Virginia Woolfe and Simone de Beavoir

In Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex he talks about the problems of the "myths" of women. In a way the term "female" imprisons women in her sex and the expectations men have of them. The myths that are made about women are more advantageous to the ruling class which are made up of men. De Beauvoir states that while it is natural for humans to understand themselves in opposition to others, this process is flawed when applied to the genders. In defining woman exclusively as "Other", man is denying her humanity."If the definition provided for this concept of the eternal feminine is contradicted by the behavior of flesh-and-blood women, it is the latter who are wrong: we are told not that Femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine." As a result of these myths the life of every woman is divided between her rights as a human and the demands of "Other". There is a contradiction between her human self and her “destiny” as a female. The women who go agaisn't their female "destiny", who are not passive, elegant, and silent, are classified as defective and unfeminine. When this happens they are punished for putting their humanity before their femininity. Men use these myths of feminity in order to excuse themselves for the burdens they put upon women. I think De Beauvoir was trying to say that these two opposing myths that are made of women imprison them.

In Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolfe emphasized that women needed economic independence in order to be able to be able to write. Women need economic independence because no one at this point is attempting to aid them in their writing process. The woman in the text isn't even able to enter the library without being "accompanied by a fellow of the college or furnished with a letter of introduction". In this chapter the main character wonders what could have been if only she had inherited money from Mary's mother. " if only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might have dined very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of wine; we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions." She also recognized that it would have been difficult to have children and be able to have all this wealth independently. "Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children - no human being could stand it." She is able to recognize that it would have been difficult for a woman to start a business at a young age and be able to have birth and take care of a child. Woolf's solution to be able to write is obviously to have the economic independance to have a room of one's own. What this has to do with literature is that in order to be able to write, one has to have some type of financial backing. Woolfe also poses the problem of what poverty had on the mind. How wealth affects the mind and the limited resources that women have and also how this affects their writing. I agree that in order to do anything at all, a person needs capital. The activies a person is able to do are fairly limited without any money. I believe it was worse back then especially in those times for women to do anything, let alone write without any source of capital.