In the work against war, Woolf notes that women—unlike many of their brothers—have four great but perhaps misunderstood teachers:

And those teachers, biography indicates, obliquely, and indirectly, but emphatically and indisputably none the less, were poverty, chastity, derision, and—but what word covers “lack of rights and privileges?” Shall we press that old word “freedom” once more into service? “Freedom from unreal loyalties,” then, was the fourth of their teachers; that freedom from loyalty to old schools, old colleges, old churches, old ceremonies, old countries which all these women enjoyed, and which, to a great extent, we still enjoy by the law and custom of England. We have no time to coin new words, greatly though the language is in need of them. Let “freedom from unreal loyalties” then stand as the fourth great teacher of the daughters of educated men.

Woolf, Three Guineas, page 267

These are strange teachers. We may be forgiven for not seeing them as such when they’ve visited us. Woolf continues:

By poverty is meant enough to live upon: That is, you must earn enough to be independent of any other human being and to buy that modicum of health, leisure, knowledge and so on that is needed for the full development of body and mind. But no more. Not a penny more.

By chastity is meant that when you have made enough to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money. That is you must cease to practice your profession, or practice it for the sake of research and experiment; or, if you are an artist, for the sake of the art; or give the knowledge acquired professionally to those who need it for nothing.

By derision—a bad word, but once again, the English language is much in need of new words—is meant that you must refuse all methods of advertising merit, and hold that ridicule, obscurity, and censure are preferable, for psychological reasons, to fame and praise. Directly badges, orders, or degrees are offered, fling them back in the giver’s face.

By freedom from unreal loyalties is meant that you must rid yourself of pride and nationality in the first place; also, of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride, and those unreal loyalties that spring from them. Directly the seducers come with their seductions to bribe you into captivity, tear up the parchments; refuse to fill up the forms.

Woolf, Three Guineas, page 270

Woolf is echoing what we already know of wealth, fame, and loyalty—namely, that they encourage possessiveness and defensiveness, that they drive us to the violent defense of prestige and power, and that on that road lies war. We see this possessiveness and defensiveness in the whingeing insecurity of the leaders declaiming DEI; in the boss who insists his workers flatter his every decision, however foolish and arbitrary; in the patriarch who demands obedience from his wife and children; in the man who beats his partner when she tries to leave. (The most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is always when she is trying to leave.) Woolf, again: “the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected…the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”¹ If we are to prevent war in our public worlds, then we must also root it out in the private.

And we must root it out among ourselves. For we are no more immune to the appeal of tyranny than anyone else:

And the facts which we have just extracted from biography seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement on their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war?

Woolf, Three Guineas, page 249

In naming these teachers, Woolf transforms a proscription into a refusal. The lack of wealth becomes the refusal of it; the lack of fame, of prestige, of authority becomes the rejection of all those ugly and pernicious forces. (The one benefit of living in an era in which we are bombarded with the lives of the super wealthy is we cannot even for one moment forget that they are deranged.) By claiming that lack as a refusal, we release ourselves from longing for that which we can never have; we end a ravenous hunger that could never be sated. For had we great rank and great wealth and all the rest, we would be as eager for war as the warmongers, as miserable and unhappy as the billionaires. Without, we can see war for the horror it is; we can use our time and attention to imagine other worlds, and other roads to get there.

I think these teachers go by other names—frugality, integrity, humility, and solidarity, to name a few. Like the best teachers, they ask a lot of us. Perhaps too much on some days; we may not always be able to hear them, especially through the din of the war drums and the noise of the platforms and the very real fear of precarity that screams ever so loudly in our ears. But I think perhaps that if we make an effort to listen, we will find that they still have much to teach us, that we still have much to learn.