Virginia Woolf's Transformative Touch

Reading Woolf's extended essay 'A Room of One's Own' is a transformative moment for one 15-year-old Tucson girl.

From an essay in the Los Angeles Times...

The book was "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf. The extended essay is based on a series of lectures on women and fiction that Woolf gave in 1928 at two women's colleges at Cambridge University. In examining the lives of female writers, Woolf concluded that for a woman to write, she needed two things that most of her contemporaries did not have: money and a room of her own. The idea led her to speculate about what would happen to a brilliant woman without resources or an outlet for her creativity. That woman could indeed be frustrated to the point of suicide, Woolf thought. The book ends with an exhortation to women to continue writing, so that one day their daughters might know true freedom of the mind.

As the daughter of a mother who went to college during the 1960s and fought the feminist battle for me, I had grown up with the feeling that I really could be anything I wanted to be. It never occurred to me that the world had once been unwelcoming of female achievement, even though my mother told me that when she was growing up there were two accepted career paths for women — teacher or secretary.

So, as I tiptoed into Woolf's solitary room each day, leaving the sidewalks of Tucson radiating heat in waves and imagined the pungent scent of dry creosote for the grassy lawns of early 20th Century Oxford, upon which Woolf, and women in general, were not allowed to tread, I began to feel something I hadn't before.