The suffragette movement offered women possibilities for change, so alongside the portrait of the woman who is eager to please, happy to be loved and eager to found a family, we get the portrait of the woman who has made the the cause of humanity her life’s work, and also the woman who is seeking freedom simply to be by herself, measuring the stars. This fits with the period in which the book seems to be set, the early decades of the twentieth century there are horses and carriages but also motor omnibuses, a focus on the suffragette movement yet no talk of war. Surprisingly, it is between the portraits of the women that there is the most opposition the men offer less variation of type. There are several versions of He and She in this book as if Woolf set out to analyse men and women in general and offer us examples, some very diametrically opposed, as in the example above, and some hardly at all. She: believes she must renounce a life of reason to satisfy his feelings. He: believes women can only feel and not reason. She: would like to take a compass and a ruler and measure the distance between the stars. He: would like to write verses comparing her eyes to the stars.
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