A Room of One’s Own: A Contemporary Jump in Time A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf dissects and critiques the rights of women and their role in society through extensive essays. In my own work, Virginia Woolf’s style of writing is mimicked and mainly, her ideas are translated into the XXI century world. The first line matches the same line as the original book. “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction -what, has that got to do with a room of one’s own. I will try to explain…” I previously answered this very question almost a century ago but yet -- still, in the XXI century, I find myself wondering, has anyone learned anything? I have observed that in this new era of technology, one still finds an overwhelming concoction of treachery and hypocrisy from men. For whenever men claim to be on the side of progress and social change, I have seen remarkable reluctance to move beyond empty promises and act when such action might cost them benefits and privileges over female kind. Society, perhaps, has made great advancements to the role of the woman, if those contributions are contrasted with last century’s works. In these modern times, women have professions in which they make their own living and are theoretically able to receive the same education as their male counterparts. However, what good are these resources if inequality still exists, still roams around the plains of everyday life, infecting the opposite sex so often with dishonesty
and inequality? The woman born to the average couple, part of the middle class to-day, still does not have a fair chance at life. It seems that such ‘luxuries’, which should be basic genderless human needs for education, are only known to men and only reserved for men in our society. Even men who claim to be on the side of gender equality often inscribe inequality through unconscious bias, such as teachers who favor and prioritize boys in math class due to the longstanding stereotype that men are more logical than women. Women, still today, remain elusive to uninterrupted times of learning and enrichment, varying in importance depending on their living conditions around the globe. As such, it is impossible for her to invent, to write, to solve and live enhanced just as a man does, if she does not receive the same education. Why is it that basic necessities of life are constantly constrained? Women have suffered enough through centuries of these institutionalized patriarchal foibles but yet, the human race has never reached a sufficient point of enlightenment: any changes to society are meager and inadequate. One hundred and twenty-nine million promising young women, who perhaps could become the next Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Sylvia Plath or Emily Dickinson, or in the light of these more modern times, Toni Morrison, Lauren Groff or S.E. Hinton, do not even have access to the mere simplest form of education and will therefore 29
