Final essay (so far)

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 change; women had to take care of 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 to illuminate 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 so that history will contain not only a male point of view, but also female’s. Thus, as history has written by men its objectivity is more than questionable, therefore literature is a reasonable source to find more about women. However, only a few female authors can be mentioned. So, where is the history of women?

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 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 house. As she refused to get married with the man her father had chosen for her, she killed herself. Although, this is a fictional character was not based on fantasy. This was 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.