Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Virginia Woolf was not well-traveled; beyond a few trips to the European continent, the author spent most of her years living in or near London, England. Woolf announced that “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” Her famous declaration provides the catalyst for my study on the influence of Keynesian economics on Woolf’s feminist globalism. As fellow Bloomsbury Group members, Virginia Woolf and economist John Maynard Keynes debated ideas; included were discussions about economics as their correspondence and journal entries attest. Woolf herself did not traverse the world to develop her global perspective. During the decades she lived and wrote in London, the capitol was a center of trade. The world came to Woolf’s London, and she embraced it. Echoes of Keynesian economics resonate in Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” “Three Guineas,” and her London essays. As a corrective to Keynes’ theories, Woolf adds her feminist concerns to issues of global supply and demand, whether she mockingly critiques her own desire for the latest fashions (plumes from Africa!) or advocates that women act as cogs in the wheels of England’s ultra-masculine war machine.