Virginia Stephen taught composition, history, and literature to “anaemic shop girls” (Lee 219) in London and I teach Virginia Woolf to strippers in Las Vegas. In her early twenties Virginia taught at Morley College, which Jill Channing describes as “the closest thing to a community college of her time” (11). I teach literature at the College of Southern Nevada which is a community college in Sin City that serves around 40,000 students each year. In her 2004 article “Teaching Woolf/Woolf Teaching” Beth Rigel Daugherty connected two-year college students to the “common readers” at Morley College because of their educational desires, scholastic preparedness, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Daugherty made this connection over ten years ago, but many community college students can still be referred to as Woolf 's “common readers.” Like the working-class students at Morley College, my community college students work fulltime jobs while attending classes and most students work as entertainers on The Strip. I have observed that my female students who work in the sex entertainment industry take a special interest in Woolf 's work, and they respond to her work in ways that reflect a new, fourth wave feminist awareness. They strongly identify with her declarations of independence in A Room of One's Own, as well as some of her radical philosophies, such as the proclamation in Three Guineas that, “to sell a brain is worse than to sell a body” (111). I wish to share my experience teaching Woolf to college students who identify as sex-entertainment workers, and highlight ways that these contemporary women connect with and use Woolf 's work to create a new feminist heritage.

When I first moved to Las Vegas to teach at the community college, I expected to find highly liberated and progressive views about women, because of the city's reputation as being one of the most popular adult entertainment destinations in the world and because of the sex-positive vibe that permeates the desert metropolis. But the feminist mirage quickly faded as I learned about both the tourists’ and the locals’ views of women. Las Vegas is a city that maintains highly contradictory views about women and feminism.