Locating its origins in a series of lectures delivered in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College (at the time the only two women's colleges at CamLocating its origins in a series of lectures delivered in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College (at the time the only two women's colleges at Cambridge), A Room of One’s Own is at once a deeply personal and searching account of one woman's writing life, and an urgent critical intervention into women’s history. Woolf's essay, which makes a definitive claim that financial security is an imperative requirement for female intellectual independence, both came at a moment and helped produce a moment in which new cultural roles were being envisioned for women.
The basic premise of A Room of One’s Own is succinctly summed up by its author: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The second longing is of the domestic variety, a desire for an interior space untouched by the exigencies of the male gaze. Woolf is using “a room of one’s own” metonymically to represent her desire for an intellectual existence entirely independent of men. A room of her own will provide Woolf with the financial security and the space necessary to pursue the work that fulfills her. The room, in other words, is the grounds upon which Woolf locates an agency of empowerment: she envisions this room of her own—her space of study—as a profound act to reaffirm the importance of a female intellect so unsettling to the social order its value demanded its constant disavowal. The first longing—money—is paramount for the realization of the second—a room of one’s own. Recognizing how poverty binds women to awful material and psychic configurations, Woolf conceives of her newly found financial independence as a panacea against feeling poised on the verge of drowning: “my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me.”
A Room of One’s Own also illuminates the difficulty of recovering women lives from the annihilating force of historical neglect. Woolf’s text is distinctly preoccupied with the absence of an established female literary tradition. I found it interesting how Woolf, in speaking to an overarching project to wrest back control of women’s stories from their historic (and continued) abuses, traces narratives of women’s inherent inferiority to intricate processes of male projection. To put it differently, Woolf contends that the patriarchal myth of inherent male superiority necessitated female disempowerment precisely to reaffirm itself. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses,” she writes, “possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” Women’s intellectual and economic independence, according to Woolf, embodied the threat of male decline and made it palpable. Fearing the collapse of the dominant male order, men projected both their fears about female independence from male control by deeming women unfit for history.
Woolf’s great achievement in A Room of One’s Own is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between public and private. For much of Western history, women writers have not been recognized, and their work has been largely relegated to history’s ill-lit margins. How can a woman, therefore, write in a textual and historical space largely defined by an overwhelmingly male canon? How can she articulate an experience that has scarcely been touched by words? These questions have clearly occupied Woolf, who, in A Room of One’s Own, chooses a rogue approach to writing. Resisting coherence and proscriptive forms of agency typical of critical texts, Woolf opts instead to meet the reader in the concrete realities of her lived experience. Woolf speaks in a language that is never still, combining memoir, literary criticism, political and cultural critique in order to imagine a new model for how to produce productive and lasting knowledge about women’s lives. She insists on holding space for the detours, interruptions, and digressions, which imbues her essay with the impression of spontaneous improvisation. The rigorously thought-out vignettes, however, point to a text closely observed, its pieces clearly arranged and rearranged. This is one of the primary strengths of A Room of One’s Own: how her consistent willingness to examine her own claims and her continuing insistence on her own positionality as a woman writer offer spaces and modes of recording history as a part of an alternative feminist project.
That said, A Room of One’s Own does not always escape its author’s blind spots. Woolf’s 500-pound allowance and the room of her own that it afforded her are defining achievements, epitomizing the attainment of financial independence and the enjoyment of freedom from social convention. They are certainly significant when compared to what was possible for women in Britain at the time, particularly working-class women, whose position is one of legal (and oftentimes physical) powerlessness. Women who were single and without family were particularly vulnerable to economic destitution, as they were not expected to be financially self-sufficient. Where Woolf’s inheritance allowed her a liberating alternative to the marriage plot, most women at the time could not afford to forsake the security and convenience of marriage in favor of independence and intellectual freedom. At one point in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf confesses that her newfound fortune loomed larger in her mind than the women’s vote of 1918: “Of the two—the vote and the money—,” Woolf writes, “the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.” While Woolf’s comment can be dismissed as simply insensitive, the moment does evince how individualistic thinking can easily reproduce our relationship to patriarchal forms of power. For a moment, Woolf becomes complicit with the very system she disavows, having claimed a position of power within it.
Whether Woolf’s ambivalence simplifies her argument or not, it is undeniable that Woolf has produced an important inquiry into what a literature that decenters the male gaze as sovereign can and should look like. Woolf’s concluding call for women to reconstitute themselves as dominant by reviving the “dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister” is guided by a fierce and expanded sense of what might be possible if women allowed themselves to wrest their voices from a dominant order intent on denying them their sound. Woolf’s clarity of vision when she writes about the torturous vagaries of being a woman in a world that cannot fully saturate her crosses almost a hundred years to address each of us intimately. As we think of recent grim setbacks in women’s rights, it is imperative to keep listening for resonances in A Room of One’s Own.
(Note: This review was reworked from a longer essay I wrote for class.)...more
The joy of reading Christina Sharpe is one of knowing that this book, this thing here, in your hands, these words will become part of your cellular stThe joy of reading Christina Sharpe is one of knowing that this book, this thing here, in your hands, these words will become part of your cellular structure. I'm mesmerized by her work, emotionally and intellectually, and often upended by it. To read such intelligent, rigorous, and luminous insights—about art, grief, memory, community, and what it means to eke out a sense of “beauty as a method” in times of great rupture—feels like an enormous gift and I can only begin to speak my gratitude. If I could venture out into the world right now and reverently press this book into every single reader’s hands, believe me I would....more
Another illuminating study I read for my class on race, ethnicity, and gender in 19th century US.
The political is unequivocally personal, is the succiAnother illuminating study I read for my class on race, ethnicity, and gender in 19th century US.
The political is unequivocally personal, is the succinct version of Jane Dailey’s thesis in Before Jim Crow. By insisting on race as a slippery, tractable, and malleable designation rather than a deterministic, essentializing category, Dailey seeks to redefine race as “situational and historical, created and sustained through social interactions.” In other words, race, in Dailey’s rendering, exists as a social dynamic and interpersonal negotiation. It’s a phenomenon not only enacted and maintained by social structures and institutions, but is also continually renewed and remade through the “ordinary and everyday” actions and interactions often invisibly informed by them.
Recognizing the volatile state of change and instability, slipperiness and malleability that characterize constructions of race, Dailey convincingly demonstrates how white supremacy undermined the efforts to build cross-race political cooperation in the post-Emancipation South. Dailey’s monograph is the Readjuster coalition, an interracial political movement that sought to breach the color line by emphasizing the class-based interests of both Black and white Virginians.
Central to Dailey’s argument is the idea that late 19th century Virginians were acutely aware of the socially constructed nature of race, and that that awareness has generated implacable levels of anxiety that originated principally from “the rising fortunes of Black Virginians.” Indeed, the appearance of Black people asserting their citizenship in public spaces not only challenged existing social hierarchies but also called into question definitions that centered around ‘being black’ and ‘being white.’ The Readjuster Party, in other words, shattered the sacred fantasies that allowed Virignians to establish whiteness as intrinsically valuable and blackness as inherently inferior.
Playing on these race-based anxieties, white Democrats set out to destroy the Readjusters party. Capitalizing on white Readjusters' fears that their “possessive investment in whiteness” is being challenged, the Democratic Party excluded white Readjusters from definitions of whiteness–and its ‘wages,’ to quote the DuBoisian term–on account of them being hybridized or contaminated. For white Democrats, to put it differently, white Readjuster’s social affiliation and proximity to Black people undermined their whiteness and made them inferior.
The strength of Dailey’s reflection in this book is to make clear that evaluations of race should account for the ways in which the gender line and the color line often intersect. As Dailey sees it, white Readjusters’ “vulnerab[ility ]to race baiting” stemmed, in a large part, from a sense that their manhood, more than anything else, is being devalued. Indeed, white Democrats, in Dailey’s view, successfully employed a “gendered rhetoric of race and politics” against which white identity was defined and legitimated. Within this rhetoric, Black Readjusters served as a repository for the sexual longings and fears of white Readjusters and Democrats alike (in regards to miscegenation, control over white women, loss of white male authority etc). White Readjusters understood, in other words, that in order for them to be regarded as credibly ‘white’ and credibly ‘male,’ they had to distance themselves from the Black members of the Party and reassert their whiteness and masculinity in the same breath. To illustrate this, Dailey evokes the white reactions to the appointment of two black men on the Richmond school board in 1883 as the clearest statement of white anxieties about “the value of whiteness.”
The cumulative effect of this commitment to male whiteness, Dailey hauntingly demonstrates, is a resurgence of white male supremacy and the disintegration of the coalition party. To break through the color line, white Readjusters had to make a commitment to a radical repudiation of whiteness where it intersects with received notions of masculinity. That they failed to do so paved the way for the rise of Jim Crow....more
I read Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness for class, and while I found it hugely illuminating in its continuing relevance–it was, also, frankly depressI read Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness for class, and while I found it hugely illuminating in its continuing relevance–it was, also, frankly depressing.
Wages appeared in 1991 at a moment of renewed inquiry into the question of whiteness in relation to the US labor movement and has since left many porous boundaries for scholars to outline. since the 60s, activists of color have been challenging white people’s inability to see race in relation to themselves, but it wasn’t until the 90s that critical reassessments of whiteness have reached a point of avalanche in academic circles. the project of re-articulating whiteness as a constructed race was one pursued relentlessly by critics and scholars (such as Toni Morrison, Howard Winant, Michael Obi, Hazel Carby, and many others) and is the principle focus of this book.
in Wages of Whiteness, Roediger breaks sharply with Marxist interpretations of US labor history that preserve a strange silence about the social realities of race. “the main body of writing by white Marxists in the United States,” he writes, “has both ‘naturalized' whiteness and over-simplified race, reproduc[ing] the weaknesses of both American liberalism and neo-conservatism” (6). whiteness, according to Roediger, has enjoyed for far too long its status of normativeness and invisibility in labor scholarship. dislodging it from that normative spot in the center is therefore imperative for a more capacious understanding of the US labor movement.
building upon the generative insights of Black scholars (particularly those of Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois), Wages of Whiteness made new hay in labor scholarship by reconceptualizing race in America as a “white problem” (24). whiteness and white supremacy, Roediger argues, were not a peripheral condition of the formation of the working class, but central features of the white worker’s emerging class consciousness. the strength of Roediger’s argument here is to take seriously the agency of 19th century white workers as “historical actors making their own choices” (24). Roediger was, in other words, unwilling to cast white workers as unwitting victims of capitalism who were merely duped into racism. white workers, he asserts, not only accepted and promoted racial distinctions, but were deeply corrupted by an excessive “devotion to whiteness” (22). thus at stake in this book is the question, “why [did] the white working class settle for being white” (6)? the short version of the answer Roediger finds derives from W.E.B. Du Bois' notion of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” (20).
“the pleasures of whiteness,” Roedgier writes, “could function as a wage” (13) and in 19th century America they led “many workers [to] define themselves as white” (6). in Roediger's view, the Civil War and end of slavery stripped the white worker’s ability to derive satisfaction from defining themselves as “not slaves” (39). this, alongside the circumstances of economic exploitation and class oppression, generated for the working class an acute cultural and psychological anxiety that centered around definitions of being 'white.' put bluntly, if 19th century white workers could no longer project a sense of inferiority into Black enslaved people–how will they feel better about their own growing subordination to a rising class of capitalists?
the irony Roediger's analysis depicts is a biting one: whiteness as a 'psychological wage' compensated white workers for their own exploitation. white workers clung to the myth of whiteness, Roediger writes, as a way “of reassuring [themselves] in a society in which downward social mobility was a constant fear” that they “might lose everything but not whiteness”(60).
unable to release themselves from the implacable paradox of this investment in whiteness, white workers found it unthinkable to acknowledge the very obvious kinship between their condition of dependency and that of the slave. as a result, white workers mobilized downward against Black freed slaves instead of upward against their white capitalist masters. they, to put it sharply, preferred to live in exploitative poverty than, as Du Bois puts it, “see colored labor with a decent wage” (qtd. in Roediger, 20). indeed, such was the allure of whiteness and the power of racism that Irish immigrants could promote the worst forms of white supremacy by participating in violent riots against Black people without feeling self-conscious about their own similar condition of exilic displacement.
the strength of Roediger’s reflections in Wages is to make clear how a blind commitment to whiteness destroyed the greatest opportunity America ever saw to deal a decisive blow to the foundations of capitalist exploitation and build a truly united labor movement.
it is really difficult not to read this book without feeling the past pressing into the present. as Kathleen Clever astutely remarks in her introduction to this edition, “the spurious wages that white racism paid long ago continue to bedevil democracy and diminish our humanity” (25). in The Wages of Whiteness, the turbulent rifts in the 19th century labor mouvement spread from past to present, and the lesson that emerges becomes a horrific cautionary tale: there is no hope for a class revolution if we continue to pay whiteness its wages....more
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