Gloria Anzaldúa

Feminist literature has changed greatly throughout the movement, often improving on or contradicting previously written ideas. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf discusses the disparity between the treatment of men and women as she argues for equal access and opportunity. Several years later, Gloria Anzaldúa reclaims the word mestiza in her discussion about borders in Borderlands: La Frontera (1987). Writing in the beginning of the 20th century, Woolf was very much a proponent of First Wave feminism and its goal of equal possibility for women. Though this was a revolutionary idea, Woolf fails to mention race and the non-binary, however, Anzaldúa is one of the first to be a major proponent for racial, intersectional, and queer
Woolf argues for the need of equal access for women in terms of the prevailing dichotomy between the options available to men and those to women. In her first chapter, she highlights the idea that one must be privileged to be educated and the two are mutually exclusive. Woolf states this as a relationship to writing as “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” This dichotomy between money and education is apparent in her society and Woolf’s focus on those with the privilege of education. In Woolf’s perspective, one must be educated to be a contributing member of society and that those without this privilege cannot and are not-no in between exists. The contrast of the wealthy and those without the means are illustrated in the absence of mentioning the men and women alike who cannot achieve an education in Woolf’s work. In Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, she argues for the breaking down of boundaries set up by a patriarchal society to inhibit the growth of women. Woolf analyses the disparity of how women are treated in
While Woolf desires a “room of [her] own” separate from everyone else, Anzaldúa believes that this is not possible because there is already an integration of people and ideas. There cannot be a solitude room because the influence of other’s is always within. Anzaldúa argues that there cannot be complete division between two things. Regardless of physical borders, Anzaldúa maintains that there is a communication and mixture of these two sides. Even if one would not be able to freely cross those borders, the concept of borders being strict separations is incorrect. Nonetheless those countries with guarded borders between are “irrevocably tied” to one another. There is an inevitable sharing of ideas and beliefs. Regardless of physical, social, or cultural boundaries, there will be merging of the two as Anzaldúa argues borders are insubstantial to prevent this crossing