‘Finding New Words and Creating New Methods’: Three Guineas and The Handmaid’s Tale

In 1935 Virginia Woolf wrote to the organizers of an anti-fascist exhibition in London seeking assurances that this would include a section about the position of women under the Nazi regime in Germany. But feminist ideas had fallen out of favor with many antifascist intellectuals in Britain during the 1930s. Naomi Mitchison observed in Left Review that the very women who had started before the war as good little bourgeois feminists, determined to beat, or at least equal, men at their own game, had ‘ceased to be militant feminists, ceased to regard men as enemies’ after the vote had been won and had sometimes come to think of ‘the economics of feminism as part of the general economics of possessor and possessed’. As Johanna Alberti has put it, the very real threat to the lives of European opponents of Fascism and their children meant that the specific threat of Fascism to women assumed secondary importance for many feminists. Those feminists who worked with refugees, or called attention to the victims of Nazism, were unequivocally opposing Fascism but could also be distracted from Fascism’s specific attack on women.