How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? (5.11)
Here's something radical: it sounds like Woolf is inviting us to imagine what sexes other than male and female might be like. A third sex? Or even five?
Quote #8
All of these infinitely obscure lives remain to be recorded, I said, [...] and went on in thought through the streets of London feeling in imagination the pressure of dumbness, the accumulation of unrecorded life, whether from the women at the street corners with their arms akimbo [...] or from the violet-sellers and match-sellers and old crones stationed under doorways. (5.14)
Woolf can't seem to stop herself from hinting at all of the "unrecorded li[ves]" of women out there. Woolf does a lot of listing in A Room of One's Own. Does she always do it for the same reason?
Quote #9
If one is a woman one is often surprised by a sudden splitting off of consciousness, say in walking down Whitehall, when from being the natural inheritor of that civilisation, she becomes, on the contrary, alien and critical. (6.3)
So, being a member of civilization and being a woman is not always the same thing. We get that. It's hard to feel like a member of your own nation and culture when you're considered inferior.