hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued by a whole pack of hounds. Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen,
.
2 210 6 / VIRGINIA WOOLF
novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women, chased my simple and single question?Why are women poor??until it became fifty questions; until the fifty questions leapt frantically into mid-stream and were carried away. Every page in my notebook was scribbled over with notes. To show the state of mind I was in, I will read you a few of them, explaining that the page was headed quite simply, WOME N AND POVERTY, in block letters; but what followed was something like this:
Condition in Middle Ages of, Habits in the Fiji Islands of, Worshipped as goddesses by, Weaker in moral sense than, Idealism of , Greater conscientiousness of, South Sea Islanders, age of puberty among, Attractiveness of, Offered as sacrifice to, Small size of brain of , Profounder sub-consciousness of, Less hair on the body of, Mental, moral and physical inferiority of, Love of children of , Greater length of life of , Weaker muscles of , Strength of affections of, Vanity of, Higher education of, Shakespeare's opinion of, Lord Birkenhead's opinion of, Dean Inge's opinion of , La Bruyere's opinion of, Dr Johnson's opinion of, Mr Oscar Browning's'J opinion of, . . .
Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why does Samuel Butler1 say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently. But, I continued, leaning back in my chair and looking at the vast dome in which I was a single but by now somewhat harassed thought, what is so unfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing about women. Here is Pope:
Most women have no character at all.2
And here is La Bruyere:
Les femmes sont extremes; elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes?3
9. Famous history lecturer (1837?1923) at King's (1645?1696) and of the English writer Samuel College, Cambridge. F. E. Smith, earl of Birken-Johnson (1609-1784) below. head (1872-1930), was lord chancellor (1919- 22) 1. English writer (1835-1902). and an opponent of women's suffrage. William 2. From 'Epistle to a Ladv,' by the English poet Ralph Inge (1860-1954) was dean of St. Paul's Alexander Pope (1688-1744). Cathedral in London (1911-34). Woolf quotes the 3. Women are extreme: they are better or worse opinions of the French moralist jean de La Bruyere than men (French).
.
A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN / 2107
a direct contradiction by keen observers who were contemporary. Are they capable of education or incapable? Napoleon thought them incapable. Dr Johnson thought the opposite.4 Have they souls or have they not souls? Some savages say they have none. Others, on the contrary, maintain that women are half divine and worship them on that account.5 Some sages hold that they are shallower in the brain; others that they are deeper in the consciousness. Goethe honoured them; Mussolini6 despises them. Wherever one looked men thought about women and thought differently. It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.
I could not possibly go home, I reflected, and add as a serious contribution to the study of women and fiction that women have less hair on their bodies than men, or that the age of puberty among the South Sea Islanders is nine? or is it ninety??even the handwriting had become in its distraction indecipherable. It was disgraceful to have nothing more weighty or respectable to show after a whole morning's work. And if I could not grasp the truth about
W. (as for brevity's sake I had come to call her) in the past, why bother about W. in the future? It seemed pure waste of time to consult all those gentlemen who specialise in woman and her effect on whatever it may be?politics, children, wages, morality?numerous and learned as they are. One might as well leave their books unopened. But while I pondered I had unconsciously, in my listlessness, in my desperation, been drawing a picture where I should, like my neighbour, have been writing a conclusion. I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X. engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. He was heavily built; he had a great jowl; to balance that he had very small eyes; he was very red in the face. His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained. Could it be his wife, I asked, looking at my picture. Was she in love with a cavalry officer? Was the cavalry officer slim and elegant and dressed in astrachan? Had he been laughed at, to adopt the Freudian theory, in his cradle by a pretty girl? For even in his cradle the professor, I thought, could not have been an attractive child. Whatever the reason, the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great book upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. Drawing pictures was an idle way of
4. ' 'Men know that women are an overmatch for renowned for his biography of Samuel Johnson. them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the 5. 'The ancient Germans believed that there was most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never something holy in women, and accordingly con- could be afraid of women knowing as much as sulted them as oracles.'?Frazer, Golden Bough themselves.' .. . In justice to the sex, I think it but [Woolf's note]. Sir James Frazer (1854-1941), candid to acknowledge that, in a subsequent con-Scottish anthropologist. versation, he told me that he was serious in what 6. Italian Fascist dictator (1883-1945). Johann he said.'?Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Wolfgang von Goethe (1749?1832), German poet, Hebrides [Woolf's note]. James Boswell (1740? novelist, and playwright. 1795), Scottish lawyer, diarist, and writer.
.
2 210 8 / VIRGINIA WOOLF
finishing an unprofitable morning's work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top. A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psychoanalysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom?all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had. It referred me unmistakably to the one book, to the one phrase, which had roused the demon; it was the professor's statement about the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women. My heart had leapt. My cheeks had burnt. I had flushed with anger. There was nothing specially remarkable, however foolish, in that. One does not like to be told that one is naturally the inferior of a little man?I looked at the student next me?who breathes hard, wears a ready-made tie, and has not shaved this fortnight. One has certain foolish vanities. It is only human nature, I reflected, and
