What Virginia Woolf said about Putin

Writing nearly 100 years ago, she nailed it.

I’ve started reading Virginia Woolf’s 1928 feminist essay A Room of My Own many times. Started, and stopped. Only this week, because I’m writing about women and power, I decided it was time to read some of the classic feminist literature I have avoided like the plague.

A Room of My Own is not just about having a room to write in and enough money to be able to focus on creative work. (That, I always thought, was dead obvious, albeit difficult even today.) It is about power, and thus relevant to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as to racism and other social ills that plague us.

It’s well worth reading the entire essay, published as a short book, and also available at Gutenberg Australia, but here are a few passages that I marked up. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

It seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power? Rich people, for example, are often angry because they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth. The professors, or patriarchs, as it might be more accurate to call them, might be angry for that reason partly, but partly for one that lies a little less obviously on the surface. Possibly they were not 'angry' at all; often, indeed, they were admiring, devoted, exemplary in the relations of private life. Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one self. By feeling that one has some innate superiority--it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney--for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination--over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power.

A page or two later came an image I knew, about women reflecting men at twice their size, but the full passage is more interesting:

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and bartering flints for sheep skins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge.

She writes about money, of course, and motherhood, and, one might argue, about the importance of reproductive rights:

Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children--no human being could stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one. People say, too, that human nature takes its shape in the years between one and five. If Mrs Seton, I said, had been making money, what sort of memories would you have had of games and quarrels? What would you have known of Scotland, and its fine air and cakes and all the rest of it?

Finally, a passage that I savored as I thought about all the editorial meetings in which we have talked about needing more women in our books about world history and leadership:

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.

The footnote to that passage is worth recording here:

“It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena's city, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression as odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like Clytemnestra and Cassandra Atossa and Antigone, Phedre and Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the ‘misogynist’ Euripides. But the paradox of this world where in real life a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man, has never been satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same predominance exists. At all events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare's work (similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine; six of his tragedies bear their heroines' names; and what male characters of his shall we set against Hermione and Andromaque, Berenice and Roxane, Phedre and Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we match with Solveig and Nora, Heda and Hilda Wangel and Rebecca West?”--F. L. Lucas, Tragedy, pp. 114-15.]

Incidentally, A Room of One’s Own is a version of a 1928 lecture on women and fiction that Woolf addressed to a group of young women students facing a world very different from ours. She urges them at several points to undertake research on issues that she was puzzling over. It would be fun to see whether in the intervening century anyone has tackled them.

I know that we’re still puzzling over issues of women and leadership, in a new edition of Berkshire’s Women and Leadership, which is being typeset. I enjoyed coauthoring a new chapter on the impact of #MeToo, in part because it meant conversations with two colleagues in the UK who are well-known leadership scholars.

It’s summer in the Berkshires, which means Tanglewood concerts (James Taylor is back for the 4th of July) and lots of theater, open-water swimming, and evenings by my tiny pond, where last year’s tadpoles are emerging as frogs the size of my smallest fingernail.

Here’s hoping the 4th of July reminds us in the United States of the ideals upon which this country was founded, a topic that’s come up rather often in the January 6th Committee hearings. Happy Independence Day and Slava Ukraini!