Time & Perspective Quote by Virginia Woolf

The sharper provocation here is Woolf's decision to cast male resistance not as background noise but as a primary text worth reading. Calling it "more interesting" is a polite blade: she flatters the reader with curiosity while indicting an entire culture that made women's freedom a problem to be managed. The line turns the spotlight away from the familiar triumph narrative and onto the machinery of obstruction - the arguments, anxieties, and self-justifications men produced to keep power looking like common sense.

Woolf is writing from a world where emancipation had arrived unevenly and recently, and where formal gains didn't dissolve the informal gatekeeping: money, space, education, publication, credibility. So she isn't marveling at progress so much as diagnosing the psyche of backlash. Men's "opposition" becomes a psychological archive of what patriarchy fears losing: authority, identity, the right to define reality. That makes the resistance "interesting" in the way a symptom is interesting to a clinician - it reveals the underlying illness.

There's also a sly narrative critique. The emancipation story often gets told as steady uplift, sanitized into dates and statutes. Woolf suggests the more revealing drama is the counter-plot: how social order narrates itself into permanence, how it recruits "reason" and "nature" and "morality" as costume. The subtext is that liberation isn't just achieved; it's negotiated against a constantly rebranding resistance. Reading the opposition closely, Woolf implies, is how you learn what freedom will be asked to pay for.