Virginia Woolf is amazing. I think that, of all the female writers who come to my head, she is my favorite. To have lived in times like hers and to have written as prolifically and from the heart as she did was an astonishing feat. 
I’ve just finished re-reading A Room of One’s Own. Originally published in 1929, this book is no less meaningful or important today than it was in 1929. I think that Woolf’s perspective is correct: when women rely on others for their well-being, we suffer creatively. Yet, when we must work to support ourselves, we also suffer creatively. Trying to write well and work at a job is very much like trying to raise children and have a successful career: something or someone suffers. If a mother is a good mother, her creative work suffers unless she is able to withstand the assaults of the modern world and a culture that surrounds us with demands to fill our lives with stuff.
Oprah Winfrey is the only respected woman I know of who has openly said (over and over again) that it is impossible to be an excellent wife, excellent mother, and be at the top of one’s career all at once. The last time I heard Oprah make this statement, the audience full of wives and mothers who presumably work full- or part-time and are thus doing a mediocre job at something, all broke out into applause. We all know it’s true; but we accept mediocrity, distracted mothering, faltering marriages, and harrying careers anyway–not to mention our stunted creativity. We seem to think it’s better to have a small, tasteless slice of every pie than to have something whole, robust, and satisfying.
At least, that’s how it appears to me, and I am like the other women in Oprah’s audience. Or was.
