HW 21: "A Woman Must Have Money"

Hey Little Cus,

Hopefully I can help you out with you reading of “A Room if One’s Own.” In the first chapter, the author, Virginia Woolf, tells about the events of her day. Our first glimpse into Virginia’s day begins at a river at Oxbridge college in England. Virginia makes her way to the school’s library but is not granted access into it because she is a woman. Following her library mishap, Virginia stands outside of the church and then makes her way to lunch. At lunch, Virginia is presented with the best meals and the luncheon generates lots of positive conversation. After lunch, Virginia lets herself into the garden before making her way to Fernham for dinner. At the dinner at Fernham Virginia is served plain gravy soup and there is little conversation during the meal. Virginia and her friend Mary Seton talk privately afterwards in Mary’s room. We learn that Virginia is given a task to write about women and fiction. Virginia’s initial thoughts to this assignment are, “a women must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (Woolf 4). Virginia’s point is that to be a successful female writer, you have to be wealthy and have a room all to yourself. It is explained by Virginia the reasons why it is so hard for women to become writers. For generations and generations, it was the role of the woman to be the homemaker and to raise children. With all the time it takes to care for their children, women had little time to make and save money and even if they were able to, the money would be the property of their husband's. While for men it was so much easier to compile funds for education simply because men where the only sex that had money. Some consider this novel an important piece of work because it shows that women were against high odds when it came to getting an education or being a writer. I also believe that it is imperative that it is known how suppressed women were before they were granted an education and how hard we had to fight to get that. I think that perhaps it is sometimes taken for granted that each sex is allowed equally learning opportunities and we should also keep in mind that it has not always been that way.