A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One’s Own

This book sat on my shelf unread for nearly ten years. As I've been reading through a history of patriarchy from Kate Millett to Naomi Wolf, it seemed appropriate to finally delve into the work of this infamous mind.

Created as two essays delivered to the Arts Society at Newnham and first published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own is a gentle treaty on the need for women to create their own intellectual and creative space.

Beginning with the recounting of being barred from the university library unless in the company of a male university ‘fellow’ or a letter of introduction, it lays out a select history of male thinking on female nature and the obstructive social forces resulting from these.

The list is heartbreaking.

To defeat these, Woolf famously argues, women must have five hundred guinea a year and a room of one’s own with a lock on the door. These two demands are, of course, symbolic. Five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate, that lock on the door stands for the power to think for oneself.

It’s easy to see why Woolf’s work has become a seminal and eternally popular text. She writes with humour and pathos but without recrimination. Men, she argues, hold women inferior only because men need to brace their own superiority as they go about the arduous and difficult daily task of statesmanship and nation building. Under her pen, we feel the ache of a mind longing for access to ideas, books and stories yet also taste her optimism. She lived in a time that promised liberating social change – women had been granted the vote only a few years before and only ten years previous legislation had been passed that allowed them to own property for the fist time in industrial history. Against this backdrop, it is little wonder her argument is optimistic.

There is also a wider selection of ideas that flow through the text. She opens with a number of questions: Why don’t women publish? What effect does poverty have on the mind? What effect does poverty have on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of art? Should women write as women or simply as writers disembodied from gender? On her journey across these, she discusses of the process of patriarchy and the ‘othering’ of women.

A book worth waiting ten years to read.

Feminist theory

Modern Feminist Thought

This text ended my long search to find a book that offered clear explanation of how the main theories of feminism evolved and interacted.

The main schools of thought are covered, running in a loose chronological order beginning with the liberal feminism of Betty Freidan and moving in succession through Marxist and Socialist feminism, radical feminism, lesbian and then black feminism. The strength of the text sits in these chapters, with careful exploration of the differences between Marxist and Socialist feminism, the relationship that the Cartesian mind/body dichotomy and liberal capitalism has with liberal feminism, and the evolution of the status of the personal/public divide so actively challenged in radical feminism. Whelehan also keeps a firm gaze on the general socio-political developments that accompanied each school of thought; ensuring readers get the wider picture of the conditions that provoked feminist groupings of thought.

Part two is a less coherent and more organic exploration of how feminism presented in the 90s and the predicted problems it faces in the future. There’s scathing emphasis on the rise of liberal feminists like Naomi Wolf. The author’s tone changes here, her pen growing more critical and harsh as if registering her own disappointment with the refusal of modern feminist theorists to confront patriarchy.

A notable omission in her discussion on the evolution of thought is the French psychoanalysts like Kristeva, Irigaray and Cixous. For me, this highlights the US and UK focus of her canvas. Asian and European thinkers are barely mentioned, despite the explosion of feminist critique in Japan in the late eighties and nineties.

Overall, an accessible journey through the main Anglo schools of thought in second wave feminism.

Whelehan, I. (1995.). Modern Feminist Thought: From Second Wave to 'Post Feminism'. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.