In Chapters Four and Five of A Room of One 's Own,, the focus on Women & Fiction shifts to a consideration of women writers, both actual writers and ultimately one of the author 's own creation.
The special interest here is one raised earlier in the work: the effect of tradition on women 's writing.
Woolf believes that women are different from men both in their social history as well as inherently, and that each of these differences has had important effects on the development of women 's writing.
Women writers, this is to say, have been treated differently from men because they were women; and this has affected how they developed.
Furthermore, Woolf maintains, women writers are different from men writers because they are women; and this has also affected how they developed.
The narrator explores both of these elements.
In this chapter, the cultural perspective will begin with a "liberationist" viewpoint, with a focus especially on women 's not being able to write with the freedom that men have had. Women 's lack of men 's freedom to experience the breadth of the world, for example, is a significant constraint on women 's ability to create.
However, during the chapter, a different viewpoint emerges which will continue as the dominant perspective in the following chapter.
This is what I call a "feminist" view.
The feminist focus is on women developing independent of men and on their expressing capacities that are inherently different from those which are characteristic of males.. A feminist perspective might be seen as growing out of one that is liberationist, but its impulse and direction are quite different.
In a word, feminism moves toward FEMININE standards, a concern for what is good or appropriate for women as women.
In any case, the narrator begins this chapter by considering a series of women who wrote in the Seventeenth Century. These writers are important because they are the first women who are know to written.
However, being the first,