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Saturday 5 March 2011

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 5th March

Because we can't omit Virginia Woolf, can we? I had to look for this one for a long time, having thought, initially, that it was either in A Room of One's Own or Three Guineas:

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.
Virginia Woolf, 'Professions for Women', in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
Woolf went on to exhort women to kill the Angel in the House. Unfortunately, she keeping coming back from the dead like Dracula in a Hammer Horror film, and shapeshifts into all sorts of mutated forms.

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