The Mind as Male AND Female

"Even so, the very first sentence that I would write here, I said, crossing over to the writing-table and taking up the page headed Women and Fiction, is that it is fatal for any one who writed to think of their sex. It is fatal to be man or women pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly (Woolf 104)."



I find it quite interesting that throughout the whole book Woolf explores how women are at such a disadvantage to men. The entire book, Woolf argues that women need a room of their own and 500 pounds to write. But suddenly, in the final chapter of the book, Woolf decides to address both male and female writers. She decides that the solution to all writing blocks. Writers must take on a mind that of a male and female combined. It is "fatal" for a man to write purely as man. Is this to say that all men who wrote purely with the mindset as a man, and all women who wrote purely as a women, wrote horrible novels? Was there less of an effort because they only thought as one sex? Should we think lesser of those writers? How do we know if a writer wrote as one sex or as both?

While I am not quite sure how one can distinguish the writers who used bothe sexes from those who only used one, I think Woold advice is of great value. A piece of writing that all people can relate to is obviously more widley accepted than writing that can only one sex can truly understand. And it is this theory that could have possibly led to a smaller gap between the advantages of men to those of women.

I very much like that Woolf moved from the topic of what more women needed to be able to be writers to advising all writers, male or female. Her advice for writing could possibly be translated to everyday life situations. Would the world be a better place is all people thought as both male and female?