The experiences of women in the early 20th century are inherently different than women’s experiences today. In this paper, I will analyze Virginia Woolf’s role in the modernist movement of the 1900s through her essay titled A Room of One’s Own. Simone de Beauvoir, a famous philosopher and gender theorist, writes about Woolf’s essay in her book The Second Sex, which I have become well acquainted with over the course of this semester through my Honors Thesis research. While A Room of One’s Own was written in 1929, Beauvoir notes the similarities women still faced in 1949 in her book, The Second Sex.

Woolf’s essay argued that women need economic freedom and a room of their own in order to be able to write fiction. In this essay, she asks many questions as to why men and women have been historically unequal, with some questions being “Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” (Woolf, 43). Woolf brings up ideas that have previously been accepted without question. In her essay, she asks these questions and answers some of them through her research of women authors including Jane Austen.

The modernist movement was a rejection of traditional beliefs in order to make progress into the modern world of the 20th century. Woolf played a major role in the feminist development of the modernist movement. In questioning the traditional gender norms that people conformed to without question, Woolf was able to raise awareness and consciousness among other feminists who may not have realized these issues previously. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf did just that, as she questioned the traditional values of society and fought to bring down the misogynistic norms she saw in her everyday life.

In Danny Heitman’s article, “Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer,” he writes about Virginia Woolf’s written works and how they impacted the modernist movement. Heitman writes, “In a series of lectures published in 1929 as A Room of One’s Own, Woolf pointed to the special challenges that women faced in finding the basic necessities for writing—a small income and a quiet place to think.” Woolf’s arguments in this essay helped to define the feminist ideas that helped develop the modernist movement. By pointing out the challenges women faced in making money and finding a room for themselves shows how little women were actually given throughout history.

First, it is important to address the differences between an essay and a novella. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, an essay is “an analytic or interpretative literary composition usually dealing with its subject from a limited or personal point of view.” In contrast, a novella is “a story with a compact and pointed plot.” A Room of One’s Own is an essay as it is a literary analysis of an academic topic including research on women in literature and a reflection on her personal point of view. This piece being an essay is crucial to the modernist movement because she has a well-researched topic that fights traditional values and embraces progressive change.

Next, I want to go through some key points from Woolf’s essay and how they played a role in the feminist development of the modernist movement. Woolf’s main thesis is that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (Woolf, 18). It is important for women to have economic freedom from men in order to be able to work and create art such as writing fiction. It is merely impossible for women to write fiction under the traditional roles expected of women in the early 20th century.

She also argued that women need equal pay to men in order to have economic freedom, writing that “at the thought of all those women working year after year and finding it hard to get two thousand pounds together, and as much as they could do to get thirty thousand pounds, we burst out in scorn at the reprehensible poverty of our sex” (Woolf, 38). Woolf explains that even if women do have the ability to work like men, they still do not make as much money as men, meaning that they are in poverty compared to men. If women can’t have as much education, work, and money as men, how would they be able to write fiction as well as men?

Woolf continues with her point of economic freedom, arguing that “every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me and disposed of according to my husband’s wisdom” (Woolf, 40). This was a point discussed in my “Intro Women & Gender Studies” course at Canisius University, as we discussed what women couldn’t do in 1850. Some other examples of things women couldn’t do in 1850 include voting, initiating divorce, having control of their children, pursuing higher education, having a bank account, initiating lawsuits, having control of their wages, and bringing charges against a man for marital rape. All of these points were addressed in the modernist movement and in the feminist movement, as women were becoming aware of their inferiority under the patriarchy.

A final point in Woolf’s essay argued, “Even in the nineteenth century a woman was not encouraged to be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted” (Woolf, 80). Writing this essay was radical for Woolf’s time, as she wrote about topics that had been kept quiet for too long. This essay argues why traditional gendered norms should be questioned and changed in order to become modern. The modernist movement rejected traditional beliefs to make progress into the future of progress and modern ideologies.

Reading this essay helped me better understand first-wave feminism and how feminists used radical methods to raise consciousness and increase the power of the women’s movement. In my Honors Thesis research, I have focused on a philosophical analysis of gender in three films, while researching Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler. Between my research of The Second Sex and mentions of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own during this “Intro Women & Gender Studies” course, I decided that I should dig deeper into Virginia Woolf’s fight for economic freedom so women could have a room of their own to write fiction and create art.

As I argued at the beginning of this paper, the experiences of women in the early 20th century are inherently different than women’s experiences today. Now that I have analyzed Woolf’s experiences of women in the 19th and 20th centuries, I want to compare those experiences to today’s experiences. Woolf mentions limited educational opportunities for women, while today, women have equal educational opportunities as men due to Title IX and other educational policies that keep education equal. Women also have increased financial independence today, as they can have their own jobs and bank accounts. There is still a wage gap affecting women’s earnings, but progress has been made in order to hopefully someday erase this sexist wage gap. Woolf also mentioned the social expectation to get married and reproduce, with more bodily autonomy today. This comparison is still not perfect, as Roe V. Wade was overturned in 2022 taking away abortion rights for many people in the United States. Lastly, women writers have more opportunities to write and publish their work today than they did back in 1929 when women writers weren’t taken seriously.

In conclusion, Woolf’s essay argued that women need economic freedom and a room of their own in order to be able to write fiction. While the experiences of women in the early 20th century are inherently different than women’s experiences today, there are still many similarities in the feminist movement and it is crucial to learn about women’s history in order to not make the same mistakes as the past.