Introducción a los estudios culturales – Prof.

Vasallo
Paola Longo – 06/26/08

Analysis of Virginia’s Woolf A Room of One’s Own in the light of Scott’s

Gender and the Politics of History

Even thought the concept of gender was already been discussed by the moment

Joan Wallace Scott set herself to re-define gender not as something associated only to

women but as a place of constant struggle of power between the sexes where both, male

and female construct their social identities. If we read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of

One’s Own using Scott’s definition of gender, we could see how this construct is bound

both diachronically and synchronically.

Virginia Woolf’s short piece of writing shows how women were restricted in their

rights and there were many things that they were not allowed to do by a male-driven

society. When asked to discuss the subject of women and fiction, the author comes to the

conclusion that it is difficult to talk about it because women are restrained in the two

elements needed to create fiction: money and a room’s of one’s own.

During the 1920’s, when this piece was written, women were no free to choose

their destiny and do what they pleased (i.e. have their own income to practice the

profession they chose). Women were socially limited to the house and their duty to their

husbands. Thus, their role as creative individuals was virtually non existent. In Scott’s

line of thoughts, the struggle between sexes showed that men imposed certain roles on

women (housewives, mothers, etc.) and these women had little chance to challenge their

authority.

Through the simple anecdote of a woman not being allowed to step on the turf of

the Fellows and Scholars association, Virginia Woolf clearly shows the state of the

struggle in which women during the 1920’s lived: She, as a member of the gender
Introducción a los estudios culturales – Prof. Vasallo
Paola Longo – 06/26/08
woman, was considered insignificant compared to the three hundred year old turf planted

in succession by the very men who oppressed her.

Bibliography:

• Scott, J.W., Gender and the Politics of History, New York, Columbia University
Press, 1988.
• Woolf, V., Three Guineas, New York, Hartcourt Brace, 1966.