Professions of Women

Professions for Women
By: Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s extroverted dignity shows she is a figure for many other women to look at. In Virginia Woolf’s essay, “Professions for Women”, she stresses her dexterity to fight against what society has in mind for women like her, encouraging women to be who they want to be. In doing so, she hopes to have cracked the glass ceiling that holds women from their natural rights. Virginia Woolf uses clear diction when she depicts three unique metaphors: the Angel in the House, the fisherman, and the empty rooms. While telling the story of the Angel of the House, she showed extreme disgust for the woman who “bothered” and “wasted” her time, and “tormented” her to ignore her calling. Although the Angel was “pure,” Woolf recalls that if the Angel were not rid of, she would have “plucked the heart out of her writing,” so instead, Woolf killed her. Woolf then describes the metaphor of the fisherman in the form of a girl. In the girl’s dream, she let her “imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world” able to explore and think what she wanted to without a second thought. Then before the fisherman knew it, her “line” was lost, her imagination “dashed” into “something hard,” and the girl was “roused from her dream.” By telling about the fisherman, she was able to show how censored woman’s minds were because they were always “impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex.” Woolf then speaks of the empty rooms that women were able to possess, “though not without great labour and effort to pay the rent.” She challenges women to “decorate” and “furnish” the room with their accomplishments and beliefs and were they to “share” it, to do so with caution and to an extent. She affirms this to explain that when one has achieved so much independently, not to let a man come to take one’s achievement away. Woolf uses anaphora’s. By repeating the word “you,” she puts weight on the women in her audience. She indicates that only they can make change for themselves, that they can only one day find equality with men, and they can only be the ones “to decide for themselves what the answers should be.” Woolf’s extroverted dignity reveals that while women of her time did not question the authority of society, she did. She inspired many women to think beyond their imagination into deep depths, to not let man’s judgment taint their thoughts. By doing so, she became a role model for many bright women, beginning the crack on the glass.