Virginia Woolf: 'But this freedom is only a beginning--the room is your own, but it is still bare', Professions for Women, National Society for Women's Service - 1931

21 January 1931, London, United Kingdom

When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say. My profession is literature; and in that profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any other, with the exception of the stage--fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road was cut many years ago--by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot--many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare--if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.

But to tell you my story--it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right--from ten o'clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all--to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner. It was thus that I became a journalist; and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month--a very glorious day it was for me--by a letter from an editor containing a cheque for one pound ten shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I deserve to be called a professional woman, how little I know of the struggles and difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher's bills, I went out and bought a cat--a beautiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon involved me in bitter disputes with my neighbours.

What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her--you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it--in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all--I need not say it---she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty--her blushes, her great grace. In those days--the last of Queen Victoria--every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered: "My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all, be pure." And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money--shall we say five hundred pounds a year?--so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must--to put it bluntly--tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

But to continue my story. The Angel was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and common object--a young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is "herself"? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. That indeed is one of the reasons why I have come here out of respect for you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a woman is, who are in process Of providing us, by your failures and successes, with that extremely important piece of information.

But to continue the story of my professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motor car. And it was thus that I became a novelist--for it is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels. And yet, if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional experiences as a novelist, I must tell you about a very strange experience that befell me as a novelist. And to understand it you must try first to imagine a novelist's state of mind. I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living--so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. I suspect that this state is the same both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience, the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl's fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of--what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist's state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trance was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers--they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.

These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first--killing the Angel in the House--I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful--and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?

Those are the questions that I should like, had I time, to ask you. And indeed, if I have laid stress upon these professional experiences of mine, it is because I believe that they are, though in different forms, yours also. Even when the path is nominally open--when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant--there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved. But besides this, it is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. Those aims cannot be taken for granted; they must be perpetually questioned and examined. The whole position, as I see it--here in this hall surrounded by women practising for the first time in history I know not how many different professions--is one of extraordinary interest and importance. You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning--the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms? These, I think are questions of the utmost importance and interest. For the first time in history you are able to ask them; for the first time you are able to decide for yourselves what the answers should be. Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers--but not to-night. My time is up; and I must cease.

Martin Flanagan: "I am a man of no faith. Or I am a man of all faiths", Multi faith Opening of Legal Year - 2017

30 January 2017, Government House, Melbourne, Australia

1.

When I am asked to speak to an audience, I always ask the question – who is the audience? To whom am I speaking?

Today’s gathering was described to me as “The Multi Faith Opening of the Legal Year”. That brings together two concepts – faith and law – that great minds have been pondering for thousands of years. I have been told to take no more than 12 minutes.

Here goes

2.

I am a man of no faith. Or I am a man of all faiths.

My principal spiritual guide has been my father. He died at the age of 98 having survived a war crime, the construction of the so-called Death or Burma Railway by the Imperial Japanese Army using slave labor.

100 to 200,000 men of various nationalities died.

He returned from that experience with no formal religious beliefs but a belief in compassion that transcended all else.

I call my father a bush Buddhist.

One of my brothers calls him a bush Catholic.

Does it matter?

Only if we believe the ultimate truth of thesematters lies in words.

I am adamantly of the view that it does not.

3.

I was brought up in the Catholic church. There was a lot about the Catholic church at that time that I didn’t get, but there were a couple of things I did.

I got the story about the mob wanting to stone a woman to death for adultery and Jesus stopping them by saying, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”.

And it was his cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, that suggested to me that this may indeed be a truly human story.

And there was one other line that has always stayed with me:  By the fruit of their actions ye shall know them.

4.

At university, I did a law degree. I learned to respect “the law”, as it was then called, as a system of disciplined thought. In my very first moot court I also learned something that has stood me in good stead ever since, that you can’t get away with pretending to know about something if you’re being scrutinised by good minds schooled in the subject.

I also sensed a certain wisdom in the law, in sayings such as, “Justice must not only be done; It must be seen to be done”.

One of the things I continue to marvel at in our system of law is the presumption of innocence. Imagine if the presumption of innocence were not a character of our legal system at this time and we sought to introduce it by political means. What would shock jocks say? What would the tabloid headline writers scream? It would be something about going soft on crims, about it being another betrayal of ordinary people by a privileged elite.

I believe that if we had not have inherited the presumption of innocence, we would not be capable of getting it ”up” in the present political climate, nor in the foreseeable future.

That’s where we are politically in some ways right now - about 200 years ago,

I take a particular interest in that period of history, the Georgian period, not least because the modern state of Australia was born from it.

5.

My life has been a search for meaning.

When I was 20, I read the Chinese Book of Tao. I have never forgotten the line: “He who knows does not say; he who says do not know”,

As someone who was born into the culture of sport, I also found this line from the Hindu text, the Upanishads, compelling: “Action pursued for its own sake leads to darkness; Intellect pursued for its own sake leads to greater darkness”.

I grew up in Tasmania and could never escape the feeling that something was missing without knowing what. At 24, I went to Ireland,  thinking perhaps the answer lay in my Irish Catholic roots.

I hitch-hiked into Northern Ireland then in a state of civil war between the Catholic and Protestant communities. I nearly landed myself in serious trouble, but a Protestant truck driver saved me.  A succession of Protestants took me in.

I wandered the world for two years. In Africa, I got sick. On a railway station in the Nubian desert, I was one of many massed around a single water pump. A young man, seeing how sick I was, took the soap from my hand and washed my hair. It was the most Christian experience of my life, but the young man was a Muslim.

I was learning that whatever it was that I was seeking didn’t come with a name or a neat label.

I went to places that don’t exist any more like the old Soviet Union. I worked on a building site in Glasgow where I learned as much as I did in four years at university. I met lots of people and returned home believing what the Victorian poet Tennyson wrote in his poem Ulysses:

I am part of all that I have met.

But I was still lonely in this land, my land, Australia. There was some part of it I needed to know and didn’t. Until I met Aboriginal people.

I expected them to see me as the enemy, but I found if I approached them with humility and respect I was taken in.

And through this process I met elders, Older Aboriginal people who’d seen a lot of suffering, Who were compassionate and, although they had reason to be, weren’t racist.

I’d say to the Aboriginal elders, “This spirit you’ve got - where does it come from?” And they would point downwards and say, “The land”.

I am part of all that I have met in this land as well as outside it.

In 2015, I spoke at an Australian-Japanese reconciliation event in Sydney. Before that, I was involved in the AFL Peace Team, which sought to create a dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. Speaking to the Japanese audience in Sydney, And an Israeli and Palestinian audience in Jerusalem, I said that so much of what I know about reconciliation I learned from Aboriginal people;  from the oldest living culture in the world.

6.

Some people say the 20th century started in 1914. It may be the 21st century started on 9/11, and since then various dark forces have flowed into one another and are now starting to run like a wild river.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that, “Positions that were once the cornerstones of American diplomacy — such as support for human rights and the rule of law — could become mere bargaining chips to be traded away in some future bilateral deal”.

The battle for those of us who believe in the Rule of Law and wish to defend it will be that we will have to frame our arguments in 140 characters or less on a twitter feed.

At such times, I take comfort from history, particularly the Georgian period in Britain and its colonies of which Tasmania, then called, Van Diemen’s Land, was one.

It was a period of gross inequity, of tyrannical tendencies, but there were still brave lawyers; brave journalists, too. If I have a hero as a journalist it is Henry Melville, author of“The History of Van Diemen’s Land 1816-36”. He chronicled the cronyism, the corruption, the brutality of the island penal colony. He reported on court cases where traditional Aboriginal people were tried for their lives and understood not a single word of the court proceedings.

Melville wrote “The History of Van Diemen’s Land” from the condemned cell at Hobart prison. Not that he was condemned but he was being given a taste of what it means to displease the authorities.

7.

We could be on the brink of an era when history starts hurtling backwards. Two hundred years ago, European wars were fought by two armies lining up opposite one another in neat rows on the outskirts of cities. Now war is Aleppo. At the end of the 19th century, torture was widely thought to be an abomination safely buried in the past. Now it’s being endorsed by the so-called leader of the free world, Donald Trump.

But to quote the Nobel Laureate for literature, Bob Dylan, “They say the darkest hour is just before the dawn”. What if we are also on the brink of an era where a lot of people around the globe all of a sudden go, “No, we can do better than this!”.

In the context of world affairs, I am currently writing a critically important book on the Western Bulldogs 2016 grand final win. When coach Luke Beveridge arrived at the Dogs in 2015 he inherited a team which had become too entrenched in its defensive ways and thereby too passive about its fate. He persuaded his players to take the game on. What if we decided to take the game on?  What if we agreed that our so-called differences aren’t as big as they might once have seemed, particularly when measured against the tsunami of social and political change that is sweeping our way?  When our beliefs meet and merge, we are both stronger. How do we know who is speaking the truth in the post-truth era? By the fruits of their actions we shall know them.

Thankyou