Amor, Kristine Joyce B.

3EDENG6B

Survey of English and American Literature

The Summary of Virginia Woolf's Women:

Virginia Woolf's Women that is written by Vanessa Curtis is the first biography to focus on
Woolf's close and inspirational female friendships with the key women in her life. The reflect of
these relationships on her emotional life and the inspiration that each woman provides in the
novel. Women inspired and fascinated Woolf until the day she died, evoking not only her
loyalty, love and wit, but also anger, envy and insecurity. It is revealed an honest portrait of
Virginia Woolf as writer, daughter, sister, lover and friend.

In history, a girl was seen before marriage as the property of her father who will choose her
husband or what we call "arranged marriage". If she refuse to accept the marriage, her father had
every right to beat her and lock her up without having to fear any protests being voiced from the
side of the public.
Only if a woman has money and a room of her own she is independent enough to be able to
develop to the full or else she will always be tied down by the conventions of her time and the
society she is living in. Virginia Woolf’s quote, although referring to a certain situation, which
can, however, also be extended to other aspects of life, shows in my opinion clearly her desire
for female independence and freedom. This is probably the reason why she became one of the
leading figures of the Women’s Movement during the so-called ‘second wave’ of emancipation
in the 1970s in which Woolf was re-discovered as a feminist writer and early advocate of
women’s emancipation.

Virginia Woolf’s true motives and her opinions on feminism, emancipation and the Women’s
Movement as well as the Suffrage Movement, however, her work has to be set into the context of
both, her life and the time she was living in. It is necessary to uncover the many facets of
Virginia Woolf for she was a woman who was not easily understood. Often very different,
sometimes even opposing, points of view on one and the same topic can be found throughout her
work, a fact which can simply be explained by the natural changing of one’s perspective during a
lifetime due to experiences made.

When she was already married, her husband is a dominant in their relationship and if he did
not treat her with respect there was no way out. There was an exception if a woman is on the
upper or middle class she had the right to choose her own husband, so she was always dependent
on her father’s will to choose for her partner. 
In conclusion, women have been oppressed since the beginning of time and were basically made
mere objects in the hands of men. Laws made by men made sure that anything in their eyes
necessary could be done in order to keep everything the way it was. The role of women is only
noticeable is their literary works and Virginia Woolf noted that “imaginatively she is of highest
importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover,
she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction and
she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. So she used this for
her inspired words, profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips and in real life experiences.

Taking all this into account it would have been impossible for a woman before the 18th
century to do anything, be it speaking her mind or writing great literature. To stress this fact even
more Virginia Woolf starts following the tracks of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister and asks the
question, What would have happened if a woman in Shakespeare’s time, the Elizabethan age,
had had the same genius as the great playwright and poet and had decided to make use of it.
Criticism scattered in irony Woolf discovers this as the reason for woman’s complete absence
not only from literature but also from history and finds out as well about what she calls the
‘poverty of the female sex’.

Following Julia’s death, Woolf’s older step-sister Stella Duckworth became a surrogate
mother to the seven children of the Stephen family. However, no sooner was she established in
this role than two events snatched away her comforting presence to first her marriage to Jack
Hills, and then immediately following the honeymoon, her sudden death. It results, attributes to
Woolf’s scepticism about the prospects of successful heterosexual love to this trio of family
martyrs.

A whole chapter on Dora Carrington fails to establish any significant influence on Woolf

herself, despite uncovering many similarities between them as creative artists. The two women
were simply rivals for the friendship of Lytton Strachey, to whom they were both attached and
Carrington won hands down on that attachment, for which she paid with her life. In Vita
Sackville-West, the history and nature of their affair is well known an affair facilitated by the
fact that neither of them had sexual relationships with their own husbands. There is a detailed
tracing of the ups and downs of the emotional tensions between them, but the account ignores
opportunities to consider any possible mutual influence as writers.

Mary Beton, Mary Seton or Mary Carmichael is strolling around the grounds of the University
of ‘Oxbridge’ and when she sees how much money has flown into the buildings and faculties,
which were not only endowed by men but were also founded to help their purposes and from
which women were excluded, she starts wondering why not her friend’s mother, nor any of their
mothers, had gone into business, had made a lot of money, which to leave to their daughters, and
had not endowed a college or founded a scholarship which was “appropriated to the use of their
own sex”. She starts wondering why women are so poor and have always been.
One of the main reasons she comes across is the problem of childbearing. If Mary Seton’s
mother had really gone into business at around the age of fifteen or sixteen, as was the usual age
at that time, the thing is that there would have been no Mary. Virginia Woolf is of the opinion
that “to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a
fortune and bearing thirteen children – no human being could stand it.”

She therefore states quite plainly that with the conventions and customs of the time and
without birth control it was absolutely unthinkable for a woman to work and earn money as she
was far too busy taking care of her children and the household. However, women even if they
had had the possibility to work, could not have kept the money they had earned for the law
denied them any property. All their income would have belonged to their husbands before the
1880s and it was for this reason that many women did not even think about going into business
and trying to bring a change about for it would have been a fruitless work.
Virginia Woolf’s expression of the ‘poverty of the female sex’, which in Orlando she also calls
the “dark garment of the female sex”, does not, however, only refer to financial poverty. She also
investigates the effects poverty has on the mind and thus the reason why there were so few
achievements made by women, be it in literature or in other fields.

To escape the conventions and restrictions of their time and to obtain more independence
and freedom of speech women soon joined together in what is generally known as the Women’s
Movement. Up to the present there have been three ‘waves’ of this movement which are also
called the three waves of emancipation. By campaigning and gaining more rights women were
seeking to emancipate themselves from men and the rule of patriarchy.
Ethyl Smyth period in the novel, she has a characteristic of pipe-smoking lesbian feminist
composer, who by the time she met Woolf was seventy-three years old, stone deaf, and sporting
an enormous ear trumpet. Nevertheless, she fell in love with the much younger writer, and
although this feeling was only weakly reciprocated and makes a reasonable case that influences
on Woolf.
The first influences were Smyth’s radical feminism, her support for the Women’s Social and
Political Union (WSPU) and her struggles to find acceptance as a female creative artist in a
musical world which was dominated by men (as it still is).
Due to the fact that women were not allowed the vote and were even, by the Suffrage Reform
Act passed in 1832, strictly forbidden to vote, many unions and associations were founded over
the following years in order to take action and win the vote for women. Slowly the situation
improved and after the Local Government Act in 1894 women were allowed to vote in local
elections.