You Go, Girl!          

          I think it has been interesting to see how woman have gained their voice through the different literary eras. From Mary Wollstonecraft who politely asserted that women had the right to own their own property to Elizabeth Barrett Browning who poetically implied that women were being smothered by the empty Victorian way of life to Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf, who very clearly claims that women not only have the right to do something productive and meaningful, but also that they need to be able to provide for themselves. In her essay, “A Room of One’s Own”, Woolf writes about the fictional Oxbridge and Fernham as a way of showing the unfair treatment of women in English laws and practices. We can see by looking at the different ways that the colleges were built how Woolf was criticizing traditional views about property and education for women.

          Oxbridge, which was actually a common slang term for Oxford and Cambridge, represents the men’s college. The way that Woolf describes it, we can see a large and looming group of group of buildings which was built on what was once a marsh. Teams of horses and generations of men dedicated time and energy hauling stones, staining glass and puttying the roofs – Woolf writes, “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.” She writes even more about all of the gold and silver that has gone into the building and maintaining of Oxbridge; kings, queens, manufacturers, merchants and wealthy families have all donated money to the education of men. Everyone gave willingly, of course, because there was clear value in educating men; no one questioned that men had a right to education – after all, they held sole rights to money and property. This passage makes me think of the bible passages that describe the building of Solomon’s temple with the flowing gold and silver and the hours of labor that went into it. It also emphasizes the long practiced and enthusiastic support, both theoretical and financial, of the basic necessity of education . . . for men.

          The women’s college, Fernham, has a much different history; it has been recently established, and just barely at that. Women formed committees, wrote letters, addressed envelopes, drew up circulars and held meetings; they were forced to hold fund-raisers and bazaars “and it was only after a long struggle and with the utmost difficulty that they got thirty thousand pounds together.” This is a stark contrast from the ever-flowing stream of money that ran into the men’s college. In Woolf’s notes she quotes Lady Stephen who said – concerning the thirty thousand pounds – “considering how few people really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal.” Not only did the women’s college not have the financial support that the men’s college did, they did not even have theoretical support; much of the population believed that educating women was futile – after all, they had no rights to either earn or keep their own money. Woolf mentions that women from past generations were unable establish a college for their daughters because of these restrictions on them; their money legally belonged to their husbands, who saw no purpose in female education. Therefore, any backing – financial or otherwise – had to be earned through hours of hard work and fighting for a basic right to learn.

          When Virginia Woolf says that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” she is boldly claiming that women have the same rights as men to education and property. For years, women had been treated as possessions; they were traded by their families for titles and position; their money was taken from them and given to their husbands, who kept them in the dark by refusing to educate them. During these same years, women were speaking out against this oppression – first politely, then poetically and finally boldly. Virginia Woolf . . . you go, girl!