Why Women Still Need ‘A Room of One’s Own’ by Hlonipha Mokoena

I couldn’t get past the thought that Virginia Woolf was right; a woman still needs ‘a room of one’s own and three guineas’ to be a writer. I am one woman who has been profoundly shaped by the work of other women, including Woolf. I read To the Lighthouse in my early teens, not because it was a set work but because I had found it while browsing at the library where my mother worked as a librarian.

It was also in those teenage years that I read her essay A Room of One’s Own. The premise of the essay is that Woolf is invited to speak about women and the writing of fiction, and that while contemplating the subject, she visits an Oxbridge university — first, she has lunch at a male college, and then second, she has dinner at a female college. The entire essay hinges on the disparity she notices between how men are educated, housed and fed and how women are educated, housed and fed. Her first insight is about the funding of these colleges themselves — she noted the glaring fact that when men make money, they use some of it to fund the education of other men. Women on the other hand, didn’t seem to have the money to pay for their gender’s education.

She wrote: “If only Mrs Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureships and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex, we might have dined very tolerably up here alone off a bird and a bottle of wine; we might have looked forward without undue confidence to a pleasant and honourable lifetime spent in the shelter of one of the liberally endowed professions. We might have been exploring or writing; mooning about the venerable places of the earth; sitting contemplative on the steps of the Parthenon, or going at 10 to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry.”

She then summed up the questions in the following way: “For that visit to Oxbridge and the luncheon and the dinner had started a swarm of questions. Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art? — a thousand questions at once suggested themselves.”

My teenage self probably didn’t understand all the politics of post-war Britain or the history of women colleges, but what I did understand was that there were vocations that women were barred from, not from the lack of ability but from the lack of money. What I understood was that when a woman chooses to be a writer, she is possibly choosing a life of penury, unless she secures the bag, as the expression goes nowadays.

I have chosen to focus on women and the problem of writing because no matter how much women accomplish, our accomplishments are still belittled and minimised.

Next to Woolf stands yet another woman who my precocious self discovered again by accident; Zora Neale Hurston. In her book Their Eyes Were Watching God, I found for the first time that a writer — a woman writer — can write about “her people” and their way of making sense of the world without adding an apology. Hurston opened a new way of thinking about my past, my family’s past, and the history of Africans in the world. She legitimised my wondering and daydreaming and made my idle thoughts seem so important.

She wrote: “She began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn’t know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind … She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.”

What things did I expect from reading and thinking? At the time when I was reading Hurston, I probably wouldn’t have been able to verbalise what it was that I expected to happen when I read books. In the foreword by Alice Walker to the book Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, we are told that the function of the writer is to express the “nobility of a soul that has suffered …”

“But we see something else: the nobility of a soul that has suffered to the point almost of erasure, and still it struggles to be whole, present, giving. Growing in love, deepening in understanding. Cudjo’s wisdom becomes so apparent, toward the end of his life, that neighbors ask him to speak to them in parables. Which he does. Offering peace.”

This job of enlarging souls that have been crushed under the burden of suffering is also present in the work of Toni Morrison, who has given many women writers the language we never thought we would find. “Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?”

Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life.

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

I can’t count the many times that I have read something written by Morrison and thought, ‘you have said it best, Toni. This cannot be improved’. But her legacy is to force us to improve, to elevate, to move the needle and to write the books we want to read.

You may already be asking yourself, but why focus on women and writing. Why not just focus on the job of the writer. I have chosen to focus on women and the problem of writing because no matter how much women accomplish, our accomplishments are still belittled and minimised. And one of the ways in which we are minimised is by being misdirected to struggles other than the hard work of writing. In Zadie Smith’s collection of essays, Dead and Alive, she writes about the constant fight to defend the writers we read and the words that made us choose to be writers in the first place. We are being told that the words that raised us are politically incorrect, and we have to find new heroines and new vocabularies. Smith answers in her inimitable style by saying, “…I’m the one severely triggered by statements like ‘Chaucer is misogynistic’ or ‘Virginia Woolf was a racist’. Not because I can’t see that both statements are partially true, but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: ‘Is it interesting?’ Into which broad category both evils and flaws could easily be fitted, not because you agreed with them personally but because they had the potential to be analysed, just like anything else.”

Women have to continue writing not just because we are feminists or we have something to say but because we are interesting and interested. We are interested not just in other women; we are interested in telling stories; we are interested in retelling old stories; we are interested in rewriting the world and inserting the many contorted souls who were never given a hearing before. Like Morrison, in her Nobel Prize speech, we need to affirm that “word-work is sublime”. We need to be able to celebrate that women get to be invited to luncheons and dinners where we no longer have to eat the bare necessities but where we can dine sumptuously, knowing that we have done the work that qualifies us to call ourselves writers.

Regardless of whether one has a room of one’s own or whether one has money, a “woman’s voice” always causes discomfort, especially when it is being used in the service of amplifying her need for independence.

• Hlonipha Mokoena is the director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. Before June 2015 she worked in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University. She is the author of Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual as well as The Nightwatchman: Representing Black Men in Colonial South Africa.