mid-Victorian poem of the same name that glorified a domestic (or domesticated) femininity devoid of any critical
spirit.In her highly influential critical A Room of Ones Own (1929), Virginial Woolf studied the cultural, economical and
educational disabilities within the patriarchal system that prevent women from realising their creative potential. With
her imaginary character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister),
Another, Virginia Woolf main theory is based on a statement that language is gendered. She argues that the
characteristics of a women’s sentence are that the clauses are linked in looser sequences, rather than carefully balanced
and patterned as in male prose. When taking a closer look at a wide range of literary texts, we can notice that her theory
is accurate.
Another important source of inspiration has been Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 The Second Sex. Here de Beauvoir wrote
that one is not born a woman, one becomes one De Beauvoir’s point behind her muchquoted comment was that
“ woman is a cultural construction, rather than a biological one As Ruth Robbins notes, this remark is important
because it highlights the fact that the ideas about male and female roles which any given society may have come to
regard as natural are not really so and that given that they are not natural they may even be changed Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex Beauvoir’s major work criticized male dominance and exposed sexism. Although it wasn’t
originally meant to be written as a feminist text, it reflects a profound understanding of women’s desires and needs. It
rejected the notions of an eternal feminine nature as the determinant of women’s fates. In this sense, women’s
subordination referred to the inferior position of women, their lack of access to resources, and decision making. This
was a situation inmost societies. The work remains one of the most influential works for contemporary feminists.
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