Professions for Women
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) When your cretary 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 that 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 pur. 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 mistress, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of cour, 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 yourlves 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 tho 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 check for one pound ten shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I derve 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 neighbors.
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 em 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 Hou. It was she who ud to come between me an my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothere
d me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come off a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her--you may not know what I mean by The Angel in the Hou. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intenly sympathetic. She was immenly charming. She was utterly unlfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herlf daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft 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 suppod to be her chief beauty--her blushes, her great grace. In tho days--the last of Queen Victoria--every hou 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; u all the art and wiles of our x. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of our 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 mylf, 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 c
harm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excu, If I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in lf-defen. 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, x. And all the questions, according to the Angel of the Hou, 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 dispatched her. Though I flatter mylf that I killed her in the end, the struggle was vere; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in arch of adventures. But it was a real experience; It was an experience that was bound befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the Hou 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 remaine
d was a simple and common object--a young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herlf of falhood, that young woman had only to be herlf. Ah, but what is “herlf”? 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 expresd herlf 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 succeeded, 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 motorcar. And it was thus that I became a novelist--for it is a very strange thing that people will give you a motorcar 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 cretary 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 crets if I say that a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious
as possible. He has to induce in himlf a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to e 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 yourlves 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 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 itlf against something hard. The girl was roud 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 roud her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trace 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 x. For though men nsibly allow themlves great freedom in the respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme verity with which they condemn such freedom in women.
The then were two very genuine experiences of my own. The were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first--killing the Angel in the Hou--I think I solved. She died. But the cond, 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 immenly 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 ca is very different;
she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I th
ink, 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?
Tho are the questions that I should like, had I time, to ask you. And indeed, if I have laid stress upon the professional experiences of mine, it is becau I believe that they are, though in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally open--when there is nothing to revert a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil rvant--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 labor 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 the formidable obstacles. Tho aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The whole position, as I e it--here in this hall surrounded by women practicing 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 hou hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labor 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? The, 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 yourlf what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss tho questions and answers--but not tonight. My time is up; and I must cea.
女性职业
——弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫你们的秘书告诉我，贵协会所关注的是妇女的就业情况。她邀请我来此并建议我谈谈自己的职业经验。我是名女性，这是事实；我工作，这也是肯定的；但是要谈谈我的职业经验？
