Virginia Woolf:
“thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other…”(A Room of One’s Own, 24) And “what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind.”(A Room of One’s Own, 24)
Asking “Why are women poor?”(A Room of One’s Own, 28)
“An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught… And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were funded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king, but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, and from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships… Hence the libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and the swine rooted.”(10) “a scene of masons on a high roof some five centuries ago…was for ever coming alive in my mind and placing itself by another of lean cows and a muddy market…”(10) As she said, “It was impossible not to reflect” on all this…(A Room of One’s Own, 10)
“And (pardon me the thought) I thought, too, of the admirable smoke and drink and the deep armchairs and the pleasant carpets; of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space.”(14)
We might wonder why, “for some reason or other our mothers had mismanaged their affairs very gravely.”(23) “If only [they] had learned the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriate to the use of their own sex, we [women today, in the1920s, that is] might…have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honorable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing mooning about the venerable places of the earth, sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry.”(A Room of One’s Own, 22)
“What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?“(21) If only our mothers had gone into business… but then many of us “would never have come into existence at all,”(23) for no one could do both well – succeed in business and raise children. “Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if [our] mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned. It [was then] only for the last forty-eight years that [any woman] has had a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her husband’s property.”(A Room of One’s Own, 23) So is it any wonder that making money is not the first purpose of most women? And that money more often seems better utilized taking care of children and families – an art called ‘homemaking’ that has been valued as essential to families since ancient times, though those who do the job have been much abused.
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.”(24) “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”(79)
“sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought... There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought.”(5) “The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning… and the mind… was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment.”(6) “There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought.”(5)
“here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it – the change was there.”(A Room of One’s Own, 12) (Paradigms shifting with melting glaciers…the effect not unlike winter giving way to spring… *)
“yet genius…must have existed among women,” even if it “never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor…crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”(50) For “any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.”(51) And “it is all very well for you, who have got yourselves to college and enjoy sitting rooms... of your own to say that genius should disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men and women of genius who mind most what is said of them.” Creativity is a gift to be received, and is wasted if misunderstood or underappreciated. So it is certain that, “Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out.”(A Room of One’s Own, 57)
The obvious conclusion is this: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.”(4) “That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom that the sons of Athenian slaves. Women then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.”(A Room of One’s Own, 112)
“The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have…”(Woolf, 14)
“like a sailing ship always voyaging never arriving”(Woolf, 9)
“How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper, I asked myself…in despair.”(Woolf, 27) (connect Smith words proliferate to obscure truth…)
“For we think back through out mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure.” True, to a point… but we can’t give up on all the great teachers equally. Some have not been fairly represented or deeply examined…(Woolf, *)
But we might hope to “see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality.”(Woolf, 116)
“Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”(Woolf, 31-32)
“thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other…”(A Room of One’s Own, 24) And “what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind.”(A Room of One’s Own, 24)
Asking “Why are women poor?”(A Room of One’s Own, 28)
“An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught… And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were funded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king, but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, and from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships… Hence the libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and the swine rooted.”(10) “a scene of masons on a high roof some five centuries ago…was for ever coming alive in my mind and placing itself by another of lean cows and a muddy market…”(10) As she said, “It was impossible not to reflect” on all this…(A Room of One’s Own, 10)
“And (pardon me the thought) I thought, too, of the admirable smoke and drink and the deep armchairs and the pleasant carpets; of the urbanity, the geniality, the dignity which are the offspring of luxury and privacy and space.”(14)
We might wonder why, “for some reason or other our mothers had mismanaged their affairs very gravely.”(23) “If only [they] had learned the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriate to the use of their own sex, we [women today, in the1920s, that is] might…have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honorable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing mooning about the venerable places of the earth, sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry.”(A Room of One’s Own, 22)
“What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us?“(21) If only our mothers had gone into business… but then many of us “would never have come into existence at all,”(23) for no one could do both well – succeed in business and raise children. “Moreover, it is equally useless to ask what might have happened if [our] mother and her mother before her had amassed great wealth and laid it under the foundations of college and library, because, in the first place, to earn money was impossible for them, and in the second, had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what money they earned. It [was then] only for the last forty-eight years that [any woman] has had a penny of her own. For all the centuries before that it would have been her husband’s property.”(A Room of One’s Own, 23) So is it any wonder that making money is not the first purpose of most women? And that money more often seems better utilized taking care of children and families – an art called ‘homemaking’ that has been valued as essential to families since ancient times, though those who do the job have been much abused.
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.”(24) “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”(79)
“sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought... There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought.”(5) “The spirit of peace descended like a cloud from heaven, for if the spirit of peace dwells anywhere, it is in the courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning… and the mind… was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment.”(6) “There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought.”(5)
“here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said, but to the murmur or current behind it. Yes, that was it – the change was there.”(A Room of One’s Own, 12) (Paradigms shifting with melting glaciers…the effect not unlike winter giving way to spring… *)
“yet genius…must have existed among women,” even if it “never got itself on to paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor…crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.”(50) For “any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.”(51) And “it is all very well for you, who have got yourselves to college and enjoy sitting rooms... of your own to say that genius should disregard such opinions; that genius should be above caring what is said of it. Unfortunately, it is precisely the men and women of genius who mind most what is said of them.” Creativity is a gift to be received, and is wasted if misunderstood or underappreciated. So it is certain that, “Among your grandmothers and great-grandmothers there were many that wept their eyes out.”(A Room of One’s Own, 57)
The obvious conclusion is this: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write.”(4) “That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom that the sons of Athenian slaves. Women then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.”(A Room of One’s Own, 112)
“The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have…”(Woolf, 14)
“like a sailing ship always voyaging never arriving”(Woolf, 9)
“How shall I ever find the grains of truth embedded in all this mass of paper, I asked myself…in despair.”(Woolf, 27) (connect Smith words proliferate to obscure truth…)
“For we think back through out mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure.” True, to a point… but we can’t give up on all the great teachers equally. Some have not been fairly represented or deeply examined…(Woolf, *)
But we might hope to “see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality.”(Woolf, 116)
“Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”(Woolf, 31-32)