A Room of One's Own

Published in 1929, A Room of One's Own is still relevant to today and was the first time I (finally) discovered Virginia Woolf. The first chapter was quite dull but after that I loved finding the gold nuggets of Woolf's knowledge as she processed her thoughts onto paper. Many times I wanted to underline passages and discuss them, but I try not to mark library books so I folded tips of pages. It was her questions that often provoked me to think more about the place, position, influence, freedom, creativity and liberty of women today.

Bill Harper's sermon this past Sunday was about who does God love more? The answer was (of course) women and children. Now there are specific reasons that women and children were "favored" and continue to be because at the time they had no rights and were considered as property. Thus, the Bible preached a message for men to reach out to women and children. The examples were from Elijah and the Gospel of Luke.

Woolf discussed women writers and how women write in a patriarchal/male dominated society. Her examples were the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen. Questions arose such as was the brain androgynous or was it actually female or male? (Read the Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, M.D .and you will come to find that females have specific hormones that alter the brain in different ways).

Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art? (26).

Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority (37).

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 (38).

She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others (80).

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 (90).

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? Ought not education bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? (96)...and that is why I go to a women's college I thought to myself.