i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

3Starting Out from Home,1927–1932Neel came of age in the 1920s, a decade when women were granted the rightto vote and the image of the New Woman was born, who, in her short skirtsand bobbed hair, could imagine enjoying professional and recreational activitiespreviously reserved for men. However illusory the image of the NewWoman’s freedom may have been in social reality, nonetheless, the number ofwomen writers and visual artists whose work was granted a public forumgreatly increased. These artists considered themselves modernists, and yetwere aware that the modernist movement was gendered masculine and thatthe term feminine was a derogatory one. In their novels and essays, womenwriters such as Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West, whom Neel mentionedwith admiration, addressed this problem directly, often using satire to de„atethe pretensions of male genius. Comparing modernist literature unfavorablywith classical literature in A Room of One’s Own, Woolf argued that despitethe “freedom of mind” and “liberty of person” found in the writings of the contemporarynovelist, “Mr. A.,” a “straight, dark bar, a shadow shaped somethinglike the letter ‘I’ fell across every page . . .” Commenting on the boredom inducedby the protagonist’s repetitious and egotistic display of sexual prowess,Woolf concludes that “He does it in protest. He is protesting against the equalityof the other sex by asserting his own superiority . . . virility has now become29