Status Updates From Ett eget rum

"...my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh."

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Thus, it is fairly evident that even in the nineteenth century a woman was not encouraged to be an artist. On the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured, and exhorted. For here again we come within range of that very interesting and obscure masculine complex which has had so much influence upon the woman's movement; that deepseated desire, not so much that she shall be inferior as that he shall be superior.

Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer's mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are against it… But for women, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her own was out of the question, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble.

it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare's day should have had Shakespeare's genius. For genius like Shakespeare's is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people. It was not born in England among the Saxons and the Britons. It is not born today among the working classes. How could it have been born among women who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom?

“It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for *if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only.*”

If two sexes are inadequate…

What I find deplorable looking about the bookshelves, is that nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century. I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that. Here am I asking why women did not write poetry in the Elizabethan age, and I am not sure how they were educated; whether they were taught to write; whether they had sitting-rooms to themselves; how many women had children at fifteen.

Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian's view of the past.

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; But this is woman in fiction. Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger.