Three Guineas

The “greatest testimony to the value of education” (25) shown by real-life examples, Woolf suggests, is that the women who fought so hard for their minor improvements actively wanted access to higher education. Women have always possessed the “desire for education” (25), and Woolf presents the life of Mary Astell as proof of this burning desire. Astell lived 250 years before Woolf was writing. Despite the barriers in her path, Astell “proposed to found a college for women” (26). She secured funding for the project from Princess Anne, but the Church intervened. Though this example establishes the value of education, Woolf notes, it also proves that education is “by no means a positive value” (26). Education, history suggests, is good for some and not for others. Though education should be used to prevent war, it is important to know what kind of education people are receiving and which kind of people are receiving it.

Colleges for women have existed “since about 1870” (26). Throughout the 19th century, women’s desire for education grew so strong that Cambridge opened a house and then expanded it further and further. But the funding for the project was not as available to women as it was to men. Funding was “collected from the purses of the poor, from the bodies of the young” (28), rather than from rich benefactors. Even after women graduated, they were not permitted to put letters (such as B.A.) after their name. Education, history teaches, was not equal for the sexes, and attempts to influence the young against war through this means, Woolf wryly suggests, are futile.

On the contrary, “education […] does not teach people to hate force, but to use it” (29). Bitter, educated men, anxious to maintain their status, denied women equality. Thus, the belief that education is a means to prevent war is fundamentally flawed. Even in 1937, Woolf notes, Cambridge women’s colleges are “not allowed to be members of the university” (29), and the number of students is “strictly limited” (30), although both sexes contribute to university funding. Women’s educational institutions are “unbelievably and shamefully poor” (30) compared to the men’s equivalents, evidenced by the letter on Woolf’s desk asking for money.

But why should Woolf help with the funding? University education does not necessarily educate a person against war. Women do not have the means to alter the institution in any meaningful way. 

In response to her reasoning, Woolf drafts a mock letter to the treasurer asking for education funding. In the letter, she sarcastically wonders whether the woman is foolish or ignorant for requesting such a large amount. The men’s university, in comparison, has received so many donations and government grants that it has stopped asking for money. How has the women’s college furthered the war effort or benefited capitalists? Woolf asks in her imaginary letter. Woolf advises the woman to “rebuild your college differently” if she is to expect donations (32).

Woolf’s suggestion is to double down on the “poverty and youth” of the women’s college (32). It should be fresh and open to new ideas, and it should “teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practiced by poor people” (33). Students should learn to better understand human nature, including “other people’s lives and minds” (33). Woolf ends her imaginary letter abruptly while espousing the benefits of such a drastic institutional change. Simply accepting donations from rich men will only replicate existing men’s colleges, which are not fit for the purposes of equality or preventing war. Woolf recommends not spending a single “guinea of earned money” on replicating old colleges, or on new colleges. It should be spent, instead, on materials to “burn the college to the ground” (34).

Woolf, however, sees the flaws in her own argument. Without education, women will not be able to get jobs. Without jobs, they can no longer exert their “disinterested influence” (35), and they become inescapably pro-war. Money should be given to the women’s college, then, but without conditions attached. Despite everything, Woolf admits:

[…] there is no blinking the fact that in the present state of things the most effective way in which we can help you through education to prevent war is to subscribe as generously as possible to the colleges for the daughters of educated men (35).

To expand upon this, Woolf quotes from the biography of one such educated daughter. The woman lives on an annual allowance, and her father or mother must accompany her “to any sort of entertainment” (36). Her life is monotonous, with marriage being the “great aim” (36), until, eventually, “the thought of marriage influenced what she said, what she thought, what she did” (36-37). Woolf asks whether this education—focused solely on marriage—was “consciously and unconsciously in favor of war” (37). The answer is that the woman used what little influence she possessed to prop up the institutions that provided her with everything, including her marriage. She flatters and cajoles men, and accepts their views, because this is how she finds a husband.

Similarly, women in 1914 enable the concept of war “heroism” and tended to the injured soldiers who returned from the front. Women’s education taught them to do so, as any means of escaping the menial, mundane home in which a woman was raised was preferable to “education of the private home” (37).

The only solution, Woolf concludes, is to rebuild the education system, “imperfect as it may be” (37). Money must be donated without institutional conditions on what should and should not be taught.