Making Room for Mrs. Seton: Economics, Masculinity and Virginia Woolf's Room of Her Own Timothy Sexton College

That Virginia Woolf’s epic essay “A Room of One’s Own” would be greeted unenthusiastically by its 20th-century male critics goes without saying. That it has managed to become a foundation of modern feminist thought since its publication is also hardly surprising. That so many men alive during the early decades of the turn of the 20th century failed even to understand the underlying message is perhaps the least surprising thing. For how could any man raised on the millennia-spanning ideological explanation that women were oppressed due to an inherent failure on the part of the character of their sex possibly grasp the mountains of meaning that women the world over could instantly understand in a passage like the one in which Woolf bemoans the lack of opportunities for women—personified in the specific figure of Mrs. Seton—to pursue their love the arts through actions like establishing fellowships, funding prizes and offering scholarships. Opportunities denied them not as a result of inferiority of intellect required to make aesthetic judgments as worthy as any male benefactor, but resulting from pure, base economic depravity.

What woman could not instantly grasp the achingly familiar recognition of the inhuman indecency of...