I'm paraphrasing Virginia Woolf in this post, referring to her extended essay entitled "A Room of One's Own" first published in October 1929. The essay derived from a series of lectures she delivered at Cambridge University and was ostensibly written from the point of view of a fictional narrator exploring women as writers of, and characters in, fiction. It presents the argument that women need a space of their own--literally and figuratively--to write in order to be able to produce within the structure of society where women did not have a clear right to a role other than as wife and mother.
Embedded within the idea of a room of one's own is the implicit notion that a woman must also have the financial means to pay for that room (and secure it for life), and that women's relative poverty (contrasted with men in similar stations in life), legal rights (or lack of), and societal roles often prevented them from having that room where they could write, or otherwise create, freely.
Woolf herself was deprived of a formal education because her father, like many others of that era, did not believe in wasting education on girls. Only the boys were sent to school. Any learning that did occur was usually of the kind thought to be useful in attracting and holding a mate, but nothing along the lines of an actual career or profession.
So what does this have to do with our house?
