In chapter three of A Room of One’s Own, 20th century self-educated literary critic Virginia Woolf makes a compelling humanist argument; one, which is not smudged with the many “isms”, seeking bias, that seem to have found residency on the web. Woolf analyzes gender inequality in Elizabethan English society by speculating the existence of the woman who could have been William Shakespeare’s sister.
Before reading this hypothesis, I was expecting Woolf to state that Judith, Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, could not have been great because she was a woman and, alternatively, that Shakespeare was great only because he was a man. However, Woolf is much smarter than that. She advances a very sensitive argument, despite its extremities, in a proper egalitarian way. Taking the mechanism of society’s design into consideration, she ensures that both participants in her experiment have equal capabilities and unequal chances of success. She then goes on to show how one was aided and the other impeded by this same machinery: society. In so doing, she brilliantly illustrates gender inequality.
Despite her wild imagination and obvious bias (as a woman herself), Woolf does not just make sense but also tells the truth, all in the hope of correcting. She does not yell that all men are evil, that women deserve more, or whatever they tweet and blog about these days when it comes to feminism.