The Paci-Feminist Ethic of Virginia Woolf and Malala Yousafzai: Rhetorics of Care and Justice in the Face of Tyranny

Abstract

The Paci-Feminist Ethic of Virginia Woolf and Malala Yousafzai: Rhetorics of Care and Justice in the Face of Tyranny Hillary Coenen (bio) In August of 1940, the United States had yet to enter the Second World War, and Virginia Woolf wrote the widely circulated “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” in part to advise Americans on their approach to the war. Many of Woolf’s works address issues of peace and women’s rights, as does this one. The brief entreaty was written for a symposium addressing “current matters concerning women” (Woolf, “Thoughts” 243). Less than one month after writing the piece, Woolf’s London home was destroyed by a bomb during the London Blitz, and the address was never delivered to the American symposium. Just days before the address was published in The New Republic, Woolf witnessed the bombing and destruction of Tavistock Square, a significant local landmark. “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” is an essay inseparable from its time. Over seventy years later, in a notable 2013 interview with Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, Malala1 Yousafzai made her first appearance on a major late-night news program. There she described her experience of being threatened and attacked by the Taliban, and she shared why she took on what she knew to be the dangerous task of advocating for girls’ education. The interview occurred three months after she delivered a highly publicized speech at the United Nations General Assembly on what was her 16th birthday, and a year after she was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for her advocacy of the rights of women and girls. Both Woolf’s undelivered (but later published) address and Malala’s interview represent public assertions that highlight how investing in education for women and girls can promote peace and justice while resisting violence. Rejection of violence has a long history in feminist scholarship and literature, and this theme has often been linked to care as a value that informs feminine ethics. In philosophy, care as an ethical and moral value has often been contrasted with the more traditional (and supposedly masculine) value of justice.2 While feminist scholars have acknowledged that both care and justice are essential values for ethical thinking and decision-making, in recent years feminist scholarship has fully embraced an ethic of care as a guiding principle. With the landmark publication of Jaqueline Royster and Gesa Kirsch’s Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and [End Page 139] Literacy Studies (2012), feminist rhetorical studies developed a renewed interest in the connection between feminism and care. Scholars in feminist rhetoric have taken up an “ethos of humility, respect, and care” that Royster and Kirsch claim is essential for excellent feminist inquiry (21). This research stance is consistent with the portrayal of feminist thought that Virginia Held upholds in The Ethics of Care. Held claims that “the ethics of care now has a central, though not exclusive, place in feminist moral theorizing” (28). Held responds to Carol Gilligan’s earlier work that distinguishes a “care perspective” from a “justice perspective.” In that response, Held explains that, although feminists who work within an ethic of care “share the goals of justice and equality,” this approach challenges traditional moral theories, in part because it is feminist (26). Feminists have long been faced with the violence of oppression and tyranny supported by willful ignorance and overt hatred. Appropriate and effective responses to these forces need to balance the need for justice and equity with a need to educate and build empathetic communities. Acknowledging these tensions, a pacifist and feminist response would necessarily incorporate care and justice perspectives, as well as notions of humility and respect. Feminist Rhetorical Practices provides “critical terms of engagement” that guide the rhetorical study of texts and contexts that have traditionally been excluded from the rhetorical canon or that apply non-traditional strategies (21). One of these terms is critical imagination, an approach that prompts us to rethink “what is there and not there” (20). Drawing from Jaqueline Royster’s Traces of a Stream, Royster and Kirsch explain that critical imagination involves “account[ing] for what we ‘know’ by...