A Room Of One's Own, By Virginia Woolf

821 Words4 Pages

The subjugation of women is clearly evident not only in our distant past but imbedded in today’s modernized societies. Institutions such as marriage and cultural boundaries continue to dictate the expectations of women’s role in society and determine socially acceptable behaviors which measure of their value. But as women continue to quietly suffer and fight against this oppression they have also developed creative ways to cope with it. In the movie The Joy Luck Club, An-mei Hou asks her daughter Rose, “what you're worth?” In ‘A room of one’s own” by Virginia Woolf, women are told to ask for much less than what they need while fundraising for women’s education. She writes, “We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least. . . …show more content…

But considering how few people really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal.’— Lady Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College”. While basic “amenities have to wait” for women, men are feasting on fine dining off gold leafed dinnerware. Sarah Grand proclaimed in The Aspect of the Woman Question, “Man deprived us of all proper education, and then jeered at us because we had no knowledge. He narrowed our outlook on life so that our view of it should be all distorted, and then declared that our mistaken impression of it proved us to be senseless creatures. He cramped our minds so that there was no room for reason in them, and then made merry at our want of logic. Our divine intuition was not to be controlled by him, but he did his best to damage it by sneering at it as an inferior feminine method …show more content…

Her value in society is measured by the amount of male children she produces. We see this in Lisa See, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, with Snow Flower having been ashamed to have married a man beneath the false image she had painstakingly tried to maintain and yet, even after he brutally beat her, she defended him. In such dire moments the desperate longing to relieve oneself from the emotional pain and persistent oppression needs to find an outlet to be release, a secret way to express feelings of frustration and anger that a man would not notice nor invest his time into understanding. With Lily and Snow Flower, it was nu