luxe-pauvre:

“Virginia Woolf sounded the alarm in two landmark essays. The more famous A Room of One’s Own came out in 1929, based on a pair of talks in 1928, about the practical, financial, social, and psychological restrictions on women writing and, by implication, having a voice. But what kind of a voice could she have? Adrienne Rich wrote, half a century later, “I was astonished at the tone of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness in the tone of that essay. And I recognised that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious - as she always was - of being overheard by men.” Woolf’s “Professions for Women,” originally delivered as a speech to the National Society for Women in 1931, addresses the other kind of voice, not the convincing one Rich criticised (and women’s tone of voice is so often criticised), but the comforting one. She describes the internalised instructions to women to be pleasant, gracious, flattering, that can silence a real voice and real thoughts: a real self. She indicated that there are ways to speak that are silence’s white noise: the platitudes and reassurances, the politeness and denials that lubricate a system that perpetuates silence. You speak for others, not for yourself. Woolf talked about the voice within women that tells them, “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.” She called that voice the Angel in the House and boasted of murdering her, out of necessity so that she might have a voice. So that she might break the silence.”

— Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions

left-reminders: