Virginia Woolf Research Paper

Virginia Woolf’s fulsome poise and self-worth proves that she is worthy of being admired and looked up to by other women. She shares her beliefs of willingly going against what society has in mind for women and encourages women to be who they please to be. In doing so, she hopes to open up the sturdy doors that keep many women trapped away from their natural rights. All in all, Virginia Woolf’s speech, “Professions for Women” encourages women to ignore the limits society sets on them and be who they wish to be and do what they desire. Virginia Woolf’s rhetorical strategies in addition to her use of metaphor contribute to the overall effectiveness in fulfilling the purpose of her essay.

Woolf believes that women are different from men both in their social history as well as inherently, and that each of these differences has had important effects on the development of women 's writing.

There are many African American heroes who have contributed to my life; however, the one who impacted me most was Mildred Loving. Mrs. Loving was born in 1939 in Central Point, Virginia, a small town in the deep South. Racial bias was not an issue in this community because both black and white people were able to interact and form friendships with each other. As a result, Mildred and Richard were able to socialize and become friends. However, schools were not integrated, so they were unable to attend the same school.

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.

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.

In the two passages Virginia Woolf compares to meals at a men’s college and at a women’s college to show her frustration at the inferior treatment of women. The first meal contained sweet salads, thin potatoes, and sprouts that looked like roses, while the second contained rumps of cattle, curled sprouts, and plain gravy soup. This clearly contrasts the expense and luxury afforded to the men with the parsimonious nature of the women’s in order to show the way men are valued and invested in, and women are merely tolerated. Woolf expresses her anger not only in words but in her sentences and sentence structure.

Woolf begins her speech by immediately acknowledging the reasons she was invited to speak for the Society. Through the use of anaphora, she is able to contest that she does, indeed, meet the criteria, as it is true she is an employed woman. However, Woolf shrouds a bit of doubt on her credibility with the addition of the rhetorical question, “but what professional experiences have I had?” (1). Nevertheless, she quickly recovers by stating that though she was a woman pursuing a career in literature, a profession in which “there are fewer experiences for women than any other” (1), she was able to make a name for herself like those who had paved the road before her. Woolf admits that her experience was not as rough as the women who preceded her because they “ma[de] the path smooth, and regulat[ed] [her] steps”. As a result, she had “very few material obstacles in her way” (1). Woolf incorporates the subtle use of a metonym when she states, “no demand was made upon the family purse” (1), in order to establish that her family suffered no economic strife through her writing.

At the time Virginia Woolf wrote The Years and Three Guineas, there were many differences between men and women, one of which was education. Most women were not educated, which prevented them from entering into agency. Women allowed themselves to be played by history. In order for them to change a world that was dominated by men, women needed to refuse what history said was their essence, and rather, use that essence to create critical ways of being in the world. The photograph, "a crudely colored photograph--of your world as it appears to us who see it from the threshold of the private house; through the shadow of the veil that St. Paul still lays upon your eyes; from the bridge which connects the private house with the world of

The differences between men’s and women’s colleges were considerable in Virginia Woolf’s day. Rather than proclaim this in an ordinary way, Woolf uses the separate meals served at each college to illustrate the differences between the schools. Woolf makes a far more forceful, thoughtful distinction between the male and female schools through such contrast than if she had simply numbered their variations. Woolf details the relative poverty of the women’s school, and therefore women’s position in society, through varied sentence structure, expression and imagery between the descriptions of the meals. Virginia Woolf uses different structures in each passage to portray the judgement within the educational system to expose this part of society.

Woolf starts her speech off by portraying strong understatements. In paragraph 1, she starts off by saying, “It’s true. I am a women; it's true I’m employed”. She uses a level of sarcasm when presenting this part to show that although she is a women, she has excelled well enough to become employed in the professional world. After this, Woolf states that her literary career was “cut many years ago” and that it built her career by making her path smooth and regulating her steps. Although her literary career was a helpful, she tries to play it off as though it was easy for her; in reality she faced many challenges. Then she goes on to state, because paper is so cheap, women have been more successful as writers than anything else. This allows Woolf to imply the financial differences between men and women, without blatantly saying so. Woolf is making it seem as though this career is easy just because it's the profession she was able to excel in. She uses understatements for two reasons. First, to create a connection with her audience. In a way that they see her as a peer, rather than a superior power. Secondly, she uses it to help create a sense of serenity among women who are too hesitant to start a profession. In sum, Woolf's use of understatements aids in portraying her argument to her audience.

While Woolf makes very good points throughout her essay based many interesting points, one cannot help

Woolf writes about life for women during that time period. She herself being a woman, found it hard to get her work to become public. During that time women are seen as property and that they must follow social norms. Things such as obeying her husband and waiting to be allowed to speak(if she were allowed to speak) were “just how things are done”. In society women are looked down on and seen as things or property rather than people who have feelings,

The first central idea in the relationship between woolf’s text and ophelia is gender roles . This central idea shows us how women cannot move up beyond men and how they are oppressed and shunned to the bottom and

The title of my project is Virginia Woolf as a feminist in reference to Mrs. Dalloway.

Due to their lack of educational opportunities during the Victorian era, women were more educated in domesticity, while men were taught in various subjects. Wollstonecraft describes the education that women receive to be “a disorderly kind of education” (161). If women were given equal educational opportunities as men, then it would allow them to become more empowered. Wollstonecraft states, “Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience…” (163). Meaning that by providing women with a educational equivalent to men, then it would put an end to women having to be reliant on men and be able to independent. Therefore, women will not have to feel inferior to their male counterparts. She encourages women to become more empowered and challenge the gender constructs of society.