I spent most of the past week trying to finish a long overdue essay on "Women and Power in the Enlightenment" (you can see the irony anvils falling from the sky already, right?). I thought I'd begin said essay with Mary Wollstonecraft's famous line, "I do not wish [women] to have power over men, but over themselves." But after a week of buying new shoes for the boys, dealing with the blisters from said new shoes, intermittent puking and non-stop rambunctiousness, I feel like saying, "you know what, Mar'? I think I'd settle for the former right about now."
It made me think of my favorite passage from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own,
"What had our mothers been doing that they had no wealth to leave us?...If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureship and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex...[But no, because] to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children--no human being could stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in feeding the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about in the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say the sight is not a pleasant one."
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