Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own was first published on 24 October 1929 and over the course of the following decades established itself as the ‘foundation stone’ of twentieth-century literary feminism. A hybrid text (part essay, part lecture, part fiction), A Room of One’s Own proposes that women’s freedom is a material matter entirely dependent upon money, space, and bodily autonomy: ‘Intellectual freedom depends on material things’. Amongst other arguments, the book demonstrates with excoriating clarity how men respond to legal reforms that benefit women but that challenge their own power, and it suggests how women may model new freedoms within the stubborn, if weakening, dominant patriarchy.
The full version of this landmark is written by Madeleine Davies