My Book Review > Virginia Woolf: 'A Room of One's Own'

An awesome book on the status of women, beautifully written… a must read!!!!

Why is it that, throughout history, so few women have been known for their contribution to science, politics... or fiction? Because they were KEPT IN POVERTY! "Married against their will, kept in one room, and to one occupation, how could a dramatist give a full or interesting or truthful account on them?".

There is “an obscure masculine complex which has had so much upon the woman’s movement; that deep-seated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior…”.

“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle”. “Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist emphatically upon THE INFERIORITY OF WOMEN, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women are so often inferior to men”. [-]

Even in Virgina's days, "... the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and advice. You can't do this and you shan't do that! Fellows and scholars only allowed on the grass! Ladies not admitted without a letter of introduction!...".

“Imaginatively, she" [woman] "is of the highest importance [...women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time – Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phèdre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona… But this is woman in fiction]; practically she is completely insignificant. [-] She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the SLAVE of any boys whose parents forced a ring upon her finger”.

“… any woman who born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [such as Shakespeare’s ‘virtual’ sister] would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. [-] Cat do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare”.

"They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters, But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's days, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that... [-]

"It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only?".

"Young women, [-] you have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse? [-] ... we have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years..."