A Room of Our Own: Girls, Feminism, and Schooling

by Marnina Gonick, Laura Shannon, and Amy Allison

Written in the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf's astoundingly poignant text, A Room of One's Own, reverberates almost a century later. Woolf's essay invites its readers to join her in search of the answer to the question of "women and fiction," and in the process we are treated to a piercingly articulate perspective on the condition of women in a world culture built on women's exclusion and subordination. "A woman," Woolf writes, "must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (6). Although it is true that unlike in Woolf's time, girls' education is no longer dependent on the fortunes of a Mrs. Seton who might bequeath a college and library for young women. The issues of the relationships between education, creativity, and women's access to privacy, space, and resources remain deeply relevant.