Essay on Education and Virginia’s Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

“Governor Adlai Stevenson Tells College Women about Their Place in Life, 1955” is an excerpt from a Commencement Address at Smith College in 1955. The speaker tells of how women aren’t just house wives anymore. With men becoming more educated the wife must advance as well. He says that women should keep themselves and those about you straight “not to mention keeping you man straight on the differences between Botticelli and Chianti” (page 334). Basically women at this time were supposed to go to college so they could have intellectual conversations with their intelligent husband. He says, “Once they wrote poetry, now it’s the laundry list” (page 334). Women of this time period didn’t have their

Judith Sargent Murray’s On the Equality of the Sexes reveals the struggles women had in the 17th-18th centuries when it came to equal education opportunities. Women were expected to become people of domestication while men had many opportunities to expand their minds and be ambitious, and be leaders. Women were expected to focus on taking care of their family, not to have minds of their own. They wanted change.

College tuition has skyrocketed over the past decades making the pathway to college less accessible to low-income families. According to the

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.

Alternatively, some may argue that universities offer scholarships that allow theses increasing tuition rates to be affordable to all classes of the economy. However, everyone is not fortunate enough to be granted a scholarship, so many students are left without help. Many people do not possess the needed skills, grades, or social standards that these scholarships require. Everyone is not born with the talent to score touch downs or earn a high ACT score. Correspondingly, there are only a certain amount of scholarships that can be granted, and there are millions of people that are applying for that same

money to pay for their education. Colleges are very expensive and need to start looking at it on the student perspective. Students who are graduating from high-school barely come out with less than $3,000 or less.WIENER, J. (2015) Not Every individual is able to pay for college and this just isn't fair. A high percentage of students are independent while in high school and are forced to work because of their parents low income. What happens to that student? Smart in academics, good athlete but because they cannot pay for their proper education they are forced to forget about their dreams.

“The subject of the Education of Women of the higher classes is one which has undergone singular fluctuations in public opinions” (Cobbe 79). Women have overcome tremendous obstacles throughout their lifetime, why should higher education stand in their way? In Frances Power Cobbe’s essay “The Education of Women,” she describes how poor women, single women, and childless wives, deserve to share a part of the human happiness. Women are in grave need of further improvements in their given condition. Cobbe suggests that a way to progress these improvements manifests in higher education, and that this will help further steps in advance. Cobbe goes on to say that the happiest home, most grateful husband, and the most devoted children came from a woman, Mary Sommerville, who surpassed men in science, and is still studying the wonders of God’s creations. Cobbe has many examples within her paper that shows the progression of women as a good thing, and how women still fulfill their duties despite the fact that they are educated. The acceptance of women will be allowed at the University of New England because women should be able to embrace their abilities and further their education for the benefit of their household, their lives, and their country.

In Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own” (16) if she is to write fiction of any merit. The point as she develops it is a perceptive one, and far more layered and various in its implications than it might at first seem. But I wonder if perhaps Woolf did not really tap the full power of her thesis. She recognized the necessity of the writer’s financial independence to the birth of great writing, but she failed to discover the true relationship to great writing of another freedom; for just as economic freedom allows one to inhabit a physical space---a room of one’s own---so does mental freedom allow one to inhabit one’s own mind and body “incandescent and

In October 1929, at the close of the Feminist Movement, Virginia Woolf published her famous writing, A Room of One’s Own. This feministic extended essay, based on a series of lectures Woolf presented at Newnham College and Girton College, channels Woolf’s thoughts and insights about women and fiction through the character of Mary Benton, who serves as the narrator. Through A Room of One’s Own, Woolf addresses three major points: having money and a room of one’s own (creative freedom), gender roles, and the search for truth. These three themes exist in other short stories such as “The Office” by Alice Munro and “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen, where they reveal themselves in varying degrees.

Education was not equal between the sexes and neither between the classes. Gentlemen were educated at home until they were old enough to attend well-known or lesser schools. A lady’s schooling was

In Chapters Four and Five of A Room of One 's Own,, the focus on Women & Fiction shifts to a consideration of women writers, both actual writers and ultimately one of the author 's own creation.

The late 18th century can be known as the historical period of the Enlightenment. During this time, society was undergoing drastic changes that would impact people even today. These changes were known as “reforms,” and played a big role in politics and ruling during this time period. One of the bigger reforms of this time was that which would grant women a higher education and place them in a position closer to their male counterparts. The enlightenment authors, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft, took part in a debate in which they argued about the purpose and education of women. In an article recently written in The New York Times by Nicholas

In her essay “In Search of a Room of One’s Own” Virginia Woolf used Shakespeare’s sister as a metaphor to explain the position of women in Elizabethan era. Since author finds it difficult to find any trace of women in the Elizabethan era, she creates a fictional character through imagination, and to feel situations that the women in Elizabethan society would have had to go through. Woolf compares fiction to a “spider’s web” (520) that permeates life “at all four corners” (520). Through this metaphor, she personifies narratives of women suffering as a spider’s web that cling to our material reality. For Woolf, our lived stories are a part of this web which can be changed, destroyed or, re-spin with our imagination. In my paper, I argue that Wolfe uses the metaphor of a spider’s web as a heuristic device to make a case for literacy analysis and fiction as tools for exercising narrative agency and challenging stories that deny us representation in this world. To illustrate this, she creates an imaginative character, named Judith Shakespeare, to surface the gender inequality in the Elizabethan era. For this purpose, she not only writes a new chapter of Elizabethan history that centers the perspective of the women, but she also gives voice to women of that era who, like Judith her main character, were silenced and delegitimized by the spider’s web of their time.

Through their works, Kate Chopin and Virginia Woolf were able to portray a certain relationship between women and society. While some literary pieces are optimistic towards women, others are not. In this case, The Awakening, a novella written by Kate Chopin, focuses on the inner battle that the main character Edna faces throughout her life. On the other hand, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, discusses ideas related to gender inequality. Both women seem to be facing inner turmoil that correlates back to the relationship between women and society during these time periods. Ultimately, their experiences are what drives them to change how they fit into societal norms. Therefore, the texts in this essay theorize the relationship between women and society in a way that can be encouraging towards women.

For centuries women have been forced into a role which denied them equal opportunities. Virginia Woolf expresses her frustration on why women were denied privacy in her novel, A Room of One’s Own. Woolf compares the traditional lifestyle tailored made for the opposite sex and the sacrifices that came with it. Women are limited intellectually as to not interfere with their domesticated duties. Even having the same desires for activities and education as men, a women’s place was not allowed in the man’s world.