an online women's journal which crosses national and local boundaries to create intimate conversation on substantive issues
an online women's journal which crosses national and local boundaries to create intimate conversation on substantive issues
The essay examines whether women were capable of producing work of the quality of William Shakespeare, amongst other topics. In one section, Woolf invented a fictional "Shakespeare's Sister", Judith, to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare's gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women. Woolf also examines the careers of several female authors, including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. The author subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the time, and her hybrid name for the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge—Oxbridge—has become a well-known term in English satire, although she was not the first to use it.
The title comes from Woolf's conception that, 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction' (chapter 1). It also refers to any author's need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create art.
A Room of One's Own is written with irony and sarcasm over the power-balance between men and women.
The female approach to morality is that people have responsibilities towards others. So morality is an imperative to care for others. Gilligan summarizes this by saying that male morality has a “justice orientation”, and that female morality has a “responsibility orientation”.
Female children start out with a selfish orientation.
They then learn to care for others, and that selfishness is wrong. So in their second, conventional, stage, women typically feel it is wrong to act in their own interests, and that they should value instead the interests of others. They equate concern for themselves with selfishness.
In the third, post-conventional stage, they learn that it is just as wrong to ignore their own interests as it is to ignore the interests of others. One way to this understanding comes through their concern with connecting with others. A connection, or relation, involves two people, and if either one is slighted, it harms the relationship.
“The moral imperative that emerges repeatedly in interviews with women is an injunction to care, a responsibility to discern and alleviate the ‘real and recognizable trouble’ of this world. For men, the moral imperative appears rather as an injunction to respect the rights of others and thus to protect from interference the rights to life and self-fulfillment. Women's insistence on care is at first self-critical rather than self-protective, while men initially conceive obligation to others negatively in terms of noninterference. ... For women, the integration of rights and responsibilities takes place through an understanding of the psychological logic of relationships. This understanding tempers the self-destructive potential of a self-critical morality by asserting the need of all persons [including themselves] for care.
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