Hw 24: A Room of My Own

When I first started reading "A Room of One's Own," Woolf explained her thesis and she said that "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction"(Woolf 4). At first that means to the reader exactly what it says, but by the end of the book, you realize that it is more than that. "-give her a room of her own and a five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these day"(Woolf 93). What Woolf is trying to say here is that although Mary Carmichael, in her opinion, was not a very good writer, if she had an atmosphere she was comfortable in both physically and emotionally, she would fill in the missing gaps to the literature she wrote.
I would say that I do have a room of my own. Not in my dorm room, but in my room at home. It is a place where I am perfectly comfortable and has a peaceful and relaxing atmosphere. Like the name of our course, our blogs are a small piece of ourselves that we can be ourselves and show our opinions in every way possible.Woolf concludes the book by restating with what a women needs to write fiction in a room of her own. "The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer"(Woolf 106).

Hw 22: Patriarchy then and now

One of the main themes in chapter two of Virginia Woolfs "A Room of One's Own," is patriarchy. Patriarchy is a social system where the male of the family is in charge over the women and children.Woolf discusses the issues that have been bothering her about her visit to the two colleges that involved patriarchy. There were many questions that she asked herself such as "Why do women drink water and men wine? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor?-a thousand questions at once suggested themselves"(Woolf 25). Woolf proves that England is a patriarchy with all of the questions about how men dominate over women that she continues to ask herself. Even when she goes to look up book "M" in the library of the museum, and there are no books written about males. All of these things that Woolf is questioning over and over shows the male dominance of the time. She stresses this fact when she states, " The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from the scattered testimony, that England is under rule of patriarchy"(Woolf 33).
When I looked on the front cover of "The Boston Globe" the article was about the win of the Boston Red Sox. This shows that today in the US there is still some sense of patriarchy, because the sports these days are usually only popular if men are the ones participating in them.