Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity by Suzana Zink

Author:Suzana Zink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

The harem image is akin to the earlier notion of Cambridge’s “mediaeval” attitude towards women in its androcentrism and the emphasis on men’s monopoly on knowledge. In her response to “Affable Hawk” the same year, Woolf also used the harem image as an example of gendered spatial segregation in ancient Greece , precisely to reinforce the idea that freedom was an absolute condition for women’s intellectual growth.

Several years earlier, Jane Ellen Harrison had formulated a similar critique in “Homo Sum. Being a Letter to an Anti-Suffragist from an Anthropologist.” In her essay, Harrison examines men’s monopoly on the social sphere and women’s segregation from social life in primitive societies by discussing the institution of the “Man’s House,” a space whose “sanctity” is built on the exclusion of women (108). Harrison points out that, while some of her contemporaries’ views on the differences between the two sexes were still “based on arguments drawn from primitive sociology,” the Man’s House was a model doomed to break down as “it left out half of humanity, woman” (110). As Sowon S. Park has noted, Harrison does not make any explicit reference to Cambridge , but her discussion of the Man’s House reads as an indirect critique of the androcentric values still very much in place there (75).

The result of the vote on 8 December 1920 was a disheartening one for Cambridge women, report A being “defeated by 192 votes” (Tullberg 152). In yet another letter to her Oxford friend Gilbert Murray, Harrison wrote on the occasion:the old weary struggle about the vote begins again & all the fierce young disappointed ones come seething back & it is all as you say so ‘silly’ & so small. Of course we shall get it and I think soon, but only now I fear thro’ much bitterness, thro’ outside compulsion. (Robinson 284–5)

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