Thinking as Outsiders: from Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas to Rojava's Three Cantons

In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf famously proposes the fall of patriarchy as a solution to stop totalitarianisms and prevent war. It is the way we look at gender roles which must change, she states, and in order to do this she proposes to invest her three guineas on education for women, on the importance of equal job opportunities and on the foundation of a ‘society of outsiders’. Woolf conceives a possibility which could not have been imagined before: to look at women’s condition of ‘outsiders’ as one offering them more power and freedom than that of men, because, as outsiders, women could have “freedom from unreal loyalties” and from those “interested motives” which were promised to men. The essay highlights how the steps proposed by Woolf are similar to those taken by the social revolution of Rojava, in which women played a prominent role both on the battlefield and within the newly formed political system, to free their country from an oppressive totalitarianism. The revolution led to establish, in 2016, the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, a de facto autonomous region made of three self-governing regions, or cantons: Afrin, Jazira, and Euphrates. When the grass-roots revolution began, armed militant groups were formed, whose ideology hold that ‘the liberation of society is impossible without the liberation of women’, and so they were offered ‘a valued place and an education’(Revolution in Rojava, 2016). When the Kurds managed to free the three cantons and establish the Democratic Federation of Rojava, they wrote the Charter of the Social Contract, a provisional constitution based on non-patriarchal principles giving relevance to education and job opportunities for women and on creating women’s institutions in every area of the Republic, in order for them to become ‘self-reliant’. Explaining how Rojava’s project of Democracy is different from the purported opposition in Syria, Asya Abdullah, co-chair of the Movement for a Democratic Society, affirmed: ‘How can they talk about freedom and democracy yet overlook the quality of men and women? How can a society be free when its women aren’t free?’ (Revolution in Rojava, 2016). This indeed is a core question in Woolf as well, and I will move from this question to show how the Democratic Federation of Rojava might be studied as an implementation of Woolf’s new and alternative thought in Three Guineas.