The Warsaw High School Times

In 1929, not even a year had passed since women in England gained full voting rights. It was a time when college-level education was extremely prestigious for women and only accessible to those who were rich and white. Women had to depend on men in most matters, and it still wasn’t very common for them to own property. That was the reality for most women when Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” was published.

In her work, Woolf writes about factors contributing to a woman’s ability to create literature throughout history. While referring to conditions that female authors had to write in, describing the role women play in society, writing about non-existing novels, and many more, she concludes that what enabled women to make great art in the economic system at the time was mainly having money and a room. For Woolf, a woman owning a room symbolized her independence, and her potential to be something other than a wife.

When considering a room from the perspective of Virginia Woolf, it seems like an amazingly liberating idea, and in many ways it is. A room gives one the space to create, rest, and simply exist on their own terms. It can be decorated and personalized to the taste of the person owning it, so it can also become a creative outlet on its own. Since it’s somewhere to come to at the end of the day, it can create a sense of stability. It can be a place to spend time with friends, to have a family, to be alone, to create memories, a place to call home.

A room has one more crucial advantage. In this day and age when everyone is posting on social media, some parents share every single moment of their children’s lives, and it’s rare to get to sit alone with one’s thoughts, we can feel as though privacy has become more of a privilege than a right. One can easily get overwhelmed when thinking about the fate of child stars or the kids who take part in broadcasting on family channels because it seems that they have been denied their right to seclusion since the day they were born. As a response to all this, having a room, a place where one can be alone is essential to helping fulfill the human need for privacy.

Along with all those benefits, a room also has some disadvantages. One of them is that many people have lost their social skills during the pandemic, and even now when it’s over, they have a tendency to isolate themselves. Using a room as a tool to do that can be immensely harmful, especially to younger people who haven’t gotten the chance to experience life yet. 

Having friendships and other relationships with people no longer means having to come out and experience life outside of one’s room. These days a lot of people choose the option of having their relationships online, and since they don’t have to come out of their rooms to do that, it makes them distance themselves even further. School and work are other examples of experiences that used to force people to come out of their rooms and that are to a large extent happening online.

This causes another process: the loss of third places. In the book “The Great Good Place” Ray Oldenburg describes third places as spaces like cafes, parks, libraries, and others that are neither home nor work and that should be available to anyone. Since home and work can now be merged into one, and a cup of coffee at a cafe isn’t affordable for everyone, the locations that are pivotal for creating community are beginning to disappear. Third places are being replaced with online spaces that create the illusion of a connection to other people. Due to privatization, places all over the world that used to be public now often serve the purpose of commercial activities. This issue is also impacted by the fact that people are isolated even on the transportation level, especially with weak public transportation. This is clearly visible in the US where it’s essentially impossible to get anywhere without a car, but this is a problem that the entire world suffers from.

As we can see, much has changed since the year 1929. Problems that now come to mind while discussing the topic of owning a room would be completely foreign to Virginia Woolf. In some ways, things have become worse; literature is not as relevant as it used to be, most people are suffering from the post-quarantine effect, and there is a lack of third places. However, in other ways, the situation has changed for the better. A woman can own a room without being judged, and a Chloe can like an Olivia.