Three Guineas, Fascism, and the Construction of Gender

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s essay Three Guineas is a comprehensive attempt to theorize the significance of gender for fascism. Woolf’s analysis of fascism focuses on the patriarchal relationship between men and women, and she argues that the unequal distribution of power between the genders is a key element for producing fascism. In Three Guineas fascism is not treated as some kind of extreme aberration but as the consequence of the patriarchal sex-gender system. Instead of turning towards those countries that were experiencing fascist rule in the 1930s, Woolf examines England, a democratic country, and shows that women are systematically excluded from all public positions of prestige and power, excluded from all positions that would enable them to have real political agency, making that country far from democratic for women. Woolf traces women’s lack of power and influence in the public affairs of England back to the nineteenth-century tradition of the separate spheres, which relegates women to the home and family. The relegation of women to the family, Woolf argues, not only causes women’s lack of power in the public affairs, but also their lack of power within the family.

War, the father of all things, is also our father. It has hammered us, chiseled us and hardened us into what we are. And always as long as the swirling wheel of life revolves within us, this war will be the axis around which it will swirl. It has reared us for battle and we shall remain fighters as long as we live.

(Ernst Junger)¹

Obviously there is for you some glory, some necessity, some satisfaction in fighting which we have never felt or enjoyed. Complete understanding could only be achieved by blood transfusion and memory transfusion — a miracle still beyond the reach of science.

(Virginia Woolf, TGs, pp. 6–7)