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Stepping back in 19th century to move a step forward

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than
the story of that emancipation itself.”

Virginia Woolf is that one major mouthpiece of feminism who in her book ‘A Room of One’s Own’
brings to the forefront two elements necessary for women to succeed as writers against the
androgynous minds: money and space. This book is based on two lectures on women and fiction
that Woolf gave in Cambridge in 1928. What caught my attention was that it helps you gain a deeper
understanding of the pressures, prejudice and grief female writers suffered to create their work. The
book argues that women are under-represented in writing as they lack the financial means and
access to education enjoyed by men. Male writers, even if they were poor, had more opportunities
for finding work to support the passion of writing. In discussing Shakespeare and his imaginary sister,
Judith, Woolf explains that while they both share the same genius and talent for writing rich poetry
and plays, they both step forward to embark upon the life of a writer, but Judith’s circumstances will
nail her down. If Shakespeare knocks on the door of the theatre, he will be given a job; she, on the
other hand, will be molested or harassed; and if a man gives William his job and sees Judith, he will
only make her his mistress, her dreams would be dead and the only thing she could give birth to
would be an illegitimate baby. If you've never paused to think about the huge success of many
women writers today, A Room of One's Own is a proof that such common rights did not come easily
to all.

“I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.”

Men were born free and they were allotted space without having to ask for it. Woolf claims that a
women with "a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half
that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days." She makes it clear that the
inherited money is a generous gift, because it offers the female writer with freedom, dignity and
autonomy, all of which she needs to hold her own and be left free to write. Having highlighted
people like Austen, George Eliot and the Bronte sisters, she digs deeper on how much better their
work could have been if their experience of life had not been confined to kitchen and hearth. How
enormously their genius would have sculpted if only they could have travelled or gone to a war like
Tolstoy.

In one passage she opens up regarding an untouched subject when she imagines questioning an old
woman about her life - "she would look vague and say that she could remember nothing. For all the
dinners are cooked; the plates and cups are washed; the children sent to school and gone out into the
world. Nothing remains of it at all. All has vanished. No biography or history has a word to say about
it.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf was a modernist playwright with a legacy of pioneering essays
on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and great novels. A fine stylist, she
experimented with several forms of biographical writings. She sketched the real brutal society unlike
her contemporaries and followed ‘Stream of consciousness’ technique which invited reading not for
neat solutions but for an aesthetic resolution of “shivering fragments.”

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