Three Guineas

“Through that light we may guess everything she saw looked different—men and women, cars and churches. The moon even, scarred as it is in fact with forgotten craters, seemed to her a white sixpence, a chaste sixpence, an altar upon which she vowed never to side with the servile, the signers-on, since it was hers to do what she liked with—the sacred sixpence that she had earned with her own hands herself.” 

In this quote, Woolf describes the importance of a woman having her own financial means and the freedom to do with it as she pleases. Though the woman discussed in the quote has only one sixpence, the metaphor works in the same manner as the guineas Woolf uses to title her essay. Just as the guinea becomes a tool with which Woolf can evaluate the worthiness of any cause, the sixpence is the tool the woman can use to express her freedom. 

“In short, she need not acquiesce; she can criticize. At last she is in possession of an influence that is disinterested.” 

Woolf’s theory of disinterested influence is a common theme throughout the essay and one she returns to time and time again. The influence—typically expressed through financial means in Three Guineas—must be disassociated from the implications and conditions with which it is typically couched. The woman Woolf is describing should have the freedom to spend her money and her influence in a ‘disinterested’ manner, not having to kowtow to the conditions of the society around her. Until she can do that, the patriarchy will remain in place. 

“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.” 

This quote is a neat summation of the point Woolf is trying to make to the unnamed correspondent. The man who wrote to her wished for her help in preventing