Virginia Woolf
The Death of the Moth and other essays
PROFESSIONS FOR WOMEN [1]
[1] A paper read to The Women’s Service League.
When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me
that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested
that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is
true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences
have I had? It is difficult to say. My profession is literature; and in that
profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any other, with the
exception of the stage—fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road
was cut many years ago—by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by
Jane Austen, by George Eliot—many famous women, and many more unknown and
forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my
steps. Thus, when I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my
way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not
broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse.
For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of
Shakespeare—if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models,
But to tell you my story—it is a simple one. You have only
got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had
only to move that pen from left to right—from ten o’clock to one. Then it
occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all—to slip a few
of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the
envelope into the red box at the corner. It was thus that I became a journalist;
and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month—a very
glorious day it was for me—by a letter from an editor containing a cheque for
one pound ten shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I deserve to
be called a professional woman, how little I know of the struggles and
difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that instead of spending that sum
upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher’s bills, I went
out and bought a cat—a beautiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon involved
me in bitter disputes with my neighbours.
What could be easier than to write articles and to buy
Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be about
something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And
while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review
books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a
woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous
poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my
paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time
and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and
happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by
the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was
intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish.
She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself
daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat
in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of
her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.
Above all—I need not say it—–she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her
chief beauty—her blushes, her great grace. In those days—the last of Queen
But to continue my story. The Angel
was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and
common object—a young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now
that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself.
Ah, but what is “herself”? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not
know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know
until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human
skill. That indeed is one of the reasons why I have come here out of respect
for you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a woman is,
who are in process Of providing us, by your failures and successes, with that
extremely important piece of information.
But to continue the story of my
professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review;
and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian
cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a
motor car. And it was thus that I became a novelist—for it is a very strange
thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It
is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as
telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels.
And yet, if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional
experiences as a novelist, I must tell you about a very strange experience that
befell me as a novelist. And to understand it you must try first to imagine a
novelist’s state of mind. I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I
say that a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has
to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed
with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read
the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while
he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living—so
that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings
about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy
and illusive spirit, the imagination. I suspect that this state is the same
both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a
novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting
with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips
into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is
the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with
a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked
round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of
our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the
experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men.
The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It
had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish
slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and
confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl
was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and
difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something,
something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as
a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness
of—what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had
roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more.
The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be
a very common experience with women writers—they are impeded by the extreme
conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves
great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the
extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.
These then were two very genuine experiences of my own.
These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first—killing the
Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the
truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that
any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely
powerful—and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler
than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather
than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still
many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long
time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without
finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so
in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new
professions which you are now for the first time entering?
Those are the questions that I should like, had I time, to
ask you. And indeed, if I have laid stress upon these professional experiences
of mine, it is because I believe that they are, though in different forms,
yours also. Even when the path is nominally open—when there is nothing to
prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant—there are many
phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define
them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be
shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to
discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing
battle with these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for granted;
they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The whole position, as I see
it—here in this hall surrounded by women practising for the first time in
history I know not how many different professions—is one of extraordinary
interest and importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto
exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and
effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But
this freedom is only a beginning—the room is your own, but it is still bare. It
has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you
going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going
to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost
importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask
them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers
should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers—but
not to–night. My time is up; and I must cease.
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