“Indeed my aunt's legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for ...

Hannah Beer
“Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and
imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration,
a view of the open sky.”
Is money the key to women’s liberation? Or to any, or all, liberation?
It would be easy, in a world seemingly driven by money, to argue that money is the key to
liberation. Certainly in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf demonstrates that she feels her ‘five
hundred pounds a year’ 1 liberated her from the constraints of economic dependency on men with
which women lived at the time she was writing. Her withering reference to Milton would seem to be
directed to book IV of Paradise Lost, which states: ‘Hee for God only, shee for God in him’ 2 . Milton
seems to be implying that a woman can only access heaven through a man. Woolf, however, argues
that a woman can access her own heaven –a world of opportunity and autonomy– through
economic independence. For her, five hundred pounds a year meant ‘Food, house and clothing are
mine for ever. […] I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give to me.’ 3
In considering the key to liberation, it is necessary to evaluate the meaning of the word
itself. The Oxford English Dictionary 4 defines liberation as “the state of being liberated”, which
naturally leads to the question: ‘liberated from what?’. It is here that it becomes evident that to say
money is the answer to a woman’s, any, or all liberation is too simplistic. When examined closely, it
is clear that money, like many of the systems we believe set us free, contains the essential paradox
that it has the potential to enslave as much as to liberate.
It would, however, be wrong to disregard the role money plays in women’s, and any
liberation. Woolf emphasises the importance of having a room of one’s own, a space where a
woman is at liberty to write. It must be recognised that it is money that enables someone to buy or
rent a room of their own. Indeed, money is essential to the liberation from poverty, the primary
definition of which is a privation of money. Food, shelter, clean water and clothing – all basic human
needs – require money. Without it, people are held captive by their poverty. In the United Kingdom
alone, 1.6 million children are born on or below the poverty line 5 , meaning the income of their
family is such that they cannot afford basic needs 6 . Furthermore, according to the English Index of
1
Equal to anything from thirty-five to fifty thousand pounds nowadays.
2
Paradise Lost, John Milton, Book IV (line 300)
3
Virginia Woolf ‘A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas’, Penguin, 1993, London (p.34)
4
The Oxford English Dictionary; edited by Catherine Soanes
5
Save the Children (charity), http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/child-poverty
6
The World Bank Organisation, information found on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/education/int/ms/health/wealth/def_of_poverty/definitions.shtml
Page 1 of 6

Hannah Beer
Multiple Deprivation, ‘88 per cent of the [areas] that are the most deprived in 2010 were also
amongst the most deprived in 2007’. More than half of the population of my home city, Liverpool,
lives in poverty 7 , a statistic which has hardly changed since 1851, when "Liverpool was top of the list
of every index of deprivation" 8 . It is clear, therefore, that many of the children born into poverty will
live their whole lives in poverty, and, in turn, bear children into poverty. Clearly, the liberation from
poverty is a long process, to which money is undoubtedly crucial.
Yet, in spite of money’s obvious power to liberate, it cannot be ignored that in itself, money
has the potential to enslave. For example, sex trafficking is reputed to be a multibillion dollar,
international criminal industry 9 and yet is the antithesis of female liberation: according to the United
Nations, there are an estimated 2.5 million cases of human trafficking at any one time, and 79 per
cent of these are acts of sexual exploitation of women and children 10 . Virginia Woolf illustrates that
the money she received from her aunt allowed her liberation of the mind; but money buys drugs,
supplies drugs and feeds drug addiction. Dependence is the exact thing Woolf said money liberates
one from, but substance addiction is the most obvious form of dependence, and it is only fed by
money. The National Lottery is also an interesting paradox, in that winning is promoted as the
ultimate financial liberation (“It could be you!” was the slogan that launched the National Lottery),
and yet people can become enslaved to it. The odds of winning the main draw are as low as one in
13 million 11 . Nonetheless, people pay to play, many using the same numbers each week, for fear
that the week they don’t play, ‘their’ numbers come up and they will have missed their chance to be
‘liberated’. Liberation is not the purpose of money; it is merely a by-product of it, as is enslavement.
It is evident even in A Room of One’s Own that money does not appear from nowhere: the
money that ‘unveiled the sky’ to Woolf came from her aunt. The realisation that money must always
come from somewhere, and is dependent upon a chain of supply, highlights the fact that it cannot
the sole key to liberation. When considering material liberation from poverty, it is apparent that
there must be a legitimate system in place to provide the money to liberate, be it an inheritance, as
in Woolf’s case, work, charity, a bank loan or the welfare state. This basic concept of a system to
provide liberation can be extended further. Systems of democracy can liberate entire nations from
political oppression, health care systems can provide the medicine that liberates people from illness,
and it is systems of justice that liberate people from wrongful incarceration, oppression or
7 The English Index of Multiple Deprivation, statistics by Mukund Lad, issued 24 th March 2011
(http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/statistics/pdf/1871208.pdf)
8 Professor Frank Neal, information found on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/content/articles/2009/06/18/history_sectarian_1909_feature.shtml
9 Equality Now (charity), http://www.equalitynow.org/our-work/trafficking
10 The United Nations Website, http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/faqs.html
11 Camelot, organisers of the UK nation Lottery (http://camelotgroup.co.uk)
Page 2 of 6

Hannah Beer
persecution. It now seems incredible that until 1991 marital rape was not a criminal offence in
England 12 , meaning that a woman did not have the liberty to say no to her husband; it was a system
of justice that had previously defended only the rights of men which then granted women this
liberation.
Religions are systems that aim for spiritual liberation. Christians believe that Jesus himself
freed the world from sin: ‘It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not
let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.’ (Galatians, 5:1) 13 . The theme of liberation is a
constant one in both the Old and New Testaments, and the book of Exodus tells the story of the
liberation of the Israelites through Moses. Buddhism provides a systematic way of life to lead to the
liberation from dukkha (suffering). With regards to women’s liberation, Islam’s basic principles aim
to liberate women; the Hijab is intended to liberate women from being objectified by men. Religion
and politics however are just as equivocal in the issue of liberation as money is. The Nazi movement
in Germany was a political system that claimed to strive for liberation from poverty and was brought
about by democracy. It actually created a state of fear, oppression and captivity, a paradox
epitomised in the desperately cynical words written on the gateways of the Nazi concentration
camps, “Arbeit macht Frei” (work makes you free). In the modern day, citizens of North Korea are
literally held captive by their communist regime 14 , when the aim of communism is supposedly to
protect the liberties of the individual. Religious systems too are not exempt from this paradox
particularly in relation to the liberation of women. Under Taliban rule, Afghan women are not
allowed to be educated, partake in politics or even leave the house without a male blood-relative 15 .
The Catholic Church still prohibits women from being priests, which would seem to epitomise the
ideas of Milton that Virginia Woolf scornfully dismissed.
In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf emphasises the restrictions children place on a woman’s
intellectual and economic autonomy: ‘First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the
baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed
there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby.’ (p20). With the availability of the Pill
and other forms of contraception however, a woman is freed from the constraints of her fertility as
she is able, and crucially, encouraged, to control it in a way Woolf was not. These changed cultural
attitudes to fertility and sex have resulted in women being liberated to choose how to manage their
reproductive years. It is no longer abnormal for a woman not to have children, just as it now
12 Rape Crisis (charity), http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/maritalrape2.php
13 New International Version, The Holy Bible
14 “In labour camps, […] The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea detains an estimated 150,000-200,000
political prisoners. The regime claims to hold precisely none.” – article in The Economist, 21 st April 2012
15 Amnesty International (charity), http://www.amnesty.org.uk/uploads/documents/doc_22198.pdf
Page 3 of 6

Hannah Beer
accepted for a woman to raise a child on her own. The popularisation of childcare means that
women are now at liberty to choose both having children and going to work, which Woolf clearly
thought impossible. It is ironic, however, that just as cultural attitudes have liberated women in this
sense, they imprison women in another. The advent of the ‘celebrity’ has brought about a culture of
obsession with the way women look. One in every two hundred women suffers from anorexia
nervosa in the UK (compared with one in every two thousand men) 16 , and research has shown that
the media has a critical role in the development of eating disorders. 17 This is hardly surprising when
one considers that women are bombarded daily with articles on the weight – whether overweight or
underweight – of female celebrities. Anorexia is an enslavement of the mind and body: the mind of
an anorexic is held captive by the desire to lose weight; and the body is in turn under the complete
rule of the mind.
Furthermore, the more liberal attitudes to sex have resulted in an increased availability of
pornography. Anecdotally, it is increasingly accepted that the primary source of sex education for
many teenage boys is pornography. Thus, their sexual expectations of women are not that they are
empowered, or equal to men, but instead are sexually available and compliant; this expectation
must necessarily influence girls in turn. As Caitlin Moran says in How to Be a Woman 18 , the
pornography industry shows sex to be ‘a thing that just happens to a woman’. Woolf’s idea of a
‘large and imposing figure of a gentleman’ is especially relevant here. In portraying women in this
way, the media and the pornography industry have taken what should be a woman’s definitive
‘room of her own’, i.e. her body, and made it either public, or, in the case of pornography, the
property of men. Both of these are the antithesis of women’s liberation.
Whilst money, political and religious systems and cultural attitudes are all important factors
in women’s, any, or indeed all liberation, their inherent paradox means that they can only be part of
the solution. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf considers that ‘it would have been impossible,
completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of
Shakespeare’ (p.42) because women were not sent to school and educated in the same way which
men were. Although she maintains throughout A Room of One’s Own that money is crucial to the
liberation of women, it cannot be overlooked that had Woolf herself not been educated, she would
never have been able to write with the fluency and impact that she did. She would not have been
16
http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Anorexia-nervosa/Pages/Causes.aspx, figure from 2010.
17
Research led by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, information found on
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8528443.stm
18
‘How To Be A Woman’, Caitlin Moran; Ebury Press (Random House), St Ives; 2011.
Page 4 of 6

Hannah Beer
invited to lecture at Newnham College about women and fiction, had she not been educated as she
was.
Woolf was lucky in that she had the money to provide a room of her own, but her education
allowed her the ultimate room of her own: her mind. It is education which is the true solution to
liberation: there is no paradox to it. It cannot enslave or inhibit, as money, systems or cultural
attitudes can; education – not dogma or propaganda – only enriches and liberates the mind. With
the liberation of the mind comes the ‘unveiling of the sky’ that Woolf aligns with money. Whilst
money may well have ‘unveiled the sky’ to Woolf, it would have appeared a lot more daunting had
her mind not been educated enough to appreciate its vastness. Education is the enabler of not just
women’s, but of any, or all liberation, because it leads to degrees of, or absolute independence. For
example, had the Victorians not started educating girls, it is likely that women would not have got
the vote, been able to go to university or been granted equal pay – education was the first step in
women’s emancipation.
In addition, education provides liberation from poverty. It is self-evident that education
makes you more employable, which leads to an income. The Financial Times recently published an
edited extract from ‘Poor Economics’ 19 , a book that examines what can be done to eradicate
poverty. It says that, most commonly, the poor ‘lack critical pieces of information and believe things
that are not true’. For example, they do not know the benefits of immunising children, nor do they
know the best way to avoid contracting HIV. Education is not just crucial to the economy, but is a
critical partner in the health system as well: an educated mother is more likely to have a smaller
family, and immunise and educate the children she does have. Education benefits the health
systems not just of developing countries but of the richer countries of the West, by informing people
about disease prevention and early detection. Furthermore, an educated child becomes an
employable adult; an employable adult is an economically active adult with choices and
independence; an educated mind is a lifelong source of solace, income and flexibility.
In considering what the key to liberation is, it has become evident that the apparently
obvious solutions – money, stable political and religious systems, and enlightened cultural attitudes
– are actually inherently complex and contradictory: though they can liberate, they can also enslave.
The definitive resolution to liberation is education: it enhances good systems and challenges the
bad. Virginia Woolf argued that it was her aunt’s legacy that ‘unveiled the sky’ to her, but it was her
education that meant she knew the sky was being unveiled, and it is our education that frees us
19 ‘Poor Economics: Barefoot Hedge fund Managers, DIY Doctors and the Surprising Truth about Life on Less
than $1 a Day’, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Penguin, March 2012
Page 5 of 6

Hannah Beer
from the need for legacy. Education liberates the mind from ignorance, nations from poverty and
women from inferiority. Education leads people to the autonomy that is needed for any kind of
room of their own, be it literal or figurative. It is the ultimate key to liberation because it contains no
paradox; it is an unequivocal force for good.
Word count: 2,324 (excluding quotes)
Page 6 of 6