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It’s about money, appreciation, power – and the possibilities for self-development. Virginia Woolf’s essay “A room to yourself” will celebrate his 100th birthday this decade and luckily a lot has developed since 1929: women’s suffrage, various contraceptive options, rape in marriage is punishable, some states are even managed by a woman ruled. But still: Woolf’s essay remains painfully topical.
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Why are women poor?
“Why are women poor?” Asked Virginia Woolf almost a hundred years ago and globally they are still today.
Her essay “A room to yourself” were actually two lectures that she was supposed to give at a then still very young college for women on the subject of “Women and Literature”. But instead of thinking about women in literature or women’s literature, Virginia Woolf directs the gaze to an apparently secondary matter: the conditions under which literature, art, and science can even arise.
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She explains: “A woman needs money and a room to herself if she wants to write books.” At this point, Virginia Woolf was fairly secure even by a modest inheritance.
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Shakespeare’s talented sister Judith
To make it clear how much the creation of great literature depends not only on talent but also on external factors, Virginia Woolf invents a woman named Judith Shakespeare. She is William’s sister and equally gifted. But: She neither gets a school education, nor is she allowed near a stage at all. In the Elizabethan era, women were not allowed to act at all.
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Virginia Woolf writes: “It is inconceivable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day could have possessed Shakespeare’s genius. Because a genius like Shakespeare’s is not born in a hard-working, uneducated, and subservient people. Still, there must have been some kind of genius among women as well as the working class. But it certainly never found its way onto paper. ” Judith Shakespeare sees only one way out of her dilemma: suicide.
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Who has what resources available?
Woolf also invents another character, Mary, who is practically her alter ego. She goes to two universities: one that is centuries old, has a lot of money and only accepts men, and one more recent, for women. At the men’s university, as a woman, she is not allowed to walk across the lawn, nor does she have access to the library. In addition, the food for the male students is so delicious that they can philosophize very well afterwards, while the women have to console themselves over the bad canteen food with a digestive schnapps.
Prunes and schnapps – that sounds rather funny, like a little problem. But basically this still concerns our societies today: Who has what resources and is allowed to use what resources?
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Care work and Bechdel test
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“A room to yourself” anticipates a number of later feminist discourses. As early as 1929, Virginia Woolf posed the question why work is valued so differently – and why typical activities of women are given so much less attention. Today we are still discussing the value of care work and nursing staff is applauded, but still poorly paid.
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The idea of the so-called Bechdel test also appears in this essay, i.e. the question of whether two women are talking about something other than a man in a film or a story. Virginia Woolf laments how few exciting female characters there are in literature, how exclusively women are perceived in relation to men. And that applies not only to fiction, but also to historiography, which is more interested in rulers and their wars than in the living conditions of women. Basically she is calling for a “her-story”, a female historiography.
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Relationships between women – beyond rivalry
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At the end of the 1960s, “A room to yourself” was rediscovered by feminists, today the essay has a status as a classic. It is worth reading it over and over again, because every time there is a new aspect to discover: Comments on women’s friendships and lesbian love, on the terrible feeling of having to deny yourself for fear of losing your job – and the liberation that means financial independence within a relationship. Virginia Woolf’s highly literary writing style may detract from this, but “A Room to Yourself” is a martial arts script – and one of the most elegant to date.
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Zündfunk colleague Laura Freisberg has been moderating a feminist reading club in Munich for six years. Because right now there is time to read, she made a totally subjective best-of selection for us and presents her favorite feminist classics.
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