| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction to the Handbook on Prejudice |
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strict beadle and barred from entering a library by a guard. Humiliation and anger were the emotions with which she responded to these repeated affronts of rejection. In order to find out more about the place that men allotted to women in society, she entered another library and started to do some research. When reading various books, she made a number of interesting discoveries. The first was an asymmetry: there were many books written by men about women, but no books written by women about men. Men were entitled to define and interpret women, while the opposite was not the case. Her second discovery was that professors wrote about the inferiority of women, and their writings were inspired by the emotion of anger. Not a simple and explicit anger, she wrote, but one “that had gone underground and mixed itself with all kinds of other emotions” (38f). Her third discovery was that the anger of the author had something to do with anxiety about protecting his status: “When the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price” (40). Woolf then described the process of creating self-confidence and superiority by inventing another species that lacks these assets.
The same anatomy of prejudice that Woolf discovered in the gendered power relation of patriarchy applies also to that of the British colonisers and the colonised. The topic of her book is oppression in gender relations, but the mechanism can easily be extended to cases of racism.