Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.

 

Couple of weeks ago I heard that my little brother have been studying women studies in university. What on the earth could make a big sister prouder than that? What a great brother I have! I don't know if he have ever read Virginia Woolf's book "A Room of One's Own ("Oma huone"), but if he haven't he really should. And so should everybody else too. I read it first time many years ago and a little while ago (actually after writing this post here) I decided to read it once again. I think it was even better now when I'm older myself.

Main point of the book is that woman should have 500 pounds a year and a room of her own if she wants to write literature. In her book Woolf tries to find out why women haven't been writing great literature classics. Are women just less talented or could society around us has something to do with it? Her famous example tells about Shakespeare's talented sister.

 

Let me imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say. (...) His extraordinarily gifted sister, let us suppose, remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew and not moon about with books and papers. (...) Perhaps she scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on the sly but was careful to hide them or set fire to them.

 

Woolf is convinced that genius doesn't arise from emptiness. Great writers have to have certain environment around them. First of all they have to have a place where to write, they also have to have some free time and some money so that they are not dependent on anyone else. And most of all they have to have a history. Great writers are the dwarfs on the shoulders of giants but women writers didn't have their giants for many years, they didn't have anyone to lean on, no one before them. And they most certainly didn't have anyone to encourage them...

The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing?

Nowadays it is so easy to forget how far we have come and how quickly. Once women started to write, once they were allowed to study, once they were allowed to have their own money, they really did all of those things and more. Nowadays it seems ridiculous to say that women don't have their giants, their mothers, examples to follow. Nowadays world is full of great women authors and leaders.

But there are still other things... Even nowadays those jobs that are often done by women are usually less paid than those jobs that are done by men. And still there are people who are saying that it has nothing to do with sex, that it's just a kind of law of nature that cleaning ladies are less paid than bricklayers. Why do women so desperately want to become cleaners or nurses or teachers? They can just blame themselves if they are not paid well! Hmm... I'm not so sure, could be. Or could it be that it's not always enough to give someone permission to do something, maybe we humans need also a little bit encouragement every now and then? Now when we have a woman as a president here in Finland, has it changed lives of little girls? I don't know but I want to believe that it has, at least just a little bit.

Still, you may object, why do you attach so much importance to this writing of books by women when, according to you, it requires so much effort, leads perhaps to the murder of one's aunts, will make one almost certainly late for luncheon, and may bring one into very grave disputes with certain very good fellows? My motives, let me admit, are partly selfish. Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading.

I like reading too. I want to read all kind of books, those written by men and those written by women. I also want to live in a society where you can hear more voices than just one. I want to hear men and women but also I want to hear old ones and young ones, I want to hear immigrant voices and disabled voices and all those others who still haven't written their history to the front page. And I don't want to hear those voices because I'm such a great or noble person but only because I'm really curious...