A Society

Virginia Woolf has an odd short story called “A Society.” The plot is about a group of girls who form a society. They vow that none of them will marry or have children until they can determine what men have been doing all the this time and whether it was worth it for women to spend their youth in bearing an raising them: We have gone on all these years assuming men were equally industrious [as their mother and grandmothers who have had ten or more children], and that their works were of equal merit. While we have borne the children, they, we supposed, have borne the books and the pictures. We have populated the world. They has civilised it. But now we can read, what prevents us from judging the results? “” And so they set off, each with a different topic to investigate. They hold regular meetings and make reports. We meet up with them five years later and it is clear that they are frustrated and tired and starting to wonder why they are doing what they are doing and a few of them wonder why they shouldn’t all just give up the society and get married and have children. Elizabeth, who dressed like a man and was taken for a reviewer, gives her report. She has been reading new books including those by the most popular authors for the last five years. The girls want to know if the men have surpassed Jane Austen and George Eliot, if the men’s books were good. But Elizabeth talks around the answer as if she has been reading too many reviews with lots of words and nothing to say.