"Girl with a pen": Girls' Studies and Third-Wave Feminism in A Room of One's Own and "Professions for Women"

Abstract

Although Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own ([1929]1989) is a foundational feminist tract for theorizing women's social and artistic roles, it relies on stories, metaphors, and rhetorics of girlhood. I am the first to recognize Woolf's stylistic pattern of using the term "women" when theorizing the state of female authorship, but "girls" when fictionalizing scenes of this authorship. Using this rhetorical slippage to query aged identity in the text, the article shows how representations of girls in Woolf enact contemporary debates within third-wave feminism regarding the inclusion or exclusion of girls' studies in women's studies. Specifically, it aligns girls' studies social-science phenomenological research on real girls' articulations of their sexual bodies and sexual self-consciousness with Woolf's representations of girls' artistic/ erotic expressions. Second, the article applies a range of girls' studies research from neurology, psychology, biology, sociology, and critical theory to reveal girl characters within identities that are critically treated as adult women in Room . It recuperates the allegorical "Judith Shakespeare" as a girl figure, and links moments in her representation to research on real adolescent girls' neurological myelination, psychological crises, loss of voice, eating disorders, hormonal fluctuations, subversive resistance, teen pregnancy, and global disenfranchisement and disappearance. Through a third-wave girls' studies perspective, the article argues that Woolf imbricates girlhood in her artistic imaginary, revealing her unconscious engagement with female adolescence against her more totalizing impulse to argue for a definitive "woman genius."