In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf states that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
While the statement was undoubtedly true when she wrote it back in 1929, women are in a much different position today then they were then. Women now attend universities, run corporations, are Heads of State, and marry later in life, if at all. In short, women have choices now that weren’t available to them back in Virginia Woolf’s day. For one thing, money is easier to obtain. Women are no longer dependent on the goodwill of their fathers or husbands. Instead, women can earn their own living. While it would be lovely to have some distant relative will you a tidy income, it’s not necessary.
But one fact still remains true—a woman must have time and space in order to write. However, I hazard to guess that my idea of time and space would differ greatly from Ms. Woolf’s. Perhaps that’s because I’m much more pragmatic in nature. Or perhaps it’s because I’m not writing a great literary work of art, but a romance novel. Who knows? What I do know is that thousands, nay hundreds of thousands, of women write works of fiction each and every year, all while earning a living, raising their children, and having a life.
Women write on the bus, in the car while they are waiting to pick up their children at school, and while they wait at the doctor’s office. They write when their children go to bed at night or before they awake in the morning. They scribble furiously on their lunch breaks or on day’s off while waiting for the laundry to finish spinning. They are inundated by phone calls, emails, meetings and deadlines. Women seem to have less time alone than ever before, still, they have learned to carve out bits and pieces of time to write because the act of writing means so much to them.
As for a space of one’s own, it may be something as elaborate as an office with an actual door that closes, a corner of another room with a desk, or simply a laptop or a pad and pen. What matters is the act of writing.
I think the difference between now and when Virginia Woolf first penned her essay is the attitude of women as a whole, and therefore society in general. Women can do whatever they choose to do today. Their options are limited only by their imaginations. While I’m not naïve enough to believe these attitudes exist everywhere, and certainly not in all countries of the world, the fact remains that women’s voices are being heard. Whether it’s a biography, a work of non-fiction, a literary work, a mystery, a tale of science fiction, or yes, a romance novel, women are putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboards and tapping out their stories, one stroke at a time.
Even back in Virginia’s day women were stealing moments of time to put their words down on paper. Sure, not many of them published novels (or certainly not as many as today), but that doesn’t mean they didn’t write in their diaries or journals. They wrote the tales of their lives, letting them unfold one page at a time, listing births and deaths and other important moments that marked their existence. They shared recipes and wrote letters. Perhaps they passed these journals or letters with their kernels of wisdom on to their children, or maybe they were locked away in a trunk in dusty attic, rotten and forgotten.
No matter. What does matter is the act of writing, the act of creating something where there was nothing. Very little written today will be remembered, or indeed matter, to future generations. Does that devalue what is being written? Not at all. At least in my humble opinion.
The need to write is what drives the writer. It’s what drives me to sit at my desk, my chair tight against the wall, tucked away in the corner of my living room. A screen gives me the illusion of privacy and I’ve decorated the wall next to my desk in a way that pleases me. This is my space and now is my time. By sitting here and typing this blog entry I am stating that I am a writer. I make my own living and have carved out my own space.
One wonders what Virginia Woolf would have done if she’d been born sixty or seventy years later.
Today I’ve been thinking a lot on how we juggle everything. Previously I blogged on having a personal space for writing—a place of our own. Well, having a place is fine and dandy, but does no good if it just sits there while we run around after kids, cleaning the house, working day jobs, enduring the suppertime hour, trying not to be a stranger to our spouse….etc. 
