Women's right and freedom to write

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf mentioned money as the primary element that prevents women from having a room of their own, which means having money is extremely important. Since women do not own power, their creativity has been limited throughout the ages. “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely.” She uses this quotation to explain why so few women have written successful poetry. She insisted that the novel writing is more easily to starts and stops frequently, therefore, since women must deal with frequent interruptions because of disturbing of losing a room of their own in which they can write, they are more likely to write novels than poetry. Therefore, without money, women will always be in the second place to their creative male counterparts, which indicted that at the time of Woolf’s writing, women were less successful writers.

In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, the woman is also confined in a room. However, Stetson she considered a room of one’s own is limited and belittling instead of creative, private, and free as Woolf did. But they both agree that women are oppressed when they are writing. The woman in Yellow Wallpaper is in this depressed situation. She loved writing but his husband prevented her from writing. “There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word.” This story shows that women are robbed of opportunity both professionally and socially because of societal norms, and emphasized on the weakness of women’s voice and the unfairness between two genders in the society at that time, further appealed for the equality.