Virginia Woolf grew up with the suffrage feminism of the early years of the twentieth century, and the struggles and debates of this period influenced all her writing. In the second half of the twentieth century, the resurgent women's movement found significant expression in literary and cultural criticism and practice and Woolf was granted centre stage in the debates that began to revolve around such questions as the existence and nature of a separate female literary tradition; ‘realist’ versus ‘modernist’ writing as the most effective vehicle for a feminist politics; the place of feminist radicalism or ‘anger’ in aesthetic practice. It is striking that Woolf has been used by so many different critics to exemplify one or another of a variety of incommensurate positions and that such weight has been attached to establishing her commitment to whichever position she is held to represent. ‘Feminism's Woolf’, when followed through, might well provide the most detailed and vivid history of the preoccupations and values of post-war feminist literary and cultural criticism.

The recent ‘historicist’ turn in literary studies has also led to renewed interest in the nature of ‘Woolf's feminism’, and in particular to a rereading of those concepts of gender and sexuality which were highly influential in the early part of the century. In Virginia Woolf and the Real World, Alex Zwerdling argues that we will not fully understand Woolf's work until we see it as ‘a response to some of the received ideas of her time about women and “the cause” ’.

He charts her earliest and short-lived involvement with the suffrage cause (she remained aloof, it should be noted, from the more militant suffragettes), an experience which found its way into the ironic depiction of suffrage workers in Night and Day. The near-total focus on the single issue of the vote in the early years of the century appeared both narrow and naïve to Woolf, who, in Zwerdling's words, believed that ‘the psyche was much more resistant to change than the law’ and knew that it would take more than the extension of the franchise to change the deep-seated psychological motives underlying masculine authoritarianism and women's collusion with their disempowerment.