The anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s death and International Women’s Day chime, always, in March; somewhat fittingly, somewhat unsettlingly. Woolf was a champion of women’s creative expression, she was one of the founding writers of the Times Literary Supplement and much of her work took a poignantly feminist slant. Yet 76 years on from her death her essay, "A Room of One’s Own", remains glaringly relevant to the artistic scene for women today.

 

"A Room of One’s Own" is Woolf’s most celebrated feminist work, in which she explores what it means to be a woman, to be in fiction and to be engaged in the creative mind. In doing so she takes her reader on a contemplative journey through Cambridge and London pondering the question: why have women’s presence within the creative arts been so minimal? And this was in 1928, so you can imagine just how minimal she’s talking.

 

Through Woolf we experience many of the issues women were facing. One moment the narrator is anguishing over the lack of funds for a women’s college, wondering why it’s so difficult for women to come by money. “What had our mothers been doing then that they had no wealth to leave us? Powdering their noses?” And the next we encounter Shakespeare’s imagined sister, who Woolf supposes “was as adventurous, as imaginative, as anxious to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school." Her message is ultimately not a defence or fight for women, but for artists and creativity, which is not distributed according to gender.

 

It’s easily assumed that women have a rich history in literature. Look at Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith - you can cry! But in reality, we still fall short, yes, even in 2016. Take for instance the Nobel Prize for Literature, which has been awarded 113 times, 99 times to men and just 14 to women, with the most recent going to Bob Dylan (still can’t quite work out how he managed that).

 

Or the fact that men still dominate literary criticism; data compiled by women in literature advocates Vida last year, found that women are still significantly under-represented both in terms of which writers’ publications choose to review, and the critics they use. The London Review of Books was a prime example, featuring 527 male authors and critics in 2014, compared with just 151 women.

 

"Her message is ultimately not a defence or fight for women, but for artists and creativity, which is not distributed according to gender"

 

Woolf wrote, “Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year?... Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?” While our analysis of literature seems minimal, we remain the topic of it.

How many books have you seen with “girl” in the title recently? The Girl on the Train, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, the list is seemingly endless. Interestingly, writer Emily St. John Mandel found that the ‘girl’ in these books turns out to be a woman 65 per cent of the time. And as they continue to be written (by men and women), and grow in popularity, it’s clear that explorations of female identity, often cringingly reduced to girlhood, have us hooked.

 

And as audiences for shows with "strong females leads" (FYI this clichéd term now has its own Netflix category) like The Fall and Homeland continue to thrive, you could be forgiven for thinking we’re well represented in this field. But how many of these roles are written by women? Statistics released by Slated in October of last year, show that women writers in cinema account for just 13.2 per cent, while female directors make up 8.8 per cent. We may have a presence on screen, but our words are that of a man, and his vision of femininity.

 

In art, this imbalance is even more pitiful. Last year, Art News analysed the gender difference in pieces for sale at the world’s top auction houses in their November sales. Ninety-two per cent of lots were by male artists, while women made up a mere eight per cent. Bemused by this, you might wonder, why does a Picasso go for more than a Louise Bourgeois? The reason is as complex and as simple as he was a man.

 

Just last May, painter Georg Baselitz commented that, “If women are ambitious enough to succeed, they can do, thank you very much. But up until now, they have failed to prove that they want to. Normally, women sell themselves well, but not as painters.” Ignorant as this may seem, Woolf too, looked at this issue of women’s self confidence, compared with their male counterparts.

She wondered how men seemed to have an inherent belief in their abilities, while women questioned their every move. She deduced that the idea that males were the superior sex gave them this confidence, and the threat that women could match them was “infringement of his power to believe in himself”. Cultivating this "power" of self-belief is crucial; on paper we have the same opportunities as men, but do we yet have the self-confidence to govern them? Historically, men have had much more practise mastering this quality.

Today, we may have a room of our own, but it remains a glass chamber we must fight to shatter, with perseverance and self-belief. As Woolf said: “Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.”