Woolf and Women in Shorts

Virginia Woolf once said “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (1250). When looking at the history of women in rhetoric (as I have been doing the last few weeks), women were not even allowed to have money or a room of their own until pretty recently. In the medieval and early renaissance, it was very difficult for women successfully continue their scholarship after marriage unless their husband died. Marriage was usually a forcible obligation women were under from their families because they had no legal right to money or property. Modesta Fonte, an Italian humanist writer, in her book The Worth of Women, discusses how marriage meant the end of freedom since upper class women of this period were required to be sequestered in the home after marriage, and they were rarely allowed to even leave the house except on special occasions. This is the same way women were treated in Athenian society some 1000 years earlier. It appears that, for many women throughout the centuries, “Husbands and hard times are never long in arriving” as Fonte puts it (48).

The Rhetorical Tradition points out that the majority of rhetoric “produced before the modern period comprised arguments for allowing women to express themselves at all in speech or writing, ore especially to practice rhetoric in public forums” (1200). Virginia Woolf is significant because she is one of the first women rhetoricians that was advancing the genre of rhetoric with female viewpoints, rather than only arguing for women’s value in the first place. While Woolf does argue for women’s value, as all female rhetoricians seemed to have to do, she also discusses the unique quality that women writers add to the world of thought. She points out the shallow quality of female characters in most fiction written by men. “Suppose for instance that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers” (1264). This rhetorical technique of comparing a typical social situation for a women and then placing a man in the same role is still in effective use by man feminists today.

 (It would seem strange to tell men not to wear shorts when it is hot outside, but women get slut-shammed for this all the time.) 

Another excellent point Woolf made is how fictional women characters interact with each other in things written by men verses women. “Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousey…but how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated” (1264).

This reminded me of the Bechdel Test, which is “sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule. [it is] a simple test which names the following three criteria: (1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man. The test was popularized by Alison Bechdel's comic Dykes to Watch Out For, in a 1985 strip called The Rule.” This is according to the website https://bechdeltest.com/

(This is a screen shot from the website with recently added movies that have passed and failed the test )


 Clearly, this issue with women's representation in fiction has not ended, it has only expanded to the sphere of motion pictures.