Virginia Woolf, Money, and the Oldest Profession for Women

Title: Virginia Woolf, Money, and the Oldest Profession for Women

Speaker: Vara Neverow

Date: 28.12.2024

Dr. Neverow's talk will bring together various aspects of Woolf's sustained focus on prostitution throughout her work. Woolf consistently defends those who work in the "world's oldest profession for women" because those women have extremely limited alternatives to survive. However, in Three Guineas, Woolf takes a different angle when she attempts to dissuade middle-class and upper middle-class women, specifically those who work in conventional "licit" professions (paid positions won in the late 1910s in the UK). She warns these women about the risks involved in succumbing to the same corrupt ambitions men manifest in those professions.

Woolf instead advocates for these women to practice "poverty, chastity, derision" and last-but not least!- "freedom from unreal loyalties. " Woolf addresses these legitimately employed women directly stating that: "[you] must rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride, and those unreal loyalties that spring from them. Directly the seducers come with their seductions to bribe you into captivity, tear up the parchments; refuse to fill up the forms. "

The issues relating to prostitution that Woolf explores are very complex but are important structural aspects in Woolf's own ethos. The area of study certainly deserves more attention.