute culture. By these active and passive measures you would do all in your power to break the ring, the vicious circle, the dance round and round the mulberry tree – the poison tree of intellectual harlotry.
‘The ring once broken, the captive would be freed. For who can doubt that, once writers had the chance of writing what they enjoy writing, they would find it so much more pleasurable that they would refuse to write on any other terms; and who can doubt that readers, once they had the chance of reading what writers enjoy writing, would find it so much more nourishing than what is written for money that they would refuse to be palmed off with the stale substitute any longer?’
II
Now, Sir, let us consider your final and inevitable request: that we should subscribe to the funds of your society. With your letter before us, we have your assurance that you are fighting with us, not against us. That fact is so inspiring that a celebration seems called for. What could be more fitting, now that we can bury the old word ‘feminist,’ than to write more dead words, corrupt words, obsolete words upon sheets of paper and burn them – the words ‘tyrant,’ ‘dictator,’ for example? Alas, those words are not yet obsolete. We can still see traces of dictatorship revealed in newspapers, still smell a peculiar and unmistakable odour of masculine tyranny in the region of Whitehallfn41 and Westminster.
And abroad the Monster has come more openly to the surface. There is no mistaking him there. He has widened his scope. He is interfering now with your liberty; he is dictating how you shall live; he is making distinctions, not merely between the sexes, but between the races. You are feeling in your own persons what your mothers felt when they were shut out, when they were shut up, because they were women. Now you are being shut out, you are being shut up, because you are Jews, because you are democrats, because of race, because of religion.
It is not a photograph that you look upon any longer; there you go, traipsing along in the procession yourselves. And that makes a difference. The whole iniquity of dictatorship, whether in Oxford or Cambridge, in Whitehall or Downing Street, against Jews or against women, in England or in Germany, in Italy or in Spain, is now apparent to you. But now we are fighting together. That fact is so inspiring, even if no celebration is yet possible, that if this guinea you have requested could be multiplied a million times all those guineas should be at your service without any other conditions than those that you have imposed upon yourself. Take this one guinea, then, and use it to assert ‘the rights of all – all men and women – to the respect in their persons of the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty.’
Only one further request of yours remains to be considered – it is that we should fill up a form and become members of your society. What can be simpler than to fill up a form and join the society to which this guinea has just been contributed? On the face of it, how easy, how simple; but in the depths, how difficult, how complicated….
Society is far less satisfactory to us women, who have enjoyed, compared with you, so few of its goods, so many of its evils. Inevitably, therefore, we look upon society as an ill-fitting form which distorts the truth, deforms the mind, fetters the will. Inevitably we look upon societies as conspiracies and conglomerations which sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon ruling the floor of the earth with chalk marks,fn42 going through mystic rites and enjoying the dubious pleasures of power and dominion, while we, ‘his women,’ are firmly locked in the private house within.
