y. These obstacles symbolize the effects of an educational culture that restricts a woman's intellectual mind (Roseman 17). Woolf sees the fact of being denied access as another type of violation on the freedom of the female mind. She asks herself many questions such as: "Why do men drink wine and women water, why is one sex so prosperous and the other so poor, what effect has poverty on fiction, and what conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?" She notices one professor's statement of "the mental, moral, and physical inferiority of women." She decides that these studies had all "been written in emotion and not in truth (Woolf 25)." They betray an anger that prevents them from approaching their subject objectively. Her next question is "why are they angry?" She decides that male scholars have been less interested in the inferiority of women than in preserving their sense of male superiority (Woolf 32).She thinks that it is impossible to say whether the kinds of labor that have traditionally been performed by women are more or less valuable than the work done by men. Cultural value changes "from decade to decade." She sees a future in which there will be no gender-based division of labor (Woolf 38). Woolf is careful not to blame men for the unequal treatment of women over the centuries. "Life for both sexes is a difficult struggle. It calls for courage and strength, and confidence." For men, over the ages, women have served as an instrument for reinforcing that necessary self-confidence. Women have been the mirrors in which man wished to see only the reflection of his own self (Roseman 18). The narrator's ability to consider gender inequality with disinterestedness comes from her financial independence. She has five hundred pounds a year, and that income is to destroy the frustration and vulnerability that would affect her thinking and writing in a negative way. It is for this same reason that the writer must enjoy...
