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| Virginia Woolf |
Because I recently wrote a review of the film The Hours, I’ve got Virginia Woolf on the brain. Though Woolf’s last novel was published over 70 years ago, her words as a woman, as a writer, and as a feminist still echo their truth in our contemporary world, despite its insistence that gender inequality is a thing of the past. Because Woolf speaks her mind with such eloquence and veracity, I’ve no need to paraphrase her words, and I’ll just let her wonderful quotes speak for themselves:
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Woolf’s indictment of femininity and womanhood makes me incredibly happy:
“Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”
And, finally, a reminder that Woolf was savvy to the Bechdel Test long before it existed:
“‘Chloe liked Olivia.’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women…All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple…And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends…They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that.”
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| Painting of Virginia Woolf |
And how small a part of a woman’s life is that. Yes, Virginia; how small indeed.