Woolf on the Economics of Gender Inequality Analytical Essay by Nicky

The paper discusses Woolf's argument that women in fiction have been historically a poor fit for reflection of the ways in which actual women think or feel, primarily, because women have so consistently been excluded from the recording of history. The paper explains that the notion that women should not be expected to work for a living functioned as a clear impediment to the entrance of women into the field of literature and this was a clear impediment to literary fiction's capacity to accurately portray the female figure. The paper further explains Woolf's belief that there is a dispossession of self in the absence of entitlement to money or property and therefore the existing depictions of women in literature are fundamentally and problematically bankrupt of realism. The paper concludes that today, there is continued relevance to this idea as women still grapple for equal pay in various lines of profession and they struggle to gain respect in an artistic world accustomed to the male viewpoint.