rchal social and political system of values, particularly related to women, and her fiction became a vehicle of her criticisms. Woolf felt her father was a tyrant and she became "the voice against male tyranny" (Bond 52). Her literature was a voice for suppressed women. She spoke out not only against her father, but against her mother as well. She blamed her father for her mother's death because he expected her to dedicate her whole life to his needs. Seeing this as a child, Virginia placed most of the blame on her mother for losing her personal sense of self and identity, causing her to die young. Although Virginia refused to settle for a life like her mother's, she fell into a similar pattern with her husband Leonard. Her marriage paralleled her parents because Leonard controlled every aspect of Virginia's life. For Virginia, it was necessary to depend on Leonard in order to sustain life, but she rebelled against him, and the entire male sex. Virginia blamed men for most of the negative events in her life. For the feminist Virginia Woolf, who turned down medals and doctorates at universities, which discriminated against women, second-class citizenship was unacceptable. (Bond 40) Virginia dedicated many of her works to the feminist cause, including one of her most famous, A Room of One's Own, presents the discrimination of women in a humorous fashion. She writes about university scholars attending a dinner where men are served the finest food with the best taste, and the women are given bland, boring food. Although the men and women hold equal positions their treatment is far from equal. Woolf felt this comparison represented the everyday treatment of women. Virginia Woolf used her leadership and literary talent to fight for women's rights, and to bring justice to the unfair obstacles women were challenged with. "Only writing," Virginia Woolf said, "could compose 'the synthesis of my being" (Gordon 7). Virginia Woolf greatly affected t...
