HW 30: Have you got a room of your own?

While the narrator of Woolf’s story, in Chapter 5 finds a book written by a woman of the name Mary Charmichael, she compares her writings to that of Jane Austins.  She then decides the two are nothing alike.  She states “But almost without exception they [women] are shown in their relation to men.  It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex.” (Woolf 82).  Everything that Woolf points out in that statement is true.   Women were looked at more like their husbands property, and showing signs of intelligence was a threat.  If the women were smart, and could outsmart their husbands, soon they would no longer be able to control them.  In Chapter six Woolf takes over for the narrator, giving the reader her honest view, straight up, not through anyone else.  She says, “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.  Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry.” (Woolf 108).  As bitter as that statement comes across, the point is legitimate.  Woolf then says, that that statement is the reason she put so much stress on writing A Room of One’s Own.

                I think that I myself have “my own room.”  I’ve grown up in a time where women are pushed, especially by other women, to do what they want; whether it be pursuing careers as a writer, a doctor, a pilot, or a hair stylist.  I’m lucky in that aspect.  However, I feel that if I could have a conversation with Virginia Woolf, she would be unhappy with how I use what’s given to me.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that I take advantage of things.  I think most people today do.  A women writer seems no more uncommon than rain in March.  Although there are still controversial issues when it comes to women being treated as fairly as men with salaries and things like that, women now have a lot more rights than they used to. 

Works Cited

Woolf, Virgina. A Room of One’s Own. Orlando: harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1957.Woolf, Virginia. n.d.