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The Women's College Feminist Reading Group

The Feminist Reading Group will have its first meeting on Thursday 5th August at 5.15pm, in the Senior Common Room. All are welcome to participate in the discussion and partake of refreshments. Reading the text nominated and eating the biscuits provided are encouraged, but not compulsory activities. Questions, suggestions, and specific biscuit requests to ormurphy@gmail.com.

For our first meeting we shall be discussing Virginia Woolf's 1938 essay, Three Guineas, available here:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91tg/index.html

In Three Guineas, intended as sequel to the better-known essay A Room of One's Own, Woolf 'develops an innovative and politically challenging analysis of the causes and effects of women's exclusion from British cultural, political, and economic life. ... The coming to power of Hitler in 1933, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9, the polarization of British society in an atmosphere of economic recession and massive unemployment, forced Woolf to consider the political implications of the patriarchal structure she had identified throughout both public and private institutions. Thus, in Three Guineas, her object is the identification of the social forces that have led to the growth of Fascism. Seeing these as inextricably linked to the institutions of patriarchal power, Woolf then goes on to advocate a form of radical political action in which women would form themselves into a society of 'Outsiders' in order to challenge the rise of Fascism and the drift towards war'.
-- Morag Shiach, Introduction to Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), xii-xiii.