Woolf and Beauvoir

Both Woolf and Beauvoir discuss how women face the problem of having to not be able to deal with matters that do not concern what the past routines or roles have come to consider the typical job of women, being a wife and mother. “If the definition provided for this concept 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. The contrary facts of experience are impotent against the myth.” (Beauvoir). Beauvoir describes the myth of woman being indisputable and explains that despite the existence and feelings of actual women, the myth of femininity prevails. The past has come to ultimately decide how women should be. Woolf illustrates the same problem but using a different approach. “Every penny I earn, they may have said, will be taken from me and disposed of accordance to my husband’s wisdom” (Woolf). Woolf describes how women could not keep what money they earned, even if they earned any money in the first place. The women in the story were trying to put money together to build a school and they found it very difficult. This can tie into the fact that because of the past, they were not able to deal with their own money. Also, the past of their mothers and grandmothers played a role in how the present women in the story lived their lives. “If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them…” (Woolf). Woolf goes on to say that if these women from the previous generations had dealt with money, maybe Mary could be writing poetry and going into the office. “Men need not bother themselves with alleviating the pains and burdens that physiologically are women’s lot, since they are ‘intended by Nature’...” (Beauvoir). After showing how women’s role in life in indisputable because of the past, Beauvoir describes how women’s role is physiologically intended by nature, which is having children. Woolf also puts forth this idea. “Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children- no human being could stand it” (Woolf). She furthermore talks about the years a women must spend tending to children and that Mary’s ancestors couldn’t have made money because they had to take care of the kids as well as leave financial issues to their husbands. Both authors show that because of the ideology of what women should do in life, they were left to having children. Beauvoir doesn’t seem to have a solution to this problem; it seems as if she is saying this situation is inevitable. Woolf thinks a possible solution is for women to become independent and start their own lives without being forced to do what they have been told is their role. It seems that on one hand she is saying this is a solution, but on the other hand it seems that she is enforcing the idea of no escape. She recognizes the fact that women should take care of kids and she shows how hard it was for women to raise money for the school.
This issue is connected to writing and literature. Woolf begins her story “A Room of One’s Own” saying that “women must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. If a women does not have the opportunity to do anything besides what the past and myth of femininity has prescribed for them, then there is no way for them to write. Women could not have their own room while taking care of children. Woolf states that women weren’t allowed to have their own money and without this, it is Woolf’s deliberation that women cannot write. They weren’t even allowed in the library without being accompanied by a man. Women in the world were denied the right to take part in activities that did not have to do with what nature intended, which limited their chances to learn, write, and take action for themselves. “…and, in thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and the effect of tradition and the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer…” (Woolf).