give me my room or i'll go insane

Virginia Woolf is someone that I've heard so much about; yet, until recently, I had never read any of her work. However, it seems as if I got the basic gist of her essay "A Room of One's Own" before I actually read it. I'm going to attribute that to Messiah's job-well-done of preparing me for the world of literature. With the school's emphasis on justice (and, consequently, on inclusive language), it only makes sense that we would open up the doors for women to write in a way that incorporates them into the history/present/future of humankind. It makes sense even without the school's emphasis. Perhaps this is because I am a woman, and I am living in a time where most people in the western hemisphere understand the need for women to have a distinct voice in the world of literature. I wonder, does it make a difference that I am reading Woolf's essay in 2008, when she wrote it in 1938? So much has taken place since 1938--my grandmother bore five children and saw them go out into the world; my mother graduated from college, got a job, got married, and bore two children; I have graduated from high school, am working towards my Bachelor of Arts degree, and continue to watch my mother care for my 88-year-old grandmother who must live in a nursing home due to her several medical ailments. With the coming and going of each generation since Woolf first published "A Room of One's Own," do we take greater heed to her lecture?

I don't know that I can truly answer this question without much research behind it. I'm currently taking a class on women writers in the 20th century, but oftentimes it seems that we read only African-American women writers. I don't necessarily think that such a genre gives me a picture of current women writers as a whole because it often crosses into areas of African-American writing, which is a separate entity from women's writing. I'm going to have to revisit this question in the future--in other words, this post is to be continued...