Woolf regarded Three Guineas (1938) as forming ‘one book’ with The Years (Dv. 148), in the sense that the frustrated yearnings of the novel – ‘she saw, not a place, but a state of being, in which there was real laughter, real happiness, and this fractured world was whole; whole, and free. But how could she say it?’ (TY, p. 285) – are here addressed through a programme of action whereby freedom and wholeness – key terms in Three Guineas – might be achieved. A statement in the early part of the book – ‘The years change things; slightly but imperceptibly they change them’ (TG, p. 151) – heralds both progress for women in the educational and professional spheres in the last hundred years or so, and also a rate of change that is slow and grudging and qualified by the persistence of age-old problems, sometimes in a new guise. Thus 1919, ‘the sacred year’, saw the opening up of several of the professions to women previously barred to them, and is a clear marker of historical progress (TG, p. 141); but if, as Woolf goes on to insist, the professions in question inculcate a masculine competitiveness, slavery to money-making and addiction to ambition that are inimical to health and humanity, what is the value of these so-called new freedoms? (TG, p. 197).