“A room of one’s own” by Virginia Woolf is one of the most complete literary works written so far in terms of feminist writing. It reflects how tragic has been women’s fate since beginning of times. Although nowadays women have more intellectual freedom and working opportunities than fifty years ago, there are still inequalities in the way we are treated by society; we need a room of our own.
The essay’s main topic, women and fiction, is a theme that represents dreams and reality of a gender that has suffered the rejection and humiliation from its companions for centuries. However, with First World War (1914-1918) everything changed; women had to take care of their families and work because men were at war. In that context, a new movement came to live, feminism. Once war ended women were working at industries and at home; they proved to be as good as men in the working field. However, they had to struggle to have the opportunity to study at college and being intellectually educated. Women still fought for their space in the world.
Virginia Woolf in her lecture covered the different aspects of women non-existed history as a way to shocked students minds. The three main elements presented that help her to illuminate the audience are: money, the subjectivity of the truth and gender inequality. Through these topics Virginia Woolf develops an interesting essay that called women to wake up and try to write history from a female’s point of view and not only containing a slanting male point of view.
First, money has been an important issue since its appearance. Moreover, “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time . . .” [1]Until the First World War the ones who controlled money were men; therefore if a woman wanted to do or buy anything they had to ask her father or husband for money. In consequence, without money was almost impossible to write. Even today there are many writers -male and female- that cannot develop their art because they do not have enough money to do it. Unfortunately, today the problem is how to earn money; because until the early ninth century women had no capital for their own: they had to ask their men for some and explained why they needed such amount of money; if men considered it a waste they just did not give a centavo.
Secondly, as history has been written by men its objectivity is more than questionable, therefore literature is a reasonable source to find more about women because fiction tends to have more truth than facts. However, only a few female authors can be mentioned. So, where is the history of women? Women were not consider capable of writing anything original or even to write. Consequently, society just assumed that women were inferior writers, compared to men, and this is why there is a lack of literary works made by women.
Finally, the fact that women are treated inequality in the society can be a reason why women‘s writing are not consider reliable or important by patriarchal societies. As Virginia Woolf declared women have no space to write or money on their own to create a place where they can be themselves. To make this idea clearer Virginia Woolf created the image of Judith Shakespeare, a twin sister of the great William Shakespeare. Judith was as smart as William, but she was uneducated and a women. She was never able to exploit all her potential as a writer because she had to take care of the household. As she refused to get married with the man her father had chosen for her, she killed herself. Although this is a fictional character, her characteristics were not based on fantasy. This was a reality for many women before our times. Female talent was not considered at all and even today female writers have to prove how good they are to win a space among male writers.
In conclusion, how men have described history has nothing to do with the role that women play in life and their abilities to do more than two things at the same time. The main issue is that if you have been treated as a stupid for so long, at the end you would start believing that you are stupid. Therefore, if women were told since the beginning of times that they could not write, they believed it.
To approach this need of self-awareness, Virginia Woolf used symbols and components to demonstrate women’s need of having a space to them; a room, something that men have had without question. Furthermore, privacy, financial independence and free time are essential components of the innumerable inequalities between these genders. Therefore, until these differences will change, women’s literature achievement will still have troubles to win recognition in this patriarchal world.
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Reference:
- Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own, pdf document.
- Kronenberger, Louis, Virginia Woolf Discusses Women and Fiction, http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/17/specials/woolf-room.html
