Chapter 6 Ivory Basements and Ivory Towers

Abstract

In 1931, Virginia Woolf was invited to address members of the London and National Society for Women's Service about the employment of women. As a well-known literary figure as well as a woman intellectual, Woolf mused on her own biography and the risks she had to take to establish her own career. She used the metaphor of a room of one's own to underscore the challenges women faced to have a degree of freedom to shape their professional lives:You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men, You are able, though not without great labour and effort to pay the rent … But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. (Woolf, 1974, chapter 27)

Citation

Fitzgerald, T. (2012), "Chapter 6 Ivory Basements and Ivory Towers", Fitzgerald, T., White, J. and Gunter, H.M. (Ed.) Hard Labour? Academic Work and the Changing Landscape of Higher Education (International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, Vol. 7), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 113-135. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-3628(2012)0000007007