Suffrage Movement Influence on Virginia Woolf's Novel A Room of One'S Own

Living in Britain in the nineteenth century, Virginia Woolf was born to a wealthy, highly literate family. She learned classical languages, such as Latin and Greek, which had been forbidden for women to study since men believed that women were physically and intellectually inferior to men. However, Woolf opposed the traditional norms held by the men; she believed in the idea of the “new woman”, in which women became free from men’s oppression by owning properties and by becoming more engaged in political spheres by having the voting rights, or the universal female suffrage.

To better understand Woolf’s motive of joining into First Wave Feminist Movement, it is important to know her early life and the suffering she underwent in her life. She was well educated as a woman since she came from a wealthy family in Britain, in which all her family members were highly educated and literate. However, when she turned into her young adulthood, her mother accidentally died, and not long after, her lover also died.

While striving to go over her losses, Woolf continued to lessen her emotional pain by continuing her studies of German, Latin, and Greek in the Ladies’ Apartment of King’s College, and these several years of study introduced Woolf to a group of radical feminists who fought for educational reforms. She also met a circle of intellectuals and artists, further enlarging her education by providing her more skills and thoughts. With radical feminist and intellectual thoughts, Woolf gave lectures of empowering women by giving them voting rights, and British government eventually made the suffrage for women, and thus increasing Woolf’s influence as a woman and as a feminist writer.

As a suffragette, Woolf not only wanted suffrage for women but also the total liberty for women. In A Room of One’s Own, a book published in 1967, Woolf made an argument that a woman needed a room for her to compose novels as excellent as that of men, and that one should not write novels for his or her own gender but for the public in general, which tied to Rousseau’s idea of the general will. The purpose of composing novels was to reflect the realities in the current societies and list down problems the society was currently facing. Through these means, the society would progress and women would write rationally instead of emotionally with polished diction and sentences that had weak or no connections to each other. Throughout her essay, Woolf expressed her opposition toward men’s mockery of women and the comparison of women to dogs. In response to the mockery, Woolf compared men to dogs near the end of this essay.

Moreover, it is possible that she may be biased toward her view on literary composition because she believed that women needed complete freedom, which was not possible during her time. She embodied feminine qualities, but she covered them by making her essay sound logical and scientific just as men’s. Woolf used her narration to further strengthen her claim, which could be similar to one of that made by an educated female writer who strived to fight for gender equality, and thus Woolf may be against men who used generalizations to discredit women that blindly fought for feminism and for female suffrage.

Furthermore, Enlightenment ideas could also affect Woolf’s argument. In the book, Woolf mentioned Rousseau’s ideology, and as a common knowledge, Rousseau himself was against females because he believed in the separate spheres for men and women, that men should appear in public areas such as libraries or theatres, whereas women should focus on the domestic sphere such as raising their children and organizing everything for the family. The idea of separate spheres forbade women from gaining influence in literary achievements, and most women who went to female universities only got basic education so that they could be literate but could not be thoughtful or logical in their writings. Women who were educated could only write works with loose logical pattern and with polished and elegant words and sentences. Their works were not worth reading for men. Being pushed by this motive, Woolf composed this book to disregard Rousseau’s idea of separate spheres and the stereotypes of women’s works by making her argument strong enough to make her point that women could write and compose texts just as good as men could.

Not only was Woolf influenced by the First Wave Feminism, but she was also influenced by realism prevalent during her time. Realism was the belief of finding truth by depicting things accurately. In this book, Woolf narrated her own experience in a library and in the British Museum, struggling to find the truth behind the social and literary inequalities between men and women. She described scenes she saw from her window when writing a work in her room, and these scenes were accurate depictions of true daily lives women had during that time. By revealing the harsh conditions and treatments toward women, Woolf could convince men to open higher level of education opportunities to women.

She could also convince women to get more opportunities by making them better educated. The realistic depiction showed Woolf’s impartialness and her objectiveness in describing situation of women during the time period. Moreover, Woolf was trying to search for the true reason why men composed the famous history books but never women and why men’s education was so different from that of women’s. Woolf stated that most women compose with anger and fear, which made their works sound illogical, but she also stated that the men who wrote the historical books also possessed some irrational emotion while composing them. She wanted to write work by being stolid toward everything she saw, and she would just accurately and realistically record her observation on her paper. Therefore, the prevalence and the rise of realism during the First Wave Feminism affected Woolf by causing her to advocate the effort needed to find the truth and reflect the society by depicting social problems.

In conclusion, Woolf lived in an era of frequent feminist movements, and she was from a community filled with intellectuals and radical feminists. Woolf’s opinion in A Room of One’s Own was influenced by her career as a suffragette because she wanted more than just political rights; she wanted intellectual changes for women. She was also affected by Enlightenment ideas of that of Rousseau’s in terms of the general will; Woolf was not advocating for woman rights as a female individual but as the entire female gender.

However, she opposed Rousseau’s notion of separate spheres for men and women since that was the barrier preventing women from reaching the same height as men. Finally, the rise and prevalence of realism had an effect on Woolf’s opinion because it caused her to write in a realistic way and in a reflective way; she used realistic description of facts to imply her attitude toward men and government’s responses to social problems.