WOOLF ON FEMINISM

In reference to your cover story “Does Feminism Mean Anything Anymore?” (by Suzanne Muchnic, April 21), I would like to take a quote from Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”:

“It is fatal [for an artist] to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.”

That was 1928.

HEATHER LOWE

Los Angeles