Virginia Woolf often questioned why men had always had
power, influence, wealth, and reputation, while women had nothing but children.
She believed that there would be female Shakespeare in the future only if women
found the first two keys to freedom: independent incomes (=money) and “rooms of their
own” (=privacy), a metaphor for women having access to their own private space. When A Room of One's Own was first published in 1929, it was considered
revolutionary. Most people considered
women less intelligent than men, they did not think about women's
freedom and certainly no one was writing about it, let alone as convincingly as
Virginia Woolf. Her essay became a classic in the movement toward equality.
Even today it is hardly dated, for the reason that there are still some men
(and women) who suppose that men are “the superior sex”.
If women were equal to men, people asked, why had none
of them produced great literature like Shakespeare's? Virginia Woolf
replied that this lack of achievement had nothing to with innate ability and
everything to do with women's lack of opportunity.
To illustrate
this, Virginia Woolf imagined a Judith Shakespeare,
William's sister, going to London to make her fortune as a playwright.
Unfortunately, she was regarded as a sex object, so rather than being taken
seriously as a writer, she was lied to and seduced, she became pregnant and
eventually committed suicide.
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