Review Paper
Year: 2023 | Month: May | Volume: 10 | Issue: 5 | Pages: 273-278
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijrr.20230534
Feminist Ideas of V. Woolf on The Material of the Essay “A Room of One's Own” and “Professions for Women”
Aziza Sahib Salamova
School of Education, Department of English grammar, Azerbaijan University of Languages, Baku, Azerbaijan
ABSTRACT
The term “feminism” (from Lat. femina – woman) was first introduced by French socialist theorist Charles Fourier in the beginning of the 19th century. Fourier wrote how what he called the “new woman” had the potential to change social life and the role of womanhood. He went as far as stating that “the empowerment of women is the main source of social progress”. Parallel to this new era of critical understanding, art needed to take not only new forms, but also contain completely new content. It is therefore not surprising that a peculiar refraction of the female image in English literature became reflected in the work of the leading figure of modernism —Virginia Woolf. Writing at the turn of the century, Woolf reimagined the place of women writers in literature, proclaiming for the first time women's right to express their own vision and experience, their right to write and to think differently. Women's literary works were perceived extremely critically by male writers specifically and the Victorian society at large. The target of Woold’s later essays would, therefore, be this very attitude towards women's intellectual creativity.
In this article, our purpose is to consider Virgina Woolf’s ideas in her essays “A Room of One's Own”, and “Professions for Women” in the context of the feminist movement in England at the turn of twentieth century, determining their significance in the development of feminist critical literature.
Keywords: [feminism, feminist ideas, women’s right, feminist movement]
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