‘A woman is always a woman!’: British Women Writers and Refugees

Virginia Woolf wrote in Three Guineas in 1938 that ‘[a]s a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’ Her words acknowledge the long-held feminist contention that the very conceptions of citizenship and patriotism are indelibly tied to the patriarchal and the male, placing women beyond and outside these structures, particularly during wartime. This chapter investigates how this placing or understanding of woman as beyond the nation might be seen to underpin the interactions between women and the legally and politically stateless: refugees. It reads the real-life and fictional interactions between mid-century British women writers from all sides of the political spectrum, from Storm Jameson to Vera Brittain, Phyllis Bottome to Iris Murdoch, alongside later feminist theory of nationhood and citizenship, to argue that these women enjoyed a different relationship with the wartime nation which allowed them to engage more empathetically with refugee subjects. It brings this into dialogue with Kantian and Derridean understandings of hospitality and Cooper’s own previous work on this topic to interrogate the essentialist dynamics underpinning the gendering of hospitality within the nation-state and the ways in which the caring/political activities of these women might be seen both to challenge and enforce these age-old customs.