Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I am going to attempt to weave several utterly unconnected strands together in this post and somehow prove their relevance. These are:

1. A research debrief I went to on Tuesday about online behaviour in the UK

2. My forray into the "blogosphere" yesterday

3. Virginia Woolf! (Who I have wanted to talk about for a week now)



So... on Tuesday I went to perhaps one of the driest research presentations in the history of research (and I've been to some pretty dull ones before I can assure you). There was one thing though which caught my eye, and that while men are far more likely than women to read blogs, and to comment on them, when it comes to creating them, the numbers of men and women are equal (it was around 10% of the online population each). This pleased me greatly, not least because I am a new member of the blogging community myself, but also because it seemed to prove an equality of creativity between men and women.

Knowing that part of being a blogger is being "connected" I finally also managed to spend some time reading other women's blogs - so far I'm totally in love with Drunk Mummy and Posh Mum (once again there will be a pause while I work out how in God's name I actually make links to their blogs). They are both fab and I really do feel like part of a mummy/writer community albeit very much on the peripherary.

Which brings me neatly onto my third point, Virginia Woolf. In "A Room of One's Own" she talks about the difficulty of women "creating" because of the lack of time, money and education afforded them, and the patriarchal society which holds them back, not to mention the onerous childcare duties which prevent any time for freedom of thought or expression.

It was interesting reading this 80 years on and thinking about the huge strides women have made (for example when she writes, women aren't allowed in a certain library in Oxford, this may still be true, but I feel that the essence of equality has at least changed for the better now.) Though of course we are constrained in completely different ways these days.

Overall though, all of these things made me proud to be a woman and to feel that maybe writing was a worthwhile thing to do after all.