Significant strides towards gender equality
Significant strides have been in the bid to achieve gender equality in the professional field. During the First and Second World Wars, a lot of men enlisted to fight for their various countries. Women were thus left home to work and fend for their families back home. As such, women were able to leave their traditional enclaves and actively engage themselves as career women. Traditionally, the perfect woman had only but a few things to do: to be utterly sympathetic, charming, unselfish and was expected to sacrifice herself on a daily basis in a bid to please the male population. Therefore, when the world wars ended and men came back home, most women found themselves out of a job. However, the change had already started taking shape, making a difference between the woman of the 19th and 20th centuries. These significant strides were not without difficulties as Virginia Woolf attempted to explain in Professions for Women.
The challenges faced by Virginia Woolf
Delivered as a speech on January 21st, 1931 at the National Society for Women’s Service, Professions for Women attempts to highlight these challenges as experienced by Virginia Woolf. The excerpt explores various concepts of human relations, morality, and sex. Fundamental among them is the struggle faced by women in an attempt to break loose from traditional conventions on the role of women in society. Woolf narrows down the problems to one central issue, an apparition in the imagination, a phantom that she calls “The Angel in The House.” It is about the stereotype of the time when a woman was socially expected to be tender and sympathetic, to flatter, deceive and use the wiles of sex to attain success. She explores this idea and further goes ahead to state that for a woman to succeed as she did, the phantom had to be killed. It implies overcoming personal and societal prejudices on how a woman should look like or act.
The repression of creativity and imagination
The Phantom, as she describes, represses and dumbs down her creativity and imagination. The ghost metaphorically represents the Victorian woman. She was supposed to be pleasant and immensely charming. Also, she was considered as an intellectual inferior, devoted and submissive to her spouse, powerless and passive. Woolf, however, overcomes this inhibition of “The Angel in the House” to become an expressive writer, perpetually voicing her intellectual views freely.
Styles used by Virginia Woolf
Woolf uses various styles in the speech to convey her message effectively. These include the use of metaphors, anecdotes, irony and sarcasm, personification and understatement. She manages to establish her credibility and build trust with her audience when she says “But to tell you my story…” an anecdote. “The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions” is both sarcastic and ironical ad adequately serves to remind the audience that the woman has been financially suppressed hence her success in other professions that may be economically damaging. She further personifies her imagination to give an analogy for purposes of clarity.
Inspiring women to overcome their phantoms
Virginia Woolf is compellingly passionate and analytical. She hopes to inspire women to overcome their phantoms-an inferiority complex, to think for themselves and excel I their chosen professions. Her intentions are clear; to pave the way for (other) women of later generations to discard their shackles and exhibit their natural excellence.
Works Cited
Gullet, Sydney. Professions for Women by Virginia Woolf. 2015, https://prezi.com/9kjmatxoifqt/professions-for-women-by-virginia-woolf/.
Leaska, Mitchell. Professions for Women. 2015, https://genius.com/Virginia-woolf-professions-for-women-annotated.
Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941. The Death of the Moth: and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and company, 1942. Print.
Lewis, P. and Svendsen, J. (2010). Virginia Woolf -- Modernism Lab Essays. [online] Available at: https://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Virginia_Woolf [Accessed 1 May 2017].
