Professions for Women
B.A First Semester
Professions for Women
Virginia Woolf
About the Author
Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the
most influential 20th- century modernist authors.
She helped to pioneer the use of ‘stream of consciousness’ narration as
a literary device.
She was
born 25 January 1882
in South Kensington, London, into an affluent and intellectual
family. Her father Sir Leslie
Stephen was
a
writer and historian while her mother was a noted
philanthropist.
Woolf rose to prominence during the interwar period with novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), as well as the feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929). She was also a founding member of the influential Bloomsbury Group.
About the Essay
"Professions for Women" is
a significant feminist text that continues to inspire women to challenge
traditional gender roles and pursue their professional goals. It provides a
framework for understanding the historical and ongoing struggles women face in achieving
equality in the workplace. In this essay Woolf critiques the traditional feminine ideal that suppressed women's
individuality and professional capabilities.
The essay was actually a speech delivered by Virginia Woolf in 1931 to a society for women's service. In
her speech Woolf encouraged women to overcome societal expectations,
symbolized by the "Angel in the House," to succeed in traditionally
male-dominated professions like writing. The speech addressed the internal
and external conflicts women faced, advocating for their freedom to pursue any
profession by challenging traditional roles and biases. Woolf uses the symbol of "Angel in the
House" to represent the idealized, domestic, and self-sacrificing
Victorian woman who inhibits women's professional ambitions. The speech
highlights the societal and internal barriers women encountered when entering
professional fields. To become a professional writer, Woolf stated she had
to reject societal norms and prejudices that sought to limit women's roles. Woolf
encouraged women to be free to pursue their desired professions and to do what
they wished, regardless of societal limitations.
Click Here for Patriotism Beyond Politics and Religion
Click Here for Cow of the Barricades
Professions For Women: Full Text
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, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters
and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is,
of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have
succeeded in the other professions.
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 Victoria--every
house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very
first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of
her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to
review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: ‘My
dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written
by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and
wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own.
Above all, be pure.’ And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one
act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs
to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money--shall
we say five hundred pounds a year?--so that it was not necessary for me to
depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the
throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court
of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would
have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I
found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without
having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth
about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the
Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must
charm, they must conciliate, they must – to put it bluntly – tell lies if they
are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of
her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard.
Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill
a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had
despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the
struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon
learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it
was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women
writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation
of a woman writer.
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?
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