Virginia, Gloria and Dolly – A Room of One’s Own

I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own at an impressionable age. It was the 1980s, and women were grappling with issues of economic independence and freedom. I came away from that book believing, perhaps too simply, that economic independence was the key to every other kind of independence.

What stayed with me most was Woolf’s argument in Shakespeare’s Sister. She imagined the fate of an equally gifted sister of Shakespeare—a woman with the same talent and ambition but none of the freedom, education, money, or opportunity available to her brother. Woolf’s conclusion was famously practical: for a woman to write, she needed money and a room of her own.

The room mattered. But the money mattered too.

What Woolf did not—and perhaps could not—tell us was exactly how women were going to get there.

That became the work of the women who followed her.

By the time I was coming of age, Gloria Steinem and the women of her generation were challenging assumptions that had governed women’s lives for centuries. They insisted that women should be able to choose their own lives, control their own money, pursue careers, and participate fully in the economic and political world.

And then there are women such as Dolly Parton, who represents something slightly different to me. She built enormous success on her own talent and business judgment and then used that success to create opportunities for other people. Her philanthropy, particularly her commitment to literacy, demonstrates that independence can become something larger than individual achievement. Once you have created a room of your own, you can begin opening doors for someone else.

But the people who move this work forward are not only famous women.

I think of my friend Barbara Albert and her work with Huru in Nairobi, Kenya, where young women from low-resource communities learn practical tailoring skills they can use to earn a living and become economically independent. Barbara committed her own resources, brought others into the effort, and helped create opportunities for women who are now taking sewing orders, saving for their own machines, and imagining businesses of their own.

That strikes me as A Room of One’s Own translated into real life.

Woolf articulated the need. The women who came afterward had to deal with the nitty-gritty of achieving it: education, jobs, childcare, equal pay, access to credit, ownership, entrepreneurship and, perhaps most importantly, the expectation that a woman could support herself.

And those changes did not occur because of one woman or even one generation of women. Some marched. Some legislated. Some built businesses. Some hired other women. Some taught. Some gave money. Some, like Barbara, created opportunities for women they might otherwise never have known.

At the time, I thought independence was something an individual woman achieved. You earned your own money. You had your own profession. You had, metaphorically and literally, a room of your own.

But there is something else competing for our freedom now: there is constant competition for our attention. Work follows us home. Our phones are always within reach. Email, news, social media, family obligations and professional demands can enter almost any room we occupy.

So perhaps the room Woolf wrote about has taken on a different meaning. We still need economic independence. We still need a place of our own. But increasingly, what we need to protect is the space inside our own minds—the ability to think, to read, to create, to reflect, and sometimes simply to be alone with our own thoughts.

Almost a hundred years ago, Woolf wrote words that may be even more relevant now than when she wrote them:

“There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

So on this Saturday morning, I’d say a silent prayer—whatever your prayer may be—of gratitude for Gloria Steinem and, in particular, Dolly Parton. Their light has illuminated the way for so many women, and that light will endure.