The process of gaining basic rights, including the right to be seen as equal to men and the right to be entitled to the same range of freedoms and opportunities that men have has been excruciatingly difficult for women. Although the presence of gender stereotypes and the resulting discrimination against women still persist in modern society some countries representing the extreme examples of the specified injustice, a massive progress has been made. Modern women owe a substantial number of opportunities that they can presently enjoy to the feminist philosophers and writers of the past, among which the names of Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf deserve a separate mentioning. The two authors are known primarily by their major works, namely, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects) and Woolf’s “Professions for Women” (A Room of One’s Own). Since Woolf’s work was written almost two centuries after Wollstonecraft’s essay was published, Woolf expands on Wollstonecraft’s idea of providing women with additional opportunities for liberation, namely, by offering employment options based on the hard-won education options. Therefore, thematically, Woolf’s work represents a continuation of Wollstonecraft’s plight, demanding employment opportunities for women.
Although the ideas that Wollstonecraft and Woolf convey in their respective essays address quite different concerns, the core of their arguments remains the continuation of the same idea. Namely, the authors insist on the necessity for female liberation, Wollstonecraft viewing education as the path to it, and Woolf promoting employment opportunities as the main vehicle for it. Specifically, Wollstonecraft propagates the idea of education for girls and women, whereas Woolf addresses the importance of employment (Drum 177). Thus, by extension, both themes are in equal part related to the issue of female liberation and the need for women to gain agency and independence from men.
However, despite the common focus on female liberation, Wollstonecraft and Woolf had quite different philosophies, which became evident after considering their key writings. Specifically, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman posits that women deserve the same range of rights and freedoms as men since they are equal to men in every respect, yet the lack of education opportunities for women make them seem inferior (Drum). Herein lies the core of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy and convictions, primarily, the idea that women require education in order to gain freedom from patriarchy and gain liberation.
In turn, Woolf expands upon the idea proposed by Wollstonecraft by centering the concept of female employment as the foundation for promoting emancipation of women. Specifically, while Wollstonecraft saw illiteracy as the main problem defining the presence of inequality between the sexes, Woolf pointed to the fact that economic and financial dependency also restrict women’s agency significantly. Therefore, gaining employment opportunities would be the next logical step in the fight against patriarchy and its suffocating effect on women’s rights. Thus, both philosophies are based on the idea of emancipation and liberation of women, yet Woolf expands the platform provided by Wollstonecraft to include employment opportunities along with education ones into the range of options available to women.
At the same time, one cannot deny the presence of multiple similarities between the two works. There are significant similarities in how both women portrayed gender in their works. Specifically, both Woolf and Wollstonecraft saw and depicted it as the tool of oppression of women. Suggesting that gender roles and gender-related stereotypes restrict the opportunities for women to gain agency and independence, both authors reject the idea of gender roles as the principles according to which relationships within communities should be built. Instead, both Wollstonecraft and Woolf promote the idea that perceived gender roles have nothing to do with the potential or a woman. Specifically, Wollstonecraft emphasizes that gender does not define one’s ability to learn and gain skills: “if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge” (Wollstonecraft 374). Similarly, Woolf establishes that the stereotypes associated with gender-related expectations set by the society are completely unrelated to women’s ability to work: “It is true I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had?” (Woolf 224). Therefore, the specified point appears to be the idea on which both writers agree completely.
Nonetheless, there are also several notable differences in how the writers view the notion of gender. Specifically, Wollstonecraft promotes education as the foundational source of equality and liberty for women, whereas Woolf sees the opportunity for employment as the main source of emancipation. Whereas the described discrepancy in opinions could be attributed to the fact that at the time of writing Professions for Women, several educational options had already been provided to women, other incongruences in the authors’ arguments can also be spotted.
In addition, differences between the two authors and their perspective on the gender discourse could be examined at a more profound level of the philosophical perception of reality that each of the authors adopted. For instance, by applying literary materialism to the assessment of Woolf’s works, one will recognize the presence of the dichotomous notion of an artist’s essence. Specifically, Woolf subscribed to the idea of an artistic essence being produced due to the combination of the male and female perspective (Drum).
Extrapolating the ideas produced by Woolf and Wollstonecraft onto the theoretical dimension, one will have to approach both works from the perspective of the Feminist theory. Specifically, the presence of critique of social injustice toward women, namely, the lack of agency for the specified demographic due to the misconceived perception of women as inferior, is evident in both works. Specifically, Wollstonecraft establishes the urgency to break the traditional principles of gender normativity by embracing the idea of an author incorporating both feminine and masculine qualities: “believed that the best artists were always a combination of the man and the woman or ‘woman-manly’ or ‘man-womanly’” (Mambrol).
Another important perspective from which the works in question could be considered, the problem of unequal wealth distribution and the gender biases associated with the specified problem, needs to be applied to understand the plight of Wollstonecraft and Woolf. Specifically, Woolf emphasized that the metaphorical “room of her own,” namely, the presence of space and economic freedom needed for self-actualization is drastically absent from women’s lives. As Mambrol explains, “This is a materialist argument that, paradoxically, seems to differ from Woolf’s apparent disdain for the ‘materialism’ of the Edwardian novelists” (Mambrol). Indeed, the problem of wealth distribution and the lack of agency offered to women in the specified process constitutes the core argument of Woolf.
In turn, the feminist Theory and, particularly, the problem of objectifying women, can be considered an important perspective from which Wollstonecraft’s argument concerning education for women could be viewed. The paper by Geilhorn points to the drastic lack of female spaces not only in education, but also in the public environment, in general. Although Geilhorn focuses primarily on the Eastern setting, namely, that one of Japan, the paper makes a very compelling argument concerning the methods of ousting woman from public spaces: “the no world changed its strategy and tried to exclude women by using more subtle methods, as is still evident today” (Geilhorn). Therefore, the importance of Wollstonecraft’s plight for allowing women to have an opportunity for a place in education becomes all the more poignant.
Since Woolf builds on the legacy that Wollstonecraft created with her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Woolf’s Professions for Women represents a continuation of the plight for equality, namely, the emphasis on the importance of employment opportunities as the chance for a woman to develop her agency. Thus, the two literary works represent a chain of arguments that do not complete each other but, rather, create string of ideas to be continued by the next generations. Having set the premise for change, Wollstonecraft’s work represents the basic demand for education as the tool for accessing knowledge and gaining literacy. In turn, Woolf takes the specified idea on step further and reinforces the significance of employment for women, representing it as the means of liberating women and offering them economic and financial independence. Therefore, the two papers under analysis share quite arrange of ideas, yet the one by Wolf is understandably more insistent in its nature. At the same time, evaluating the impact that each of the pieces produced in its time, one should give credit to Wollstonecraft’s essay as the unprecedented demand for representation and equality. Therefore, the continuity that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Professions for Women represent symbolizes the unceasing fight for liberation and the plight of women’s movement.
Works Cited
Drum, Alice. “Revising Voice: Women Writers and the Challenge to Traditional Narrative Form.” College Literature, vol. 25, no. 2, 1998, pp. 175-181.
Geilhorn, Barbara. “From Private Zashiki to the Public Stage: Female Spaces in Early Twentieth-Century Nō.” Asian Theatre Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, 2015, pp. 440-463.
Mambrol, Nasrullah. Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Literariness.orgg, 2020, Web.
Woolf, Virginia. Professions for Women. CFU.ca, 1931, Web.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects). OLL.Libertyfund.org, 1792, Web.