A Room Of One's Own By Virginia Woolf

Women have long been fighting for their right to be seen as equal to men. Even to this day, women continue to fight for their rights, things such as the right to non-gender discriminatory wages. While there may be some arguments over the state of gender equality in the modern world, it is undeniable that there have been great strides made toward recognizing the female 's worth in the workforce and as a human being. Despite these strides, however, things are still not yet ideal for women and many of the issues females face today are the very same issues that have been plaguing them for decades. While it is unfortunate the oppression of women has been so long-lived, the length of that exposure has thankfully enabled many talented writers to both lament over the fact and emphasize the need for gender equality.

Back in the day almost everyone viewed woman to be the person who cleans, cooks, has children, and obeys her husband. Even woman themselves had this view hammered into their minds at such a young age, the views that women are inferior to men. This stigma of woman can be found traced throughout Virginia Woolf’s essay of two meals, a meal for men and a meal for women at a college. She uses numerous composition techniques and effectively disperses them throughout her narrative. By doing so, she accurately demonstrates her views on society’s stigma of a woman's role in an eloquent manner.

In the modern world women work, vote, run for office and the list goes on. In most aspects, women are equal to men. However, this was not always the case. In centuries past, women were not viewed as being equal to men socially, intellectually, or politically and were thought incapable of accomplishing anything of value. Consequently, many cultures held the view that women were possessions whose only purpose was to be subservient to men. The view of women as mere objects is evident in various works of literature throughout the ages. Two classic works of literature that exemplify this are The Thousand and One Nights and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of

Today the equality between men and woman is closer then it ever has before in history, with women CEO’s and stay at home dads. This happened because of the strong woman in history fighting for the same rights as man, private property, creative freedom, and the power to use their intellect. Virginia Woolf is one of those ladies arguing that, “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." She believes that women are locked in some sort of intellectual prison and not being able to have money or privacy keeps them locked, unable to blossom intellectually.

Virginia Woolf, an avid woman novelist of the early twentieth century, faced many difficulties on her journey to becoming a successful writer. In her speech, which she delivers to the National Society for Women’s Service, she recounts her experiences as both a newly acquainted journalist and already established professional, all while giving detailed accounts of her struggles with the ghosts of oppression. These personal experiences not only help to establish and defend her credibility, they also serve as a means of developing her perspective on women’s functionality in successful careers. In addition, Woolf utilizes various rhetorical devices, such as the extended metaphor and parallelism, to portray the constant struggles of women in the workforce. She attempts to shed light on what obstructs all social advancement for women – the Victorian ideal of femininity – while encouraging her audience to confront this internal obstacle. Though she intended for her speech to be advice for women in any and all professions who are facing their own internal battles against oppression, Woolf insists her story is only one of many that have yet to be told.

Emily Hergenrader English 10 Honors 6th Hour November 24, 2014 A Struggle for Power All throughout history, women have been treated as if they are inferior to men, and society sets limitations for women due to this inferiority.

James Baldwin once said, “Everybody 's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality. ” From the moment babies are born, most parents treat boys and girls differently. One study says that parents have different expectations for boys and girls as early as 24 hours from birth, according to Susan D. Witt of the University of Akron. According to healthychildren.org, infants become aware of their sex within in the first year of life. Between ages 1 and 2, children begin to notice the physical differences between males and females, and typically by their third birthday they are able to easily identify themselves as a boy or a girl. People are faced with many obstacles that alter their life. Just like the many controversies in society, “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin discusses a young man being gay in a society and a family who are simply not ready to accept his sexual orientation and neither does he. This fiction also emphasizes the battle that he faces with self-acceptance. Gender identity and American norms in society is widely discussed almost every day. Americans are becoming more open and accepting of the LGBT community, as well as against the LGBT community.

Harvey Milk once said “it takes no compromising to give people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no survey to remove repressions.” He lived in a time when there was discrimination of homosexuals and he experienced it; being the first gay man elected to Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. In the 1940’s and 50’s homosexual people were discriminated it was viewed as a disease and was described as “sociopathic personality disturbance. Homosexual activities were illegal and people were imprisoned for having consensual sex with another man. Despite the dangers and difficulties, homosexual people found a way to meet and confide in themselves. Most wrote books as a way to express themselves; it gave

Gender inequality will always affect the portrayal of women in society, the weaker, unnecessary, and other sex. It is not just a subject of the past, and still holds a name in society. However in the olden eras, the way women were treated and looked at was in a much harsher condition. In Shakespeare’s Othello and Shelley’s Frankenstein, women’s roles in the books are solely based on the way they are treated in their time period. The portrayal of women in these books demonstrate that they can never be in the same standing as men and therefore will never have the same respect as them. In both Othello and Frankenstein women are treated as property, used to better men’s social standards, and lack a voice, which demonstrates that in

Woolf and Wollstonecraft both wrote about the fact that women with a great mind, would not have survived in their time period. Wollstonecraft said “that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village”. Along with that, Woolf wanted to “see woman placed in a station in which she would advance, instead of retarding”. Both women were fighting for females to be given the chance to better themselves, rather than being forced to go insane. Just like them, women are having to fight for a chance to prove their brilliance. Feminism may not be as harsh as it use to be, but it still holds a lot of power over young girls today. Women

Milton gives an expanded story of the Devil and his purpose and how he came about. The most intriguing part of this story is when he tempts humans into eating from the tree of knowledge. This part is important because of the impact that; this one event has had on our lives whether you believe in it or not. In the bible this event is what ultimately lays out gender roles and the responsibilities of men and women to one another. For the sin that Eve has committed and also “influenced” Adam to do: in Genesis 3 verse 16, God says to Eve, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you”. The blame falls on Eve she receives the greater punishment. For the rest of history, her gender, has been sentenced by God to serve men. However,

English writer and modernist of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf, in “If Shakespeare Had a Sister”(1929), asserts the topic of women’s lack of opportunity caused by male opinion. She supports her claim by emphasizing the absence of women in literature compared to men, examining how they were portrayed and treated, and the effect said treatment had on those women. Woolf’s purpose is to bring awareness of injustice inflicted on women in that time period in order to stress the need for equality. Therefore, she supports her claim through the use of imagery, then by using logical arguments, and finally by expressing a disappointed tone in order to allow the audience to acknowledge the discrimination of women.

Virginia Woolf’s “In search of a room of one’s own,” published in 1929, represent the value, respect and equality of women as compared to men back in the sixteenth century. It was originally published in “Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own”. The targeted audience includes women. The purpose of the text is to discuss difficulties of women that used to face in the historical era of literature and artwork. The essay is about women who were so much discouraged to go to school.

Despite being under the rule of a female monarch, women faced many inequalities and suffering during the Victorian age. Examples of these inequalities include not having the right to vote, unequal educational and employment opportunities. Women were even denied the legal right to divorce in most cases. As the Norton Anthology states, these debates over women’s rights and their roles came to be known as the “woman question” by the Victorians. This lead to many conflicting struggles, such as the desire by all for women to be educated, yet they are denied the same opportunities afforded to men. While these women faced these difficulties, there was also the notion that women should be domestic and feminine. There was an ideal that women should be submissive and pure because they are naturally different. The industrial revolution introduced women into the labor workforce, but there was still a conflict between the two identities; one of an employed woman, and one of a domestic housewife.

The creativity and ideas of women have been stifled and ignored since the beginning of time. Seen as the weaker, less intelligent sex women were not believed to be able to create important works, especially those of literary importance. In “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf, the author expresses a simple idea that women need at least a room of their own to produce the work that they have been told they are unable to. Through stories of her thought process to reach this conclusion, Virginia Woolf concludes the idea that people should “think of things in themselves” (39) and in doing so presents a challenge to both sexes to understand what she argues are the causes and problems stemming from lack of economic freedom for women and social paradigms that hinder the act of truly thinking independently.