A Parallel between Women and the Proletariat in A Room of Ones Own

Sooo, as much as I dislike the Woolf book, I couldn't help but notice some things within the book that caught my eye. Woolf talks about the place of women in fiction, but through what she says about didn't apply so much to women as it did to different social classes. She states that a woman needs "funds and a room of her own." This doesn't apply specifically to women, but to human beings as a whole. How can a worker, gifted with literary skills, express his or herself? The lower classes, the proletariat, are in lack of both funds and property, which Woolf states that a woman must have if she wishes to be able to write. But does this statement not also extend to the proletariat? The proletariat is, by definition, not made up of rich landowners, and thus are unable to express their creativity. However, Woolf's claim implies that this stands only for women and not for men, as in her society, women were oppressed and unable to express themselves. But is that not also the condition of the working class? Like women in this society, the workers were, and still are, unable to control their destiny, and are set to be subjugated and controlled by the upper echelons of society, just as women at that time were controlled by their husbands. Parallels between women and the proletariat keep rising up: just as women were not allowed to own land, workers were likewise not allowed or simply unable to do so, simply because they lacked the funds (once again, just as they were poor and unable to raise enough money to be able to write, women had no control over their finances, even if they did have money.) We can thus say that A Room of Ones Own is just as much a feminist statement as a socialist one.

Woolf speaks of how she is not allowed to walk on the grass at Oxbridge, and is locked out of the Library. One might think of this first as symbolizing the fact that women are not allowed the same leisure or quality of education as men are, and it is of course a very poignant feminist point, but more subliminally, it also indicates to us how the person lacking property and funds, a woman, or moreover a worker, is locked out of these same things. The worker is not allowed leisure time, he or she must constantly be productive for long hours every day of every week, and has limited if any access to learning. Thus we see once again the critique not only of the sexist characteristic of Woolf's society, but its classist characteristic as well