Blog Post #1

My favorite quote from the first section of LAWL is from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.
Virginia Woolf is well known for her work with "truth and illusion". This quote specifically demonstrates examples of this in regards to women:

 "Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband." (pg. 36)

This paragraph from A Room of One's Own gives several instances where women were so oppositely represented when compared in truth and fiction. For example, even though there was never one single law stating "Women are the property of their husbands," a woman's place in the world was decided by ancient traditions and principles that evolved over centuries such as: 

• Women were denied a separate legal status from their husbands.
• A husband and wife were considered one person under the law and that one person was the husband.
• Women were denied rights of inheritance.
• Women were denied the right to own property in their own right.
• Men could be compensated for the loss of a wife due to another man's negligence.
• Men paid a bride price to the parents of his wife in the same way he purchased livestock.

It wasn't until the nineteenth century that women in the United States got the right to own their own property and to write a will. Finally, in 1920, women in the U.S. received the right to vote.