Lunch With Virginia Woolf
For many years, I did not read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I suppose the thesis seemed so familiar, so foundational to feminist thinking, that I never felt the need to actually open the book. Of course a woman needs personal space and financial security in order to create art!
But the truth is it was more than that. When I showed up at college in the ’90s—a working-class Latina plopped onto an Ivy League campus—I didn’t think feminism had much to offer me. I was juggling schoolwork with multiple jobs, preoccupied by economic survival and the stigma of affirmative action, while the college women’s center seemed focused on eschewing bras and makeup and organizing Take Back the Night events. “Feminism” seemed less a political framework for equity than a rebellious identity for privileged white women. And Virginia Woolf was their patron saint.
Instead of Woolf, I read Cherríe Moraga, bell hooks, Ana Castillo, Alice Walker—writers and thinkers who understood the challenges of being a woman and living at the intersection of economic, racial, and social circumstances that each press in on you in different ways. Many times, I felt I had to set aside my interests as a woman in favor of my interests as a person of color, and I blamed much of that on the exclusionary white lens that, until recently, dominated feminist discourse. And I placed all this emotional baggage onto poor Virginia Woolf.
But that was a long time ago. In the subsequent years, life taught me that I could put other aspects of my identity first but that society would almost always put women last. And so last year, I finally cracked open A Room of One’s Own. I knew that the book—technically a long essay—was based on two lectures Woolf gave in 1928, just a few months after universal suffrage was passed in England. I knew that Woolf argued that the right to vote was less crucial than financial independence. And I knew that the essay had been rediscovered in the early ’70s by second-wave feminists. But now, page by page, what had once been to me nothing but a totem to feminist history revealed itself to be what I should have realized it was all along: a piece of another woman’s soul.
In one afternoon, Woolf became known to me, and all my years of blind grievance melted away. Her honesty and fire and rage at the limitations put on women’s minds dissolved all the layers of feminist signifiers that she had been freighted with and all the distance between us.
[Read: 24 books to read this summer]
Oh, to spend an afternoon in thrall to her brilliant, incandescent mind! Woolf makes an elegant argument about the many ways that women’s voices have been silenced, suppressed, and otherwise forgotten. And she’s a beguiling polemicist, shifting easily between allegory and assertion. I found she had plenty to say to this moment, in this country where, on the one hand, I can cast a presidential ballot for a woman for the second time in my life, but on the other, my citizenship is still valued less than that of my male compatriots. I felt myself both encouraged by all that has changed and enraged by all that has remained the same.
For instance, stereotypes about what men and women can write are still going strong. A man’s fictions—novels, stories, plays, films—are still more likely to deal with matters of sport or disaster or battle. And a woman’s are still more likely to be concerned with domestic matters. “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war,” Woolf wrote. “This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.” The dismissal of women’s storytelling persists.
More important, we are still asking ourselves, a full century later, Woolf’s central question: Why are women poorer than men? Woolf was disappointed not to have found “some important statement, some authentic fact” to explain this. Now we have concrete data: White women are paid 83 percent of white men’s wages; Black women and Latinas, only 69.8 percent and 64.6 percent of white men’s wages, respectively. We can precisely measure the gap, and yet the gap persists. The media reports on it and legislation is proposed, but the will to change is never strong enough.
Woolf knew why. The patriarchy, she wrote, depends upon man’s “feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power.” Reading this, I found myself nodding so vigorously I nearly strained my neck.
The book is, of course, limited by the blind spots of Woolf’s era and experience. She is addressing her peer group: upper-class white women whose families were so bold as to allow them to be educated. Yet I still felt that, if seated across from me today, Woolf—who understood the link between the economic control of women and the control of our minds—would embrace the intersectionality that is crucial to feminism’s present and future.
Early in the lectures, Woolf introduces us to the character of Mary. She is idling by a river on the campus of a university when she is struck with an “exciting” and “important” idea. She rushes off to write it down, but when she is stopped and scolded by a university official for walking in an area where only men are allowed to stroll, she loses her thought. I cursed the official, mourned the lost idea, and wanted to tell Woolf about Toni Morrison.
During a university lecture in 1975, Morrison spoke not of gender, but of racism, and specifically its role in limiting productivity. She warned her listeners about “the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”
As I read of Mary being shamed and turned away from the library for being a woman, I thought of Jim Crow. I wanted to tell Woolf about the reading tests given to Latinas to block them from the voting booth, and of all the other institutionalized methods of shaming and othering that have arisen since her time on earth.
Mary has a succulent lunch at the men’s college, only to return to her poorly financed women’s college for a paltry supper. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” Woolf writes. I wanted to tell her about my life during the recession years, when my phone rang more frequently from debt collectors than from friends, and I had no energy to write.
And so in Mary’s journey, I saw parallels not just to the upper class and highly educated, but to the socioeconomically and racially marginalized as well.
[Read: Seven books for people figuring out their next move]
If I could sit across a lunch table from Woolf now, I would also point out—lovingly—that she has probably overestimated the coddling required for a woman to produce art. Woolf, you see, hated to work. Her Mary has inherited £500 a year—the equivalent today of about $55,000. Now she need not do anything but sit in her room and think. But before the inheritance, Mary had to earn money teaching kindergarten or addressing envelopes or reading to old ladies. The work forced her to live on a budget, which she disliked, but worse “was the poison of fear and bitterness” over having to do “work that one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave.”
I rolled my eyes. Inheritances don’t grow on trees, and many women writers have been quite productive while working. Morrison wrote Beloved while sitting in traffic, commuting to her job at Random House. Ada Limón wrote three poetry collections while working in the marketing department of Condé Nast. I wrote much of my first novel while commuting to Hunter College to work as a fundraiser. Working, I might argue, actually helps the writer/artist access a different kind of truth in her fictions.
I might press Woolf to consider an additional requirement for freeing a woman’s mind: time. Women today can obtain money and, with it, a room with a door and a lock. But this does not mean they will have the time to spend there. Since Woolf’s era, time has become perhaps the rarest commodity of all for women. After the time spent earning the money, many of us run households, even when we have a partner. We are still the primary caregivers for our children and older relatives.
We have more freedom than Woolf ever had, but do we have the freedom to while away time by a river so that our thoughts can go out like so many fishing lines until they catch onto something real? Well, when that happens, it still feels as elusive and magical as it did when she gave her lectures.
This essay is adapted from the introduction to a new edition of A Room of One’s Own.