Woolf's Economics of Gender Inequality in A Room of One's Own

Introduction: Woolf and the Female Protagonist

The seeds of gender equality, however elusive such a thing may continue to be, were surely planted by the frustration of women confined to roles crafted by longstanding patriarchy. Herein, women inclined toward any level of independent thought or transcendent desire were stunted by the obligations of social propriety. Women were strictly daughters, wives, and mothers. In a world where men pontificated abstractly while affording little time for emotional intimacy with family, women were the cross-bearers of domestic responsibility and the perpetuation of love. There was little time or space beyond that in which a woman could propose to be herself, thinking and acting upon her own desires.

Virginia Woolf's work invited a new perspective on the individual woman, both in times of male-dominated stagnancy and in self-guided metamorphosis. One of Woolf's first watershed devices was the very simple assertion of a female protagonist — or, as is the case in some of her most significant works, multiple female protagonists — whose willful uniqueness highlighted an otherwise dull and superficial universe. And yet, when asked to speak at length on the subject of the female protagonist throughout history, Woolf compiled the essays making up A Room of One's Own around the basic premise that female protagonists have frequently been manifested under conditions of severe limitation. This was especially true when the work was first published in 1929, a time which Woolf describes as having been defined by a preceding history of substantial gender-based economic inequality.

The Central Argument: Money, Space, and Literary Voice

At the heart of her discussion, Woolf makes the argument that women in fiction have historically been a poor reflection of the ways in which actual women think or feel. Primarily, this is because women themselves have so consistently been excluded from the recording of history, both as author and as subject. The idea that the female has throughout human history been defined through the eyes of the opposite sex suggests a clear distortion — one that extends both to the portrayal of women in fiction and to the impression that women themselves have no story to tell.

This underscores the most important declaration of Woolf's discussion, which pertains to the obstructions that have kept women from the opportunity to tell their story with greater accuracy. She centers her argument "upon one minor point — a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved."

Here, Woolf cites the inherently unequal nature of society as it is precipitated by the absence of material power available to women. The notion that women could not be expected to make a living through the writing of fiction — magnified by the belief that a woman should not be expected to work for a living in the first place — functions in Woolf's perspective as a clear impediment to women's entrance into the field of literature. This is, in turn, a clear impediment to literary fiction's capacity to accurately portray the female figure.

Patriarchy, Property, and Economic Exclusion

Woolf traces this experience to something we begin to understand as a socially enforced device of patriarchy. If power was defined by property, and women had neither, they might at best have been considered the property of a powerful man. As Woolf considers a history rife with instances of arranged marriages and women of ambition relegated to the quiet confines of the home, she attaches this reality to a clear economic principle. Her discussion reflects on the idea of heredity, which feeds into the perpetuation of familial and cultural wealth.

In a move that is less feminist polemic and more critical self-examination, Woolf considers derisively those women who had previously helped to establish the egregious patterns of patriarchy. She writes: "at the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex. What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses? Looking in at shop windows? Flaunting in the sun at Monte Carlo?"

Of course, there is no small degree of sarcasm in this line of questioning. Woolf is patently aware, as she frequently notes, that forces of irresistible and ingrained persistence dispatched women to behave in these ways, taking little consideration of opportunities for self-expression or self-betterment. But she decries this condition as one which has prevented even those women given the rare and unlikely chance for a room and the resources to produce work there from effectively depicting the real woman in fiction. This is because such an author would have been deprived of so many access points to the wider world that she could hardly be expected to channel lived experience into something more than vivid fictional speculation.

Works Cited

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. 1929. eBooks at Adelaide.