2026-01-06
A Reading Note
In an effort to understand the then-present state of women in the workplace, Virginia Woolf goes looking to the newspapers, where she finds a number of letters and articles declaiming that women have too much liberty, that they are taking jobs that men could do, and that they are neglecting their domestic duties in the process. She finds an immediate parallel to those complaints in other events of the day:
There, in those quotations, is the egg of the very same work that we know under other names in other countries. There we have in embryo the creature, Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes that he has the right whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what…
2026-01-06
A Reading Note
In an effort to understand the then-present state of women in the workplace, Virginia Woolf goes looking to the newspapers, where she finds a number of letters and articles declaiming that women have too much liberty, that they are taking jobs that men could do, and that they are neglecting their domestic duties in the process. She finds an immediate parallel to those complaints in other events of the day:
There, in those quotations, is the egg of the very same work that we know under other names in other countries. There we have in embryo the creature, Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes that he has the right whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall do. Let us quote again: “Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon giving work to more men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.” Place it beside another quotation: “There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women. Nature has done well to entrust the man with the care of his family and the nation. The woman’s world is her family, her husband, her children, and her home.” One is written in English, the other German. But where is the difference? Are they not both saying the same thing? Are they not both the voices of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not all agreed that the dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as well as a very ugly animal? And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, but in the heart of England. Is it not from this egg, to quote Mr Wells again, that “the practical obliteration of [our] freedom by Fascists or Nazis” will spring?
The first quotation is from the Daily Telegraph; the second is Hitler.
(I would draw comparisons to the present moment, but they seem to draw themselves.)
Woolf later concludes:
It suggests that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.
That is, the tyranny of government is the tyranny of the workplace is the tyranny of the home. Each begets and creates the other. But perhaps that also suggests the reverse: pull the thread on one, and watch as they all come undone.
Related books
This pair of essays from Virginia Woolf attends to women’s exclusion from educational institutions and economic independence on two fronts.