A Room of One's Own

It was a crisp fall day in the late 1920s, and the novelist Virginia Woolf was strolling along a river that ran through a picturesque college campus. As she lolled in the grass, she became lost in thought. Deep in this intellectual reverie, she felt on the verge of a sharp insight – until, suddenly, a man interrupted her peaceful introspection.

The interloper informed Woolf that the riverbank lawn was reserved for scholars at the university and that she must move along. Slightly miffed, she returned to the walking path. Unfortunately, the disruption ruined her train of thought – her insight, whatever it was, was lost for good.

Yet the scene brought her to another thought – this one on the relationship between gender and creativity.

The key message here is: To achieve artistic greatness, a woman needs money and space.

After the mildly unpleasant encounter on the riverbank, Woolf continued to muse on the barriers keeping women from artistic pursuits. She was struck by the way in which, both historically and in her own day, women were excluded from many academic and cultural institutions. For instance, the nearby library held original copies of works by Milton and Thackeray. Woolf would have loved to see them, but she was barred from entry without a male scholar to accompany her.

Continuing her walk around the college grounds, Woolf marveled at the impressive architecture of the university buildings. She ruminated on how these massive structures represented centuries of accumulated time, money, and effort. The institution had been founded by kings, funded by merchants and magnates, and built by countless laborers. Now, all of those concentrated resources were available almost exclusively to men.

Later in the day, Woolf attended a lavish luncheon with a few fellow intellectuals. While most busied themselves gabbing about gossip and poetry, Woolf continued thinking about social exclusion. She talked to her friend Mary Seton about the local women’s college. While the men’s university was well-funded, the women’s college was just scraping by. It had barely managed to be founded in the first place – and now had to hold fundraisers to continue offering classes.

All this reflection wore on Woolf. She saw that men were often afforded luxurious accommodations for their intellectual pursuits, while women had to struggle with economic insecurity and social precarity. She wondered how these disparate conditions affected the creative output of the respective genders. What could women achieve if they were given the same privileges as their male colleagues?