My dear friend, Dan, read this book along with me, and his thoughts are below. Enjoy!
These are a couple brief thoughts to share before turning it over to the thoughts and commentary of women...quotes from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own and from women of whom it seemed to remind while reading this work:
Firstly, A Room of One's Own should be required reading for every boy in this blobber’s high school. Perhaps every boy in high school anywhere. Apart from the pathetically-few women authors who were taught, the teachers barely, or not ever, reflected upon the issues of gender when their works were taught. And one can only speculate the damage that may have been somewhat mitigated had such sexism not still been perpetuated.
And finally, barring few miniscule changes or updates, this work of Woolf’s could very well have been written today. And that makes this blobber mostly sad. Even Woolf said as much for her own time, how slow the march to equality has been:
- That puts the matter in a nutshell, and when I tell you, rather to your surprise, that this sentence was written not in August 1828 but in August 1928...
On women's access
Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. —Woolf, ARoOO
Gate after gate seemed to close with gentle finality behind me. Innumerable beadles were fitting innumerable keys into well-oiled locks; the treasure-house was being made secure for another night. —Woolf, ARoOO
Who run the world?
Girls
Who run the world?
Girls
Who run the world?
Girls
Who run the world?
Girls
Who run the world?
Girls
—Beyoncé
On the place of women in art
There would always have been that assertion – you cannot do this, you are incapable of doing that – to protest against, to overcome. Probably for a novelist this germ is no longer of much effect; for there have been women novelists of merit. But for painters it must still have some sting in it; and for musicians, I imagine, is even now active and poisonous in the extreme. -Woolf, ARoOO
And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? -Woolf, ARoOO
Film is a patriarchal system. It’s built by men for men. Predominantly for white men. That’s the history of the medium in the United States. [...] It comes down to who gets to tell the story. If the dominant images that we have seen throughout our lifetimes, our mothers’ lifetimes, our grandmothers’ lifetimes, have been dominated by one kind of person, we take that, we internalize it, we drink it in as true, as fact. It’s tragic. Because it goes beyond just the film industry. These are the images of ourselves that we consume. It affects the way we see ourselves, and the way that other people see us. I feel like we have been lured into a sense of complacency, “The land of the free,” you know, “Equality for all.” All those things that we say, but we don’t really do. It’s a really dynamic time we’re in, you know. I feel really energized and electrified by the time that we’re in. These times will be studied. So the question is, “What did you do? What did you do during this time?” –Ava DuVernay in Time
On men in power:
He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. He was heavily built; he had a great jowl; to balance that he had very small eyes; he was very red in the face. His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained. —Woolf, ARoOO
Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. —Woolf, ARoOO
[X]’s signature has absolutely no curves, only angles. Curves in handwriting show softness, nurturing and a maternal nature. Angles show a writer who is feeling angry, determined, fearful, competitive or challenged. When a script is completely devoid of curves, the writer lacks empathy and craves power, prestige and admiration. Besides the bigheadedness that shows in this script there is something else that is rather over-sized—the “p” in “[Xxxx]p.” This large phallic symbol shouts, “Me … big hunk of man.” —Michelle Dresbold, in Politico Magazine (name eXcised)
On representation
But what I find deplorable, I continued, looking about the bookshelves again, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century. —Woolf, ARoOO
It seemed a pure waste of time to consult all those gentlemen who specialise in woman and her effect on whatever it may be – politics, children, wages, morality – numerous and learned as they are. One might as well leave their books unopened. —Woolf, ARoOO
And yet, I continued, approaching the bookcase again, where shall I find that elaborate study of the psychology of women by a woman? —Woolf, ARoOO
Three-point-perspective, that illusion that gives us the idea of a single, stable world view, a single perspective? Picasso said, “Noooo! Run free! You can have all the perspectives. That’s what we need. All of the perspectives at once. From above, from below, inside, out, the sides. All the perspectives at once!” Thank you, Picasso! What a guy! What a hero, thank you. But tell me, any of those perspectives a woman’s? No, well then I’m not fucking interested. You just put a kaleidoscope filter on your cock. You’re still painting flesh vases for your dick flowers. —Hannah Gadsby, Nanette
On reputation
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. —Woolf, ARoOO
Do you know what should be the target of our jokes at the moment? Our obsession with reputation. We’re obsessed with it. We think reputation is more important than anything else, including humanity. And do you know who takes the mantle of this myopic adulation of reputation? Celebrities. And comedians are not immune. They’re all cut from the same cloth. Donald ****p. Pablo Picasso. Harvey Weinstein. Bill Cosby. Woody Allen. Roman Polanski. These men are not exceptions. They are the rule. And they are not individuals; they are our stories. And the morale of our story is “We don’t give a shit. We don’t give a fuck about women or children. We only care about a man’s reputation.” What about his humanity? These men control our stories. And yet they have a diminishing connection to their own humanity, and we don’t seem to mind so long as they get to hold on to their precious reputation. Fuck reputation. Hindsight is a gift. Stop wasting my time! —Hannah Gadsby, Nanette
On lenses
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; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. —Woolf, ARoOO
“Wanna see a movie and get popcorn?” “Well,...I dunno. I have this rule, see… / I only go to a move if it satisfies three basic requirements. One, it has to have at least two women in it.. / ...who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.” / “Pretty strict, but a good idea.” “No kidding. Last movie I was able to see was Alien…” —Alison Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For
On destructiveness and mental health
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. —Woolf, ARoOO
“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. [...] We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.” —Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
On relationships
Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these– “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. —Woolf, ARoOO
It’s based on scholarship of Emily Dickinson where they were able to restore erasures to her poems and letters ... revealing her lifelong romantic entanglements and relationships with women. —Madeleine Olnek, director, about her film Wild Nights with Emily
On food (delightfully humorously)
After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. —Woolf, ARoOO
Prunes and custard followed. And if any one complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser’s heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers’ veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune. —Woolf, ARoOO
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. —Woolf, ARoOO
“Julia Child presents The Chicken Sisters! Miss Broiler. Miss Fryer. Miss Roaster. Miss Caponette. Miss Stewer. And old Madame Hen. But we’re spotlighting Miss Roaster of The Year! Measuring in at 14-15-14. We’re roasting Miss Chicken. Today, on The French Chef.” —Julia Child, The French Chef
“...people who love to eat are always the best people.” —Julia Child, in a letter
“Do it just as we’ve done it here. And remember that a soufflé will wait for you. You can get it ready two hours ahead, hold it, bake it about forty minutes before you serve it. The important thing is how to time it so neither one of you collapses.” —Julia Child, The French Chef
In conclusion
[...] and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself “superior.” —Woolf, ARoOO
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I hope you've enjoyed reading Danielay's thoughts as much as I did, and reading the carefully curated words of women he selected! Back to 'The Once and Future King' I go!
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