Virginia Woolf "A Room Of One's Own" Chapter 3

Chapter 3

It was disappointing that the only insight after a day of research was the fact that women were poorer than men. Mary Benton decided to go to the roots of this matter and looked up the words "women" and "position of" in the latest available history book by Professor Trevelyan[1]. What she was reading was the following: Beating a wife was a recognized right of man in 1470, which was exercised without shame throughout the social classes.

Likewise had a daughter who refused to marry the predestinated husband to be aware that she could be locked in, battered and pushed around the room without sympathy of the public. Not personal affections were relevant for a marriage, but only the family’s greed especially in the chivalrous upper class.

Even two hundred years later women of the middle and upper classes were only allowed to select their husbands themselves in very rare cases. The predestinated husbands were their master, at least insofar as permissible by law. In spite of that, Shakespeare’s women did not seem to lack personality and character. But this was only the woman in literature. In reality they were locked in, battered and pushed around.

In the rest of Professor Trevelyan’s book women were mentioned utmost seldom, only a queen or a high ranking lady. But by no means, a woman belonging to the middle class could take part in a great movement possessing nothing but her common sense and character. A woman of the Elizabethan era did not have any money, was married before she was grown up, most probably at the age of fifteen or sixteen.

She was not sent to school. She had no opportunity to study grammar and logic, never mind reading Horaz or Vergil. Every now and then she was reading a few pages but soon admonished by her parents to stir the soup, to darn the leggings and not to waste time with books and papers.

If she felt called to develop her poetic talent she would not only be hampered and hindered by others but also by her own contradicting feelings. A woman with a poetic gift, born in the 16th century was an unhappy woman.

Even in the 19th century she did not have her own room, unless her parents were extremely rich. Her pocket money dependant from her father’s voluntary will reached for her clothes at best. Still women were regarded as being inferior to men. Mr. Oscar Browning[2], once a great men in Cambridge, who examined also girls in Girton and Newham said, after looking through various exams, that he still have the impression that the best woman is intellectual inferior to the worst man. At Shakespeare’s time actresses and two hundred years later female composers and preachers were compared to dancing or upright walking dogs. Female artists were not encouraged. On the contrary, they were snubbed, insulted and advised.

[1] George Macaulay Trevlyan (1876-1962) was teaching history in Cambridge. His history of England, quoted by Virginia Woolf was issued in 1926.
[2] Oscar Browning (1837-1923) historian in Cambridge