Monday, October 15, 2007

HW 21: Dear Little Cousin

Dear little cousin,
My understanding of Virginia Woolf’s novel, or at least the first chapter in, A Room of One’s Own is that she is talking about the inequities of women writers to men. She gives some examples like when she is sitting by the river gathering her thoughts to write, but she gets interrupted by a man who goes to that college and she is a woman and isn’t supposed to be there. My thought is that she feels like she is excluded from certain things because she is a woman and isn’t allowed access to what the men have access to. Another thing she talks about is literally having a room of her own to be able to write in. She talks about how you have to be able to afford that room and a lot of times women can’t afford that room like men can. I think this piece is important to people because she was ahead of her times in talking about sexism and about the things she couldn’t do because she was a woman.

1 comment:

Tracy Mendham said...

Well done.
I think the comparison of the men's university (Oxbridge) with the women's college (Fernham) is important also--this is a demonstration that women do not have the same access to education, tradition, and money that men do.