Woolf, Walker and Reading while 'Woke' - By Na'Imah Laurent-Dixon
Before the feminist writing module I took at university, I had never read Virginia Woolf. But, as an avid reader and writer I was excited to finally meet her. I imagined that I would passionately agree with her point of view in A Room of One’s Own . Of course “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” or to engage in any kind of creative work. Wasn’t it obvious that “fiction, [and other] imaginative work…is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground” but that creatives, and the works they produce, are “attached to life at all four corners” ; that their creativity is either helped or hindered by socio-economic circumstances including “grossly material things, like health and money” . How could Woolf have been one of the first to notice that the economic disenfranchisement of women, and other consequences of the patriarchal society we (still) live in, thwarted their opportunities and abilities to write? As I thumbed through A Room of One’s Own