Three Guineas

by Virginia Woolf

  19. A great historian has thus described the origin and character of the universities, in one of which he was educated: ‘The schools of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in a dark age of false and barbarous science; and they are still tainted by the vices of their origin . . . The legal incorporation of these societies by the charters of popes and kings had given them a monopoly of public instruction; and the spirit of monopolists is narrow, lazy, and oppressive: their work is more costly and less productive than that of independent artists; and the new improvements so eagerly grasped by the competition of freedom, are admitted with slow and sullen reluctance in those proud corporations, above the fear of a rival, and below the confession of an error. We may scarcely hope that any reformation will be a voluntary act; and so deeply are they rooted in law and prejudice, that even the omnipotence of parliament would shrink from an inquiry into the state and abuses of the two universities.’ (Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings.) ‘The omnipotence of Parliament’ did however institute an inquiry in the middle of the nineteenth century ‘into the state of the University [of Oxford], its discipline, studies, and revenues. But there was so much passive resistance from the Colleges that the last item had to go by the board. It was ascertained however that out of 542 Fellowships in all the Colleges of Oxford only twenty-two were really open to competition without restrictive conditions of patronage, place or kin . . . The Commissioners . . . found that Gibbon’s indictment had been reasonable . . .’ (Herbert Warren of Magdalen, by Laurie Magnus, pp. 47-9.) Nevertheless the prestige of a university education remained high; and Fellowships were considered highly desirable. When Pusey became a Fellow of Oriel, ‘The bells of the parish church at Pusey expressed the satisfaction of his father and family.’ Again, when Newman was elected a Fellow, ‘all the bells of the three towers [were] set pealing — at Newman’s expense.’ (Oxford Apostles, by Geoffrey Faber, pp. 131, 69.) Yet both Pusey and Newman were men of a distinctly spiritual nature.

  20. The Crystal Cabinet, by Mary Butts, p. 138. The sentence in full runs: ‘For just as I was told that desire for learning in woman was against the will of God, so were many innocent freedoms, innocent delights, denied in the same Name’— a remark which makes it desirable that we should have a biography from the pen of an educated man’s daughter of the Deity in whose Name such atrocities have been committed. The influence of religion upon women’s education, one way or another, can scarcely be overestimated. ‘If, for example,’ says Thomas Gisborne, ‘the uses of music are explained, let not its effect in heightening devotion be overlooked. If drawing is the subject of remark, let the student be taught habitually to contemplate in the works of creation the power, the wisdom and the goodness of their Author.’ (The Duties of the Female Sex, by Thomas Gisborne, p. 85.) The fact that Mr Gisborne and his like — a numerous band — base their educational theories upon the teaching of St Paul would seem to hint that the female sex was to be ‘taught habitually to contemplate in the works of creation, the power and wisdom and the goodness,’ not so much of the Deity, but of Mr Gisborne. And from that we were led to conclude that a biography of the Deity would resolve itself into a Dictionary of Clerical Biography.

  21. Mary Astell, by Florence M. Smith. ‘Unfortunately, the opposition to so new an idea (a college for women) was greater than the interest in it, and came not only from the satirists of the day, who, like the wits of all ages, found the progressive woman a source of laughter and made Mary Astell the subject of stock jokes in comedies of the Femmes Savantes type, but from churchmen, who saw in the plan an attempt to bring back popery. The strongest opponent of the idea was a celebrated bishop, who, as Ballard asserts, prevented a prominent lady from subscribing £10,000 to the plan. Elizabeth Elstob gave to Ballard the name of this celebrated bishop in reply to an inquiry from him. “According to Elizabeth Elstob . . . it was Bishop Burnet that prevented that good design by dissuading that lady from encouraging it”.’ (op. cit., pp. 21- 2.) ‘That lady’ may have been Princess Ann, or Lady Elizabeth Hastings; but there seems reason to think that it was the Princess. That the Church swallowed the money is an assumption, but one perhaps justified by the history of the Church.

  22. Ode for Music, performed in the Senate House at Cambridge, 1 July 1769.

  23. ‘I assure you I am not an enemy of women. I am very favourable to their employment as LABOURERS or in other MENIAL capacity. I have, however, doubts as to the likelihood of their succeeding in business as capitalists. I am sure the nerves of most women would break down under the anxiety, and that most of them are utterly destitute of the disciplined reticence necessary to every sort of cooperation. Two thousand years hence you may have changed it all, but the present women will only flirt with men, and quarrel with one another.’ Extract from a letter from Walter Bagehot to Emily Davies, who had asked his help in founding Girton.

  24. Recollections and Reflections, by Sir J. J. Thomson, pp. 86-8, 296-7.

  25. ‘Cambridge University still refuses to admit women to the full rights of membership; it grants them only titular degrees and they have therefore no share in the government of the University.’ (Memorandum on the Position of English Women in Relation to that of English Men, by Philippa Strachey, 1935, p. 26.) Nevertheless, the Government makes a ‘liberal grant’ from public money to Cambridge University.

  26. ‘The total number of students at recognized institutions for the higher education of women who are receiving instruction in the University or working in the University laboratories or museums shall not at any time exceed five hundred.’ (The Student’s Handbook to Cambridge, 1934-5, p. 616.) Whitaker informs us that the number of male students who were in residence at Cambridge in October 1935 was 5,328. Nor would there appear to be any limitation.

  27. The men’s scholarship list at Cambridge printed in The Times of 20 December 1937, measures roughly thirty-one inches; the women’s scholarship list at Cambridge measures roughly five inches. There are, however, seventeen colleges for men and the list here measured includes only eleven. The thirty-one inches must therefore be increased. There are only two colleges for women; both are here measured.

  28. Until the death of Lady Stanley of Alderley, there was no chapel at Girton. ‘When it was proposed to build a chapel, she objected, on the ground that all the available funds should be spent on education. “So long as I live, there shall be no chapel at Girton,” I heard her say. The present chapel was built immediately after her death.’ (The Amberley Papers, Patricia and Bertrand Russell, vol. I, p. 17.) Would that her ghost had possessed the same influence as her body! But ghosts, it is said, have no cheque books.

  29. ‘I have also a feeling that girls’ schools have, on the whole, been content to take the general lines of their education from the older-established institutions for my own, the weaker sex. My own feeling is that the problem ought to be attacked by some original genius on quite different lines . . .’ (Things Ancient and Modem, by C. A. Alington, pp. 216-17.) It scarcely needs genius or originality to see that ‘the lines’, in the first place, must be cheaper. But it would be interesting to know what meaning we are to attach to the word ‘weaker’ in the context. For since Dr Alington is a former Head Master of Eton he must be aware that his sex has not only acquired but retained the vast revenues of that ancient foundation — a proof, one would have thought, not of sexual weakness but of sexual strength. That Eton is not ‘weak’, at least from the material point of view, is shown by the following quotation from Dr Alington: ‘Following out the suggestion of one of the Prime Minister’s Committees on Education, the Provost and Fellows in my time decided that all scholarships at Eton should be of a fixed value, capable of being liberally augmented in case of need. So liberal has been this augmentation that there are several boys in College whose parents pay nothing towards either their board or education.’ One of the benefactors was the late Lord Rosebery. ‘He was a generous benefactor to the school,’ Dr Alington informs us, ‘and endowed a history scholarship, in connection with which
a characteristic episode occurred. He asked me whether the endowment was adequate and I suggested that a further £200 would provide for the payment to the examiner. He sent a cheque for £2,000: his attention was called to the discrepancy, and I have in my scrap book the reply in which he said that he thought a good round sum would be better than a fraction.’ (op. cit., pp. 163, 186.) The entire sum spent at Cheltenham College for Girls in 1854 upon salaries and visiting teachers was £1,300; ‘and the accounts in December showed a deficit of £400.’ (Dorothea Beale of Cheltenham, by Elizabeth Raikes, p. 91.)

  30. The words ‘vain and vicious’ require qualification. No one would maintain that all lecturers and all lectures are ‘vain and vicious’; many subjects can only be taught with diagrams and personal demonstration. The words in the text refer only to the sons and daughters of educated men who lecture their brothers and sisters upon English literature; and for the reasons that it is an obsolete practice dating from the Middle Ages when books were scarce; that it owes its survival to pecuniary motives; or to curiosity; that the publication in book form is sufficient proof of the evil effect of an audience upon the lecturer intellectually; and that psychologically eminence upon a platform encourages vanity and the desire to impose authority. Further, the reduction of English literature to an examination subject must be viewed with suspicion by all who have firsthand knowledge of the difficulty of the art, and therefore of the very superficial value of an examiner’s approval or disapproval; and with profound regret by all who wish to keep one art at least out of the hands of middlemen and free, as long as may be, from all association with competition and money making. Again, the violence with which one school of literature is now opposed to another, the rapidity with which one school of taste succeeds another, may not unreasonably be traced to the power which a mature mind lecturing immature minds has to infect them with strong, if passing, opinions, and to tinge those opinions with personal bias. Nor can it be maintained that the standard of critical or of creative writing has been raised. A lamentable proof of the mental docility to which the young are reduced by lecturers is that the demand for lectures upon English literature steadily increases (as every writer can bear witness) and from the very class which should have learnt to read at home — the educated. If, as is sometimes urged in excuse, what is desired by college literary societies is not knowledge of literature but acquaintance with writers, there are cocktails, and there is sherry; both better unmixed with Proust. None of this applies of course to those whose homes are deficient in books. If the working class finds it easier to assimilate English literature by word of mouth they have a perfect right to ask the educated class to help them thus. But for the sons and daughters of that class after the age of eighteen to continue to sip English literature through a straw, is a habit that seems to deserve the terms vain and vicious; which terms can justly be applied with greater force to those who pander to them.

  31. It is difficult to procure exact figures of the sums allowed the daughters of educated men before marriage. Sophia Jex-Blake had an allowance of from £30 to £40 annually; her father was an upper-middle-class man. Lady Lascelles, whose father was an Earl, had, it seems, an allowance of about £100 in 1860; Mr Barrett, a rich merchant, allowed his daughter Elizabeth ‘from forty to forty- five pounds . . . every three months, the income tax being first deducted’. But this seems to have been the interest upon £8,000, ‘or more or less . . . it is difficult to ask about it,’ which she had ‘in the funds’, ‘the money being in two different per cents’, and apparently, though belonging to Elizabeth, under Mr Barrett’s control. But these were unmarried women. Married women were not allowed to own property until the passing of the Married Woman’s Property Act in 1870. Lady St Helier records that since her marriage settlements had been drawn up in conformity with the old law, ‘What money I had was settled on my husband, and no part of it was reserved for my private use . . . I did not even possess a cheque book, nor was I able to get any money except by asking my husband. He was kind and generous but he acquiesced in the position then existing that a woman’s property belonged to her husband . . . he paid all my bills, he kept my bank book, and gave me a small allowance for my personal expenses.’ (Memories of Fifty Years, by Lady St Helier, p. 341.) But she does not say what the exact sum was. The sums allowed to the sons of educated men were considerably larger. An allowance of £200 was considered to be only just sufficient for an undergraduate at Balliol, ‘which still had traditions of frugality’, about 1880. On that allowance ‘they could not hunt and they could not gamble . . . But with care, and with a home to fall back on in the vacations, they could make this do.’ (Anthony Hope and His Books, by Sir C. Mallet, p. 38.) The sum that is now needed is considerably more. Gino Watkins ‘never spent more than the £400 yearly allowance with which he paid all his college and vacation bills’. (Gino Watkins, by J. M. Scott, p. 59.) This was at Cambridge, a few years ago.

  32. How incessantly women were ridiculed throughout the nineteenth century for attempting to enter their solitary profession, novel readers know, for those efforts provide half the stock-in-trade of fiction. But biography shows how natural it was, even in the present century, for the most enlightened of men to conceive of all women as spinsters, all desiring marriage. Thus: ‘“Oh dear, what is to happen to them?” he [G. L. Dickinson] once murmured sadly as a stream of aspiring but uninspiring spinsters flowed round the front court of King’s; “I don’t know and they don’t know.” And then in still lower tones as if his bookshelves might overhear him, “Oh dear! What they want is a husband!’” (Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by E. M. Forster, p. 106.) ‘What they wanted’ might have been the Bar, the Stock Exchange or rooms in Gibbs’s Buildings, had the choice been open to them. But it was not; and therefore Mr Dickinson’s remark was a very natural one.

  33. ‘Now and then, at least in the larger houses, there would be a set party, selected and invited long beforehand, and over these always one idol dominated — the pheasant. Shooting had to be used as a lure. At such times the father of the family was apt to assert himself. If his house was to be filled to bursting, his wines drunk in quantities, and his best shooting provided, then for that shooting he would have the best guns possible. What despair for the mother of daughters to be told that the one guest whom of all others she secretly desired to invite was a bad shot and totally inadmissible!’ (‘Society and the Season,’ by Mary, Countess of Lovelace, in Fifty Years, 1882-1932, p. 29.)

  34. Some idea of what men hoped that their wives might say and do, at least in the nineteenth century, may be gathered from the following hints in a letter ‘addressed to a young lady for whom he had a great regard a short time before her marriage’ by John Bowdler. ‘Above all, avoid everything which has the LEAST TENDENCY to indelicacy or indecorum. Few women have any IDEA how much men are disgusted at the slightest approach to these in any female, and especially in one to whom they are attached. By attending the nursery, or the sick bed, women are too apt to acquire a habit of conversing on such subjects in language which men of delicacy are shocked at.’ (Life of John Bowdler, p. 123.) But though delicacy was essential, it could, after marriage, be disguised. ‘In the ‘seventies of last century, Miss Jex-Blake and her associates were vigorously fighting the battle for admission of women to the medical profession, and the doctors were still more vigorously resisting their entry, alleging that it must be improper and demoralizing for a woman to have to study and deal with delicate and intimate medical questions. At that time Ernest Hart, the Editor of the British Medical Journal, told me that the majority of the contributions sent to him for publication in the Journal dealing with delicate and intimate medical questions were in the handwriting of the doctors’ wives, to whom they had obviously been dictated. There were no typewriters or stenographers available in those days.’ (The Doctor’s Second Thoughts, by Sir J. Crichton- Browne, pp. 73, 74.)

  The duplicity of delicacy was observed long before this, however. Thus Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees (1714) says: �
��. . . I would have it first consider’d that the Modesty of Woman is the result of Custom and Education, by which all unfashionable Denudations and filthy Expressions are render’d frightful and abominable to them, and that notwithstanding this, the most Virtuous Young Woman alive will often, in spite of her Teeth, have Thoughts and confus’d Ideas of Things arise in her Imagination, which she would not reveal to some People for a Thousand Worlds.’

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  Virginia Woolf

  Three Guineas

  Two

  Now that we have given one guinea towards rebuilding a college we must consider whether there is not more that we can do to help you to prevent war. And it is at once obvious, if what we have said about influence is true, that we must turn to the professions, because if we could persuade those who can earn their livings, and thus actually hold in their hands this new weapon, our only weapon, the weapon of independent opinion based upon independent income, to use that weapon against war, we should do more to help you than by appealing to those who must teach the young to earn their livings; or by lingering, however long, round the forbidden places and sacred gates of the universities where they are thus taught. This, therefore, is a more important question than the other.