This autumn, we mark the centenary of two political milestones in the fight for gender equality with readings of two of Virginia Woolf’s seminal works: A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.

Both (abridged) texts movingly and powerfully articulate Woman’s right to intellectual freedom and financial independence. They argue for the urgent need to remove ingrained constraints on female creativity, as imagined through the plight of Shakespeare’s sister: a woman ‘as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school’.

100 years on from both the day Nancy Astor became the first female Member of Parliament to take her seat at Westminster, and the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, which outlawed discrimination on the grounds of gender or marriage in appointments to public functions, we will reflect, with these texts, on how far we have come, while also acknowledging the importance of pushing the conversation ever forward.

‘As a woman, I have no country.
As a woman I want no country.
As a woman, my country is the
whole world.’

— Three Guineas

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