This essay by Charlotte Phillips was commended by the judges of the prestigious Woolf Essay Prize.
“In a hundred years, I thought…women will have ceased to be the protected
sex. Logically they will take part in all the activities and exertions that
were once denied them.”
Do
you believe that modern European society lives up to Woolf’s expectations,
ninety-three years on?
If we are to look at the world through the eyes of
legislature and law, acts and resolutions passed, then women are indeed free
and at liberty to pursue any of the “activities and exertions” that Woolf so
equivocally mentions, and many more besides. However, the world which women
experience is not simply made up of what they are allowed to do on paper: as
Woolf so clearly demonstrates through much of her wider literature, the world
is a storm of perceptions, feelings, judgements, thoughts, effects, memories
and attitudes. And as soon as we take these social factors into consideration,
it is clear to see that women are in many ways no less constrained than ninety
three years ago.
There is a significant ambiguity to the lexical choice of
“protected”- taken literally, it could be assumed that Woolf means simply that
women are ‘defended from attack’1. This suggests an innate physical
weakness, a need to be rescued or saved- but isn’t this, some would argue,
justified?
Biologically, women are on average shorter and weaker than men2.
This is a difference that cannot be disputed. Indeed, today when a family walks
onto any medium of public transport, they will be told women and children
should be rescued first in the case of an emergency. However, in A Room of
One’s Own, Woolf considers that “knowledge, adventure, art…she reaches out for
it”. If we take “she” to be the entirety of the female population, we see a
whole people reaching out for the intellectual stimulation they are being
denied, who have been “protected” from a whole way of life. This leads us to
our second interpretation of protection- that of prevention, denial,
restriction.
In Woolf’s time,
women were still explicitly banned from any area which required cognitive
function beyond cooking, cleaning and childcare. Women of literary and
scientific significance were hard to come by and hard done by: “Jane Austen hid
her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper…there was
something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice”. Jane Austen, a much discussed
author in A Room of One’s Own, seemed to protect herself from the social judgement she knew would ensue if she was
caught carrying out the distinctly male activity of writing a novel, or indeed
writing at all. In 1929 when A Room of One’s Own was published, women over 21
had just been given the vote3, but that was about as much influence
as they could exert over an area so dominated by men as politics. Of course in
modern European society, new laws regarding women are generally made to
encourage them to enter those professions and areas that they were protected
from for so long. The explicit rules have changed; they do live up to Woolf’s
(entirely reasonable) requests for an equal society. But implicitly, those
underlying social attitudes towards women sticking to their roles as daughter,
wife and mother still cause significant barriers. The psychological impacts that
result in these barriers will be discussed shortly.
Yet another reading of “protected” is that women are
confined to certain “activities and exertions” by the social structure they
live in, essentially their marriage. Especially in higher classes, women had a
distinct role as socialite and charming wife- a cultural norm that Woolf openly
criticises in her literature, most notably in Mrs Dalloway4. Today,
gender roles and stereotypes are still very much in existence: father as the
breadwinner, mother as the carer of children, cooker of food, cleaner of
clothes, and hostess of social gatherings. Even women who earn more than their
husbands and work more hours still, on average, perform vastly more housework
and childcare than their husbands. IN fact, beyond the point at which income is
equal between the two partners, the more women earn the more housework and childcare they do. This demonstrates that even
when the traditional role of main breadwinner is subverted, the traditional
role of ‘domestic goddess’ remains static. Additionally, there is a
reinforcement of the ‘separate spheres’ of the two genders6.
By
restricting a woman’s movements to activities that are carried out in the
domestic arena- the home- she is automatically a more private figure than the
husband, who’s role is significantly more public-at work, socialising. This
could certainly be considered a protection of sorts: protection from
maintaining a reasonable public sphere, and a protection from situations
occurring beyond the home environment. The exhaustion and demoralisation of
performing both traditional gender
roles must limit a women’s creative and mental output, and her ability to carry
out aforementioned activities and exertions. Logically, Woolf would assume that
a swap, or share, of gender norms in the home would be normal practise by the
21st century. Unfortunately,
this is not yet the case, and is even worse in many countries outside of Europe
where gender equality movements are yet to make an impact on social policy.
Those who question whether inequality between the genders
still exists are blind to the deep psychological impact of attitudes and of
perception. Not just the attitudes and perception of women themselves; but the
attitudes and perceptions of the entire social world, of men, women, children,
the media, politicians, strangers on the street, celebrities…the list is
perpetual. Now that there are no legal barriers to entry into male dominated
areas, particularly ‘masculine’ professions, many place the lingering disparity
between proportion of men and women in an area such as, for example, politics
(although this is applicable to any area in which there is still a huge ratio
of men to women) to the convenient notion of ‘biological essentialism’.
Biological essentialism proposes that the nature of an individual is down to
genes and biology7, and by extension, the traits of an entire
gender-female- are biologically pre-determined to be inferior for certain roles
or at certain tasks.
Many see this idea
as the politically correct explanation for the higher percentage of males in
areas which require a high level of cerebral functioning. In fact, one could misinterpret
Woolf herself as an advocate of this theory, with her insistence that women’s
“creative power differs greatly from the creative power of men.” However, these
differences in creative power are not written to suggest that women are
inferior in any way. In fact, given Woolf’s consistent criticism of a
significant proportion of the male canon, it is more likely that she thinks
this difference in creative power an advantage. Furthermore, it is clear that
she sees the true impact of socialisation as far more important than any (yet
unsubstantiated) biological differences.
For as she points out in chapter 3, “it needs little skill in psychology
to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry
would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and
pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her
health and sanity to a certainty.”. Here
Woolf points out that the girl has a natural talent for poetry- there is no
biological block to her intellect- and yet it is “other people” who prevent her
from fulfilling her potential. The “contrary instincts” are, no doubt, a
reference to the basic human instinct to want to be accepted, and not mocked or
“thwarted”. The other human instinct is to pursue the passions and talents with
which we have been bestowed. The fact that these two needs cannot co-exist no
doubt causes psychological conflict, and is a real obstacle for women both in
Woolf’s time and now: this passage is infuriatingly relatable to life in 21st century Europe. All we need to do is replace the word “poetry” with ‘politics’,
and the word “girl” with ‘woman’.
The significant psychological effects of societal
expectations are reinforced by much scientific research. Cordelia Fine, in her
book Delusions of Gender, attacks the idea of biological essentialism, claiming
that it undermines the psychological influence of culture and society. She
argues that our self-concept (how we perceive ourselves) is heavily influenced
by gender stereotypes- we “see our own selves through the lens of an activated
sterotype.”8. In a society
where gender stereotypes are, as already established, rife, Fine suggests that
we implicitly apply these assumptions to our own self-identity. This has
substantial effects on behaviour, attitudes, and feelings. We can use this idea
to explain a barrier for women who are entering the world of STEM: Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. One of the most common gender
assumptions- and indeed a ‘fact’ most relied on by biological essentialists- is
that men are innately superior in the fields of mathematics and spatial
awareness. A 2008 study exposes the damaging effect on female performance this
assumption has.
A group of high-performing mathematics students, of both
genders, who were selected from a variety of American universities, undertook a
notoriously difficult mathematics test. In one group, the students were told
that “the test was designed to measure their maths ability, to try to better
understand what makes some people better at maths than others.”. Having
corroborated the prevalence of the stereotype that men have a higher
mathematical ability, a statement of this sort reminds women of their supposed
inferiority in the area, and this primes them to incorporate this into their
own self-concept. The results reflected this chain of reasoning: women
performed far worse than in the alternative group. In the alternative condition
of the experiment, students were presented with the information that no gender
difference had ever been found in the results of previous students undertaking
the test. The women performed substantially better in this test: 30% better in
fact9.
Although this study was undertaken in America, there is no
logical reason why the results cannot be applied to the similar Western society
of Europe. This study demonstrates a dangerous cycle of cognition: women
perceive stereotypes about their abilities in certain areas, subconsciously
adopt these into their own self-concepts, which negatively affects their achievement
in said areas- this in turn perpetuates the stereotype of poor performance,
starting the process again. This can provide reasoning to the limited number of
females progressing through the areas traditionally associated with high
mathematical ability. The social prejudices and stereotypes enforce a
protection to women from the professional applications of maths and logic.
Without these stereotypes, women would be far freer to pursue their interests
no matter the traditional gender associations.
This discrimination, these negative perceptions are not
exclusive to the fields of politics or scientific and mathematical professions,
nor are they exclusive to the female sex: people of colour, disabled people,
and other minority groups all experience the same limitations and prejudices,
often combined with other forms of oppression to give a horrific double
discrimination. But with the focus on women, half of the world’s population,
the experiences they go through in the arena of politics make it unsurprising
that there are just 7 female prime ministers and 10 female presidents
internationally (out of a total of 196 countries)10.
Politics is almost a textbook example of an “activity” that
was “once denied” women. Although there are many strong, successful and
competent female politicians throughout the UK and Europe, numbers are still
very low. 450 women have been elected as members of the United Kingdom House of
Commons in total since 1918- this is lower than the number of men (459) in the
current UK parliament8. It is not that women lack the skills to be
successful politicians: it is the previously established psychological effects
of negative perceptions of women in politics that is the problem. In July 2012,
the minister for housing in the French parliament, Cécile Duflot, was openly
mocked, catcalled and hooted at during an address to her fellow politicians11.
It was her male counterparts who were the perpetrators of what could easily be
considered a form of sexual harassment. The reason? She was wearing a dress.
This directly shows the result of showing a typical form of femininity in such
a male dominated environment. She had every right to wear a dress, and every
right to be listened to with the same respect seemingly reserved for her male
counterparts. The claim that this is a one-off incident starts to diminish when
we look at just a snapshot of similar incidents. Hillary Clinton, Secretary of
State for America, is interviewed and asked “Which designers do you prefer?”
rather than questions regarding her important, political, and non-clothes
related job. There is no doubt that male politicians would never be asked such
questions. From the infantilisation of female MPs in the UK media- being dubbed
‘Blair’s Babes’ and ‘Cameron’s Cuties’- to the blatant objectification in the
Sun newspaper’s ‘Best of Breastminster’ (rating female politicians on the
abundance of their cleavage)11, there are simply not many positive
interpretations of female politicians at all. When male politicians construct
and implement a successful policy, they are praised for just that. When females
do the same, they are subjected to a painstaking analysis of every fashion
choice of the past six months. As Laura Bates logically points out in her novel
Everyday Sexism, this is just a tiny part of a “catalogue of prejudice” that
has an “enormous” impact. “Even when it doesn’t outright prevent women from
achieving political success, it doesn’t mean they are able to operate free of
ongoing and pernicious discrimination.”11.
There can be no doubt that ongoing discrimination is a huge
obstacle for women with very negative psychological effects. And these
psychological effects are known to everyone through the form of the media,
creating a self-perpetuating circle in which females are subjected to sexism in
politics, which prevents females from entering into politics, which furthers
the issue of under-representation. This in turn extenuates the idea that
politics is a male domain, sparking the cycle of sexism to start again. This is
a pattern that resembles the vicious circle of prevention of women entering
into mathematical professions. This is a form of “protection”, preventing women
from freely expressing their “creative power” and intellect. This is an
“activity and exertion” that is certainly not free for women to access and take
part in. This is an area in which modern European society, almost without
saying, does not live up to Woolf’s expectations in the slightest.
Having established the variety of interpretations and
meanings of the word “interpretation”, and the variety of modern day and 20th century applications of these, the oppressed liberties of women become increasingly
clear. The complex and damaging psychological impact of media and societal
perceptions of women and their abilities has been outlined to demonstrate the
difficulties of subverting the stereotypical roles of women and men in private,
public and professional fields. Virginia Woolf’s desire for women to be free to
carry out whichever activities and exertions they choose has not been realised.
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