Title: Introduction: Virginia Woolf at the Crossroads of Feminism, Fascism and Art
Abstract: A brief article in the Sunday London Times caught Virginia Woolf's eye on September 13, 1936. Its title, 'Praise for Women', captured the spirit of an address by Adolf Hitler to the Nazi Women's League celebrating the participation of German women in the triumph of Nazism. Since she was gathering materials to write an indictment of domestic fascism and patriarchy in Three Guineas, Woolf was especially interested in Hitler's assessment of women's willing collaboration in their own oppression, and quite aware of the insidious presence of a seductive ideology that played upon women's maternal and nurturing instincts in order to 'enslave' them. 'A woman lawyer', Woolf read from Hitler's speech, 'may be ever so efficient — but if there is a woman next door to her with five or six children all healthy and well brought up — then I say that from the standpoint of the nation's future the woman with children has accomplished more'. Woolf clipped the article to add it to a collection of news clippings and other documents which, by the time she was finished, would grow to fill three large scrapbooks, Woolf's personal contribution to the history of the 1930s and a 'triumph' as an example of one woman's resistance to tyranny.1 The significance of Woolf's scrapbooks, and, indeed, of a voluminous collection of reading notebooks, has yet to be fully plumbed; but their very existence helps to establish Woolf as a serious student of the history of the oppression of women with special emphasis upon the role that European fascism has played in that oppression.2
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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