![]() Women had only won an equal right to vote ten years before Woolf wrote Three Guineas. Only in 1928 did Britain grant universal suffrage to all adults over the age of 21. Women gained the right to vote only in 1918, and that was in a highly provisional fashion, open only to women over the age of thirty who had a university degree, were householders or married to householders. As Woolf notes in Three Guineas, the movement's progress was incredibly slow. Despite protests and reforms movements in response, the women’s suffrage movement did not get going in earnest until forty years later. Though it succeeded in doing so for men, it legally debarred women from voting by specifically limiting suffrage to men. ![]() Only a little more than a hundred years earlier, in 1832, Parliament passed the Great Reform Act, which was intended to renovate the electoral system and expand suffrage. The first thing to understand is the fragility and newness of women’s rights when Woolf wrote Three Guineas. Written in 1938, Three Guineas should be read in the context of women’s rights, the rise of fascism, and Woolf’s intellectual commitments at that time. ![]() (Wikimedia Commons) The British political movement became known informally as “the suffragettes.” ![]() Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), c. ![]()
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