In the 19th century and in earlier times, women were excluded from universities and forced to care for large families with an average of ten children (difficult to discover or invent anything relevant without basic studies and constantly changing diapers), in addition to the fact that It was not considered proper of their sex to dedicate themselves to the intellectual field (Jane Austen and Charlot Brontë were forced to write secretly and secretly so that social disapproval did not fall on them).
This is how Virginia Woolf refers to it in her reflective essay of 1929 A Room of One’s Ownusually known in Spanish as a room of one’s own.
Woolf’s analysis of the circumstances that obstructed the development of female intellectuality throughout history and of living conditions is very interesting. of its own kind of the isolated cases of women who, despite their time, stood out intellectually to the point of becoming universal historical references. One of the conditions that he observes in these cases is that practically none of them had children and another is that the majority obtained some education due to some exceptional situation or for having joined the church as religious (we can think, for example, of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz or Teresa de Ávila, whose works are monumental; in the medieval scientist and composer Hildegarda of Bingen; or in the first European encyclopedist, Gertrudis de Helfta, whose work was the intellectual benchmark par excellence throughout the Middle Ages; etc.).
However, these isolated cases constituted less than 0.5% of cases compared to the total number of men who had received education and who had enough free time, as well as incentives beyond caring for their children. Hence, the number of outstanding intellectuals by sex was asymmetric, in accordance with the basic asymmetric proportion between the sexes in the necessary conditions for the action of genius to manifest.
These conditions can be summed up in one: individual autonomy, which Virginia summarizes as the minimum of “500 pounds a year and a room of one’s own.” Thus, she defends the right to private property for the female sex as the basis of her independence and criticizes the fact that women have been denied this fundamental right for so long. In past times, all the goods that they could obtain immediately belonged to their husbands or their fathers, not to them, with which women were historically poor and poverty a factor that played to the detriment of individual development and intellectual creation. , as shown by Virginia with concrete and statistical historical data.
This work of Miss Woolf (in truth she was not a lady, although she was married: her marriage was chaste or “white marriage”, a kind of celibate fraternity, and her female lovers, of which the main one was the writer Vita Sackville-West , “illegitimate” and clandestine, so it does not give her the very conventional title of “ma’am”) is reflective, acute and highly illustrative, as well as being essential reading for any feminist and especially for all women who dedicate themselves to writing, because she tackles that topic particularly. I highly recommend it, yes…!
However, a warning: be careful not to get discouraged in the first chapter that, to tell the truth, I found superfluous, bland and dense, a mess, and for which I almost gave up reading it, leaving me with a bad impression. From the middle of the second chapter the work begins to become very interesting and decisive.