For most of history, ‘Anonymous’ was a woman.

Virginia Woolf makes this remark in the course of her extended argument about women’s historical exclusion from education, property, and literary institutions. Writing in the late 1920s—after women in Britain had only recently gained expanded suffrage—Woolf reflects on how social constraints forced many women’s intellectual and artistic labor into obscurity or domestic anonymity. The line appears amid her discussion of the missing record of women’s writing and the structural reasons so few women could publish, sign, or preserve their work. It functions as a pointed summary of how authorship and authority were gendered across centuries.

The aphorism compresses a historical claim into a memorable paradox: the label “Anonymous,” often treated as a neutral absence of attribution, frequently masks women’s authorship. Woolf suggests that anonymity is not merely a bibliographic accident but a social outcome—produced by barriers to education, professional recognition, and public speech, as well as by the risks of reputational harm. The line also critiques how literary history is written: when women’s names are missing, their contributions can be discounted or absorbed into a male-coded tradition. It remains influential as a feminist lens on archives, canons, and attribution.

“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”