Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own to refute the idea still commonly held in the 1920s that women had not written as much great literature as men because women were innately mentally inferior. Woolf argues instead that it is social and economic opportunities, not genetic inferiority, that has held women back from becoming great writers.
She imagines, for example, that Shakespeare had a talented sister named Judith. Judith wants to go to London and write plays like her brother. But when she runs off to join the theater, she is not taken seriously and is seduced and impregnated by her manager Nick Greene. In other words, she is seen as a sex object by the man who could have helped her, not a gifted artist. While her brother is nurtured and encouraged as a writer, she is destroyed.
This imagined story helps illustrate the point that it was social stereotypes about women and lack of opportunity that held them back, not lack of ability. As Woolf writes of women in the sixteenth century (and no doubt herself, as she was a woman of genius who was denied opportunities her brothers had, feared ridicule, and suffered mental breakdowns):
any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.
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