As the 1920s were brought to a close, much of the developed world had already undergone radical social changes regarding women’s rights. Most of these movements were organized around political rights not given to women that had long been enjoyed by men, such as the right to vote, own property, and equal access to higher education. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, while influential at its time, has since become a staple of feminist literature. While Woolf makes clear that she is opposed to society’s domestication and objectification of women, most of the argument in her essay concerns women’s rights in the political world. This includes women’s suffrage, which was finally granted in full to women living in the United Kingdom in 1928, only a year before the book’s publication. In a time when European nationalism was at its peak, it might not have been uncommon for writers like Woolf to directly address the aspects of society under government control, such as legal matters in owning property and voting. After all, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the sovereign state we know today, was formed only two years prior to publication in 1927. Yet the women’s rights movement was much greater than the attainment of political power, and Woolf knew that. Many of the social inequalities seen between men and women were brought upon them by society itself, such as popular views of traditional gender roles, and what were considered men and women’s respective “realms.”
It is appropriate and fitting that Woolf would base her essay around the metaphorical “room of one’s own,” which in itself suggests that men and women have long lived and worked in their own separate realms. A woman’s role was largely seen as being subservient to men, and also to remain in the house and tend to the children. In contrast, a man’s realm was defined by his trade, and on a more social level, by his wealth and his character. In this respect women have long experienced a sort of either dehumanization or hyper-humanization- depending on how one perceives the situation- that is characterized by a woman’s fundamental ability to reproduce without any importance given to her personal morality or character. As a writer Woolf had long fought against these traditional gender roles by creating detailed and complex female characters in her novels, but even such characters were often privileged in ways many women at the time were not. Much like the women seen in Shakespeare, most of the female characters in Woolf’s novels are, like Virginia Woolf herself, of a high social standing and are usually from relatively wealthy or influential families. Characters such as Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay, and Jinny were not portrayals of typical women of the time, and throughout her work Woolf has imposed a sense of elitism that lingers over her greater desire for women’s rights. Perhaps Woolf had forgotten that not all men went to college and lived luxurious, self-centered lives typical of the men she portrayed in her novels, and even within A Room of One’s Own, there is a lack of recognition of the great social injustices that plagued England during the time aside from those pertaining to solely to women. If Woolf thought that by the twenty-first century all humans regardless of sex would have access to education and political influence, she would be sorely disappointed to see the world in which we live today. Aside from the numerous gender-related discrepancies that remain to this day (which in all due respect have lessened since the 1920s thanks in part to the efforts of Woolf and her peers), there also remain inequalities pertaining to race and social class to which the elite have long turned a blind eye. It would not help Woolf’s argument to state that even white men living in the wealthiest nation in the world often do not have access to higher education, but one can subdue such thoughts in recognition of the impact and accomplishment in women’s rights that have followed in the wake of her work. Despite these accomplishments, Woolf ultimately fails to acknowledge the correlation between the elite and the oppressors, and the poor and the oppressed, and she is strangely silent when it comes to the needs of working class women who would not be able to attend a university regardless of what the law permits them to do so. Perhaps Virginia Woolf did realize all of this, but she played to her strengths and knew that such a social movement would need to stem from those with influence. Perhaps I am just overly invested in the troubles of the twenty-first century that it inhibits me from accurately representing the political landscape of the 1920s. After all, Woolf never blamed the government, she blamed society, and that is something we should all remember.
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