As Virginia Woolf shows us in A Room of One’s Own, material condition and financial independence is needed for women to produce high quality work. For Woolf, and for many Western liberal feminists, claiming a space unbothered by familial attachments is a political act, which has been the central feminist struggle – the struggle to grant women access to public, productive space historically dominated by men.
When I returned to my PhD research when my son was 6 months old, I found that having a room is barely enough. As working from home was still allowed by my faculty and breastmilk continued to be his main source of nutrition, I made an emotionally difficult decision to return to my office to carve out some writing space and time that is not sandwiched
between feeds and naps. It turned out that having a private office away from my son didn’t ensure productive time either: as soon as I stepped into my office, the sense of guilt for not being present enough for him engulfed me, making me feel disorientated and out of place. The experience is not unique. I have observed it in numerous doctoral mom groups across Facebook and Twitter.
A room of one’s own may be needed for writing prose, but so does the impossible work of trying “not to care” or “not having to care.” My experience speaks to a sense of spatial entanglement – the impossibility of neatly demarcated space. It invites us to conceptualise space as bound up with one another, space that is not easily mapped on to binary of public and private, productive and reproductive.
Or perhaps I’ve read Woolf so literally? A room of one’s own might be a metaphor for material, financial, physical, and mental conditions that allow ones to actually carve out space?
Trang Le 