Anne E. Fernald is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus. She has published and edited on Virginia Woolf with special attention to feminism and intertextuality, as well as on modernism more generally.
Twitter @fernham
There is a lag between the advent of a major social change—the right to vote, the availability of education, working for pay outside the home—and the moment when any one individual avails herself of the opportunities arising from such a change. Activists and visionaries fight for the change long before it comes; pioneers are the first in line to participate; others hesitate and face resistance. Each woman changes her mind at a different rate from the legal and policy changes of the culture at large, and writing by women dramatizes the sometimes liberating, sometimes uneasy responses to those cultural changes.