Feminist approaches

Abstract

The word ‘feminist’ was hardly old when Woolf called for its ceremonial burning in 1938. In its current meaning, it had travelled from France to Great Britain in 1894–95, when she was a girl (Caine 1997, xv; Offen 2000, 19; see also Black 1989, 19). She grew up with feminism, addressing envelopes for the People’s Suffrage Federation in 1910 (Black 1983, 183–4), arranging meetings and speakers for the Women’s Co-operative Guild for several years, and stating, in 1916, that she was becoming ‘steadily more feminist’ in response to the war, ‘this preposterous masculine fiction’ (L2 76). She knew and associated with many active feminists in groups such as the Women’s International League and the London and National Society for Women’s Service and was thus in the web of English and international feminist groups at the time (Black 1983; Harvey 1997; Goldman 1998; Snaith 2000). Even as she worried about the divisiveness caused by the term, she supported the Women’s Service Library (later the Fawcett Library and now The Women’s Library) with donations of money and books, and used its resources to support her feminist arguments in Three Guineas (Pawlowski 2002, 3–8; Snaith 2003). Her call for cremation indicates not only the vexed context for the word in the 1930s (Offen 2000, 373) and Woolf’s ambivalence about the organized political campaigns associated with it (Snaith 2000, 34), but also the persistent challenge of identifying oneself and one’s work as feminist.

What more fitting than to destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete? The word ‘feminist’ is the word indicated.

Three Guineas, 302