topics: |  gender | essay | classic

Some of the questions asked:
   Why is it that men have always had power and influence and wealth and
	fame - while women have had nothing but children?

   Why are women ...so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

QUOTES:
[She goes to the British museum library, seeking books on women]
Have you any notion of how many books are written about
women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are
written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed
animal in the universe? ... Women do not write books about men...

What could be the reason, then, of this curious disparity, I wondered,
drawing cart-wheels on the slips of paper provided by the British
taxpayer for other purposes. Why are women, judging from this catalogue,
so much more interesting to men than men are to women? A very curious
fact it seemed, and my mind wandered to picture the lives of men who
spend their time in writing books about women; whether they were old or
young, married or unmarried, red-nosed or hump-backed--anyhow, it was
flattering, vaguely, to feel oneself the object of such attention... 16-17

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the
magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its
natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp
and jungle. The glories of all our wars would he unknown. 35

[Later: sociological musings about the life of Victorian women.  Where, in
that rush of work and babies, would one have the time to write? ]

blurb:
Surprisingly, this long essay about society and art and sexism is one of
Woolf's most accessible works. Woolf, a major modernist writer and critic,
takes us on an erudite yet conversational--and completely entertaining--walk
around the history of women in writing, smoothly comparing the architecture
of sentences by the likes of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, all the
while lampooning the chauvinistic state of university education in the
England of her day. When she concluded that to achieve their full greatness
women will need a solid income and a privacy, Woolf pretty much invented
modern feminist criticism.