Virginia Woolf Professions For Women

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.

In Virginia Woolf’s speech “Professions for Women”, it employs various techniques in order to get her argument across. Throughout the speech Virginia Woolf brings forward a problem that is still relevant today: gender inequality. Woolf’s combination brings of extended metaphors, irony, vivid imagery, anaphora and repetition emphasizes her philosophical ideal of supporting gender equality.

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.

Being a woman had restrictions in many different areas like voting, education, and professions. One main challenge that women faced during the progressive era was “exclusion from emerging profession” (Brinkley 493). There were many different forms of women’s suffrage movements. Women were concerned about more than just themselves, according to Costain, “women's rights activists are also fundamentally concerned with the advocacy of nonviolence” (Costain). Women wanted more than just jobs, voting, and higher education. They wanted to be seen as equal. They wanted stereotypes such as “the housewife” to stop.

Virginia Woolf is a famous novelist, critic, and essayist. She is most known for her novels such as: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Common Reader, and several more. These novels are both fiction and nonfiction, and include compelling psychological insight. Professions for Women is another one of her famous works, and it is the shortened version of a speech that Virginia Woolf gave on January 21, 1931 to the Women’s Service League. In this speech, Woolf conveyed her message about women in the professional world through the use of multiple rhetorical strategies. These strategies include her use of understatements, a variety of tones throughout the speech, and the inclusion of differing sentence structures involving both short sentences and complex sentences. Overall, Woolf has a strong belief that women should be free to work in the professional world, and she conveys this quite well through the use of these strategies.

A woman is given limited freedom. Something as simple as a room could give her a sense of liberty. In Virginia Woolf's article, she claims that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Woolf suggests that having a room literally allows women to have their own space to write, but figuratively traps them in their own thoughts due to a lack of freedom. In the works of Jamaica Kincaid, Virginia Woolf, and Alice Walker, the female figures have shown how their own thoughts, reflection, and creativity could be used as a sense of freedom.

Although women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced oppression and unequal treatment, some people strove to change common perspectives on the feminine sex. John Stuart Mill, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Virginia Woolf were able to reach out to the world, through their literature, and help change the views that society held towards women and their roles within its structure. During the Victorian era, women were bound to domestic roles and were very seldom allowed to seek other positions. Most men and many women felt that if women were allowed to pursue interests, outside traditional areas of placement that they would be unable to be an attentive

Surely, she craved to write—meaning to work here—endangered her husband’s position as an authority. He would not have control any longer toward the narrator—his wife. In the 19th century upper class and middle class women were not expected to earn their own living. Women rarely had careers and most professions refused entry to women. In the middle of the 19th century it was virtually impossible for women to become doctors, engineers, architects, accountants or bankers. After a long struggle the medical profession allowed women to become doctors. It was not until 1910 that women were allowed to become accountants and bankers. However, there were still no women diplomats, barristers or judges. Women were allowed to become teachers majority of women became teaches but this was also a low paying job.

Woolf demonstrates how women writers have often failed in this because of our frustration and bitterness with a world that presented to us and our writing not welcome, or even indifference, but hostility (41). She makes it clear that if there is ever going to be a “Shakespeare’s sister,” we must---at least while we are writing---swallow that sense of having been wronged, for it stands as an impediment to our creativity. This is the mental freedom that women writers must attain.

It is unfair that literature teaches women to be such things, it teaches women “To become women nurses rather than doctor, secretaries rather than attorneys or corporate executives, sex symbols rather than thinkers, elementary school teachers rather than university professors.” (Feminist Criticism 1132)

Woolf supports this claim by focusing on the anonymous writer named “Anon” (anonymous), that we as readers have seen so many times in literature. Could this “Anon” have been a woman, this “Anon” that has written so many poems and ballads? From Woolf’s point of view, “whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination” (54). She does not reach a conclusion as to the lack of women writers before the 18th century, she can only make assumptions on the time period and enlighten her audience to make sure that women are able to express their creativity without any constraints issued by society.

Women fought very hard for their rights in the workplace. Some of them, including Susan B Anthony, went above and beyond the norm. Yet, today our rights are still not the same as a man’s. At one point women weren’t allowed to work at all, and today they are allowed to have jobs while still being home makers. Although improvements have been made, there are still several dilemmas that need to be addressed. A women earns less than a man when doing the same work, and that is extremely unfair. Another issue in the workplace is that men underestimate women due to lack of strength and discrimination. There are also the issues of pregnancy and sexual

Women have experienced a historic situation of inequality in the social as well as professional aspects. Women were normally the ones that would take care of children, do the chores in the house, and in rural areas; they would work in the field with the rest of the family. However, today’s women have become more self-sufficient and independent from the predominant male figure within every historical family. Gender inequality in the workplace is becoming less common; yet, gender is a factor that affects men and women. Especially women have been subjected to a historical discrimination that has influenced society to decide which job is more suitable for women than men. However women have confronted and tried to break down the barriers that

Many female writers see themselves as advocates for other creative females to help find their voice as a woman. Although this may be true, writer Virginia Woolf made her life mission to help women find their voice as a writer, no gender attached. She believed women had the creativity and power to write, not better than men, but as equals. Yet throughout history, women have been neglected in a sense, and Woolf attempted to find them. In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, she focuses on what is meant by connecting the terms, women and fiction. Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and

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.